Three Words on a Business Card

A cartoonist doodled three words on my business card. Twenty years later, I still remember them.

I was at a BBQ dinner during SXSW with a small group of bloggers and marketers: Charlene Li, Shel Israel, Dell's Bob Pearson, a few others. Hugh MacLeod was there too, the cartoonist behind gapingvoid, known for doodles so sharp that Microsoft actually paid him to walk their halls sketching on employees' business cards as a kind of culture catalyst.

Hugh asked me what I did. I probably gave him the long version... ratings and reviews, word of mouth, the whole pitch for Bazaarvoice. He listened, grabbed my card, and handed it back with a doodle and three words: "The user generation."

That was it. No deck, no positioning document, no elevator pitch workshop. Three words on the back of a business card captured what we were building better than anything I'd written myself.

I think about that a lot now. Most companies never compress their message down that far. We hide behind decks, add qualifiers, hedge the language until it's accurate but forgettable. In my experience, a great hook doesn't need to be complete. It needs to be simple enough to travel on its own, from a business card, into a conversation, into someone else's memory.

What's your company's version of three words on the back of a card?