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We’ve found it really challenging to boil down what we do into one of those little paragraphs much beloved of professional services companies – the so-called ‘elevator pitch’ that neatly encapsulates the so-called ‘offering’.

It’s been driving me nuts.

Since we started in September 2007, we’ve made several attempts. We launched with this at the top of the page:

…And this on the sidebar:

Our Twitter feed says:

Very Social Digital Stuff.

My Twitter describes Made by Many as:

A platform-building mutant network design company.

And in our creds we initially summarised it as:

We help brands and publishers create, manage and monetise community and Rich Internet Applications

Which has recently been changed to:

We help Media Owners, Brands, Start-ups and Organisations to create & manage owned & earned media platforms

And even more recently on our website, and on a bit of a late-night impulse (fueled in part by the frustration of not having nailed it, in part by some over-excited thoughts about the changing meaning of the words “awesome”, “awesomeist”, “awesomeness”, and partly by alcohol) we changed it to:

We know none of these is quite right, and that some are quite wrong.

But as we try once again to create a canonical definition, I wonder if we’re barking up the wrong tree.

Why limit ourselves to one little line?

Why try and cram everything we do into a single paragraph?

We have feet in many camps: we make stuff, we consult. That’s the way we roll.

We’re a design shop and a software developer, but we’re not a production house. What we do is both complex and evolving quicker than words can keep up with. For example, it’s become more difficult every week since we started to draw the line between what used to be called ‘marketing‘ and what used to be called ‘product and service design‘. Everything is converging.

I wonder if what we are might not really have emerged yet. I don’t even want to be an agency any more – I think network is more accurate.

There isn’t a right or wrong answer to any of this (that’s part of the problem), but I wanted to share our dilemma. I imagine it’s a problem a lot of other people have too and we’d be interested in how you’ve solved it (if it can be – or should be – solved, that is). And let us know what you think we should do.

One thing we’re toying with at the moment is having lots of lines. Maybe the elevator pitch belongs to the world of scarcity, and we’re about the long tail of meaning – an abundance of lines, each unpacking a different facet – potentially for a different audience. Sara and I are working on a long list, and thinking about how we might use all of them. We aim to share the whole process, at the risk of being quite boring.

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