Lee Lefever's excellent weblogging pitch wins Judith's perfect pitch contest. Lee's pitch is incredibly concise, jargon-free and communicates at a level that is perfectly suited for a one on one with a company officer. Very nicely done.

Randal Moss' took second and my pitch tied for third place with Jack Vinson's. My pitch is somewhat more narrowly focussed on weblogs as knowledge management tools because grassroots KM is what I evangelize where I work. Obvious references to the Cluetrain Manifesto can be found in here.

"The weblogs as KM tools pitch"

Our company is a few conversations away from being unbelievably great. We have thousands of people holding invaluable knowledge in their heads, but they don't have the tools to communicate them when and where they need to be -- to share and find information and turn knowledge into decisions that have an impact on revenue. They're holding insular spark plugs of knowledge that are awaiting the connections needed to make things move.

We have at our disposal a way to empower these people to share knowledge on a one to many basis within the company so they can get what they need directly to make decisions now. You're familiar with that saying, "To ask permission is to seek denial", right? Well, what we have with weblogs is a way to speed up knowledge flow and increase productivity. If you were to champion enterprise weblogs, I know we'd increase the effectiveness of our knowledge work and blow away the competition.

I'm obviously not the best salesman. I'm more of an implementer than a manager, and my approach may be too personal, as I tend to write as I speak. If I ever really get in an elevator with the right person, Lee's would be a better approach to a pitch. But more to the point, it's hard for me to imagine rubbing elbows with the right people in my organization. In my particular situation the pitch is made at the grass-roots level. It is made in leading by doing, by helping others do the same when they see the advantage in what you're doing and by quietly evangelizing in the right places -- where knowledge work happens -- and hoping that my words stick to the right people. Of course, it might help to have visionary leaders that can see the advantage and help enable people, but the thing with weblogging for KM is that the people that will be doing it have to see the value in it themselves before they will be willing to do it. It has to be a bottom-up phenomenon. And keep in mind that weblogs aren't the only hammer you have to sell. While a weblog pitch may be the type of discussion that people grok because of concrete examples you might provide, a pitch that provides a broader holistic view of knowledge sharing and information work productivity may be appropriate with the right audience. Lee's pitch is more in this category.

In any case, it is important to have your elevator pitch handy when and if the moment comes when you need it. I'm happy to note that in one sense my pitch has paid off in giving presentations. Tomorrow I have my first meeting as an information services consultant to an internal customer who is starting a large-scale weblogging project using Traction software.