As Marshall said earlier this morning, the best way to pitch via Twitter is not by sending a DM, but by sending out a public Tweet instead:

Enter the Twitpitch.

The Origin

The Twitpitch is the invention of Stowe Boyd, a business strategy and information technology consultant. Boyd had plans to attend the upcoming Web 2.0 Expo, but was having trouble scheduling meetings with startups. To address this problem, on Tuesday he posted on his blog that in order to make things simple for himself, he was posting a schedule of times when he was available for meetings. He added that he would not accept email-based proposals for these meetings, only Twitpitches.

The Rules

To further explain the concept, Boyd put forth a set of rules for the pitches as follows:

1. All companies who would like to have a meeting with me, need to send me a Twittered description of the product. Yes, please Twitter it to me at www.twitter.com/stoweboyd. Yes, one tweet, 140 characters less the eleven used for "@stoweboyd ".
2. Optionally, send a supporting twitpitch with one link, and no other text. Could be to anything: website, video, press release, Rick Astley, etc.
3. Then, twitter me one or more suggested times/place to meet at the event, using the times on the calendar, and a location in the conference building I won't have time to visit your nearby hotel or offices.

An Idea Was Born

And just like that, the tweets began, the earliest of which were posted here. He then began to schedule the "tweetups" and posted the updated calendar on his blog.

This new way of pitching, now being dubbed the "twitpitch" or "escalator pitch," is quick, painless, and to-the-point. It cuts through the PR babble and forces companies to summarize what they do in 140 characters or less.

Why is this idea so timely? Well, it's like what twitterer Amanda Mooney posted in response to a blog post by Steve Baker on how social media has changed business: "The new resume is 140 characters or less."

We couldn't agree more.

Make #Twitpitch the New Way to Pitch

We did a Tweet Scan for "twitpitch," which shows there's a lot of activity around this phrase right now. However, we would like to take the idea a step further and have each twitpitch tagged with the hashtag #twitpitch. (It appears that not all of the twitpitchers were doing so, and granted, it's not in the original instructions.)

This does cut into the word count, but if used properly, everyone interested in twitpitches could track them here: http://www.hashtags.org/tag/twitpitch.

Instead of twittering at ("@") someone, as in Boyd's case, any startup wanting to get the word out fast to the community could just tweet their pitch and add #twitpitch to the end of their post.

Twitpitch. We love it. It's brilliant. It's social media put to work. We hope it catches on.