How do I make a Zotero elevator pitch?

dtjohnso

OK, so I never actually try to promote Zotero on elevators, but creating an "elevator pitch" is a creative way to phrase my question.

Basically, I do workshops promoting Zotero at my institution, and I haven't yet found a way to explain what Zotero is and does that immediately captivates my target audience (or, unfortunately, the upper-level manager who insists on writing some of my advertising for me).

Any ideas for a creative title for my workshops and a way to describe them in a simple, appealing paragraph? I've tried a number of different things, but haven't had a lot of success unless I'm able to show people how Zotero works immediately after introducing it to them.

adamsmith

you could try the Evangelist group where more librarians hang out - though it's not very active otherwise
http://groups.google.com/group/zotero-evangelists
More actively, people seem to be following the LSW friendsfeed
http://friendfeed.com/lsw
this includes Jason/Librarian X who is something of a Guru when it comes to Zotero promotion.

I'd think your target group matters a lot - are we talking undergrads? grad students and faculty? Would they know what citation tools are/what Endnote is? etc.

arggem

How about one of the taglines: e.g.:

'See it. Save it. Sort it. Search it. Cite it.',
'Leveraging the long tail of scholarship.',
'A personal research assistant. Inside your browser.',
'Goodbye 3x5 cards, hello Zotero.',
'Citation management is only the beginning.',
'The next-generation research tool.',
'Research, not re-search',
'The web now has a wrangler.'

For other ideas see this thread.

bdarcus

I don't think the taglines are substantive enough to be effective in actually convincing people.

I also don't think Zotero is generally very well-suited to undergrads.

I would say something like:

Zotero makes individual and collaborative research easier. It allows you to really easily gather and share reference information, and to incorporate that information into your manuscripts. It is also completely free, and developed by an international community of developers and scholars, which shape its future roadmap.

Something like that, which clearly distinguishes Zotero from other solutions.

synoptic

I would have to disagree with the view that "...Zotero is [not] generally very well-suited to undergrads.", I found it to be invaluable as an undergraduate. Could you expand on that thought a little perhaps?

adamsmith

most undergrads don't have a research agenda/program on which they assemble and annotate literature. They don't write longer works with many citations and a lengthy biography, at least in the US they usually don't - even "research" term papers rarely have more than 20 bibliographical items.
At least for my undergrads I wouldn't really recommend Zotero until they start thinking about an honors thesis or a comparable project. For that, though, I'd strongly encourage it.

But that also depends on how easy the respective person adopts technology - if you find Zotero to be super intuitive and need no time to get used to it (and hence also no course...) it's worth using it even for a paper with just a couple of citations.

dtjohnso

At least for me, I'm mostly targeting grad students and faculty. Some of our undergrads might be able to put it to use, such as our history majors for their senior paper.

I use some of the taglines in my in-depth stuff, but at least for a workshop title and summary paragraph I'm looking for something like bdarcus' paragraph. I like how he tries to distinguish from the competition.

Here are a few more summaries I've collected from different places. These are all fine for their different contexts, but if I can find a way to hit the target in a single paragraph that appeals to non-technical people that would be ideal.

Jason Puckett, GSU Libraries http://research.library.gsu.edu/zotero

Zotero (pronounced "zoh-TAIR-oh") is a Firefox addon that collects, manages, and cites research sources. It's easy to use, lives in your web browser where you do your work, and best of all it's free. Zotero allows you to attach PDFs, notes and images to your citations, organize them into collections for different projects, and create bibliographies.

It automatically updates itself periodically to work with new online sources and new bibliographic styles.

Michael Witt, Purdue Libraries http://guides.lib.purdue.edu/content.php?pid=149133&sid=1266822

Think of the last research paper you wrote. How many sources did you cite in it? How did you manage all of those references and sources? For large papers, you may need to keep track of dozens or even hundreds of sources. After doing your research, you can waste hours and hours getting your citations into the proper format, in the correct order in your paper, and listed in your bibliography.

Zotero is a free citation management program that helps you collect and easily organize your research information.

Learning how to use citation management software can improve the efficiency of your research and save you hundreds of hours with papers that you'll write in the future!

Zotero Quick Start Guide http://www.zotero.org/support/quick_start_guide

Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work—in the web browser itself.

...

Before learning what Zotero does, it is important to know what it is. Zotero is an extension for the Firefox web-browser. It runs in its own pane within Firefox, separately from web pages.

...

Zotero is, at the most basic level, a citation manager. It is designed to store, manage, and cite bibliographic references, such as books and articles. In Zotero, each of these references constitutes an item.

adamsmith

For faculty and grad students I'd mention Endnote in the pitch - they're still the market leaders, most academics have come across it - many finding it too clumsy to be useful - and so if your pitch makes clear that Zotero is easier, faster, more modern and collaborative, _and_ freer than Endnote that might be a draw.

bdarcus

Yeah, one big confusion I've seen is the word "free." I hear library people tell students that RefWorks is "free," which is only true in a very limited sense. We need a pithy phrase that communicates what the free software world has described as the difference between "free speech" and "free beer."

milliken

From a librarian's perspective, the biggest issue in pitching Zotero to undergrads is that they are far more likely than faculty or grad students to rely on using multiple lab computers when they are doing research or writing. Even many students who have their own laptops use our lab computers rather than lug around their laptops. For these students, the only advantage that that RefWorks has over Zotero is that it is entirely web-based. But since the subscription to RefWorks is institutional rather than individual, it will *seem* free to them and that is all they are likely to be concerned with.

dtjohnso

Well, here's what I went with for my elevator pitch. This is just a slightly tweaked version of Bruce's blurb. Some of the changes are perhaps a little idiosyncratic... I replaced a few terms with synonyms more common at my institution.

Zotero makes individual and collaborative research easier. It allows you to easily gather and share reference information, and to incorporate that information into your footnotes and bibliographies. It is also completely free, and developed by an international community of developers and scholars which shapes its future roadmap.

Fortunately for me, my institution doesn't even have RefWorks or EndNote, so I don't need to worry about competition. We're exclusively a Zotero shop. :)

We've had trouble deploying Zotero on lab machines here too, although I've been able to effect it in some areas. Zotero's freeness was actually the clincher in getting administrative approval :)

I suppose "completely free" is the clearest way to code free as in speech. Selling to undergrads is always going to be a challenge, I guess.