Keep it Short!

WHAT YOU CAN LEARN FROM TWITTER

Have you noticed how many companies have short names that make them easy to remember?

• United Parcel Service? UPS!
• Hennes and Mauritz?  H+M!
• International Business Machines?  IBM!
• Consumer Value Stores? CVS!
• Government Employees Insurance Company?  GEICO!
  

Did you know that the smallest state has the longest name? Rhode Island's full full name is The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations."  WOW!

Even many celebrities go by a shortened name: Cher, Aretha, Elvis, Anglina, Kanye, etc.

Brief can be memorable, without the flair. Matt Drudge bought a domain name and put up a website with mainly headlines on it. His site, The Drudge Report, has become one of the most go-to sites for every news organizations for breaking news. In Media, the Columbia Broadcasting Service has become known as CBS, "Rush" is Rush Limbaugh and the aforementioned Matt Drudge is known simply as "Drudge."

My wife works for book publishing company. We are always discussing short titles that grab readers' attention. People remember short better... Good to Great, Freakonomics, Outliers, What Happened, The Art of the Deal, etc. If you want to communicate your message, short is sweet. It is memorable. It is easy to repeat. It makes an impression and it flows. An older speaker told me that he no longer uses the phrase, "Give me the Reader's Digest version, because younger people have no idea what Reader's Digest refers to. He uses Twitter as his example instead with it's limited number of characters. "Give me the Twitter version."

Twitter has taught us how to be brief and get to the point. More news organizations, politicians, officials, celebrities and corporations now use Twitter to get their message out to the population

If you want to be memorable, be short and pithy. How can you shorten the message to make it memorable?