Pinterest provides direct connection

Naomi Simpson
The Australian
March 05, 2012

THE only constant online is change. Just as I think I’ve got Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook worked out, other interactive social sites show up.

My 16-year-old daughter has taken herself off Facebook, saying Tumblr is where it is all at – and now Pinterest appears to be the new frontier of social media for business.

There is no doubt that all the social media players are quickly moving to more image-intensive platforms. On Facebook you can, scarily, now view your entire history on the site in a visual timeline, and businesses need to stay abreast, if not harness the power, of what is new.

In a sense we need to be a new adopter in all our communications, rather than following something tried and tested.

Of course, the list of social media sites does seem endless and one doesn’t really know what is going to be the next big thing.

Pinterest is creating the biggest online buzz at the moment, claiming “our goal is to connect everyone in the world through the things they find interesting . . . a favourite book, toy, or recipe can reveal a common link between two people. Pinterest is connecting people all over the world based on shared tastes and interests.”

In its most basic form, it’s a visual bookmarking site that allows users to pin anything they find on the web that interests them.

All of your likes, comments, pins and re-pins are recorded on your own profile – or, more fittingly, pinboards – thereby connecting people based on their interests rather than friendships or professional networks.

These boards are arranged by any number of topics from gardening to technology and include subjects such as Products I Love and Favourite Places and Spaces. It’s a refreshing approach to social media: neat, orderly, uncluttered and devoid of those annoying flashing ads offering everything from banishing belly fat to burlesque lessons.

It is also a potential goldmine for businesses, arming them with a tool to connect with consumers on a personal level about the things they hold dear: hobbies, interests and passions.

But you can’t just sign up – you must be invited to join and play with this exclusive new social media toy.

As marketers, though, we’re dipping our toe in the water, and we’re excited to see where the Pinterest journey will take us.

Businesses have already started flocking to the site in an attempt to humanise their brands – bringing their personality to life.

This is a very attractive proposition for us at Red Balloon, as we are an online brand and it’s often difficult to have resonance with your customers when you rarely meet face to face.

This is incremental to our activity on Facebook and Twitter and we need dedicated people to listen, learn, look and play with all the social networks. Real people talking and listening with real people, not pushing a marketing message for the sake of it – this is not a broadcast medium.

But Pinterest takes it a step further, allowing brands to connect with customers on a level above and beyond the product they are selling, which in turn creates a more genuine and reciprocal relationship. We use the site to share gorgeous, striking images of our experiences, and our customers genuinely enjoying those experiences. And these images really are worth more than 1000 words of copy on a web page.

On Twitter they may be re-tweeted and on Facebook shared among friends.

From a purely marketing standpoint, Pinterest is a collection of focus groups. Try to think of a more perfectly efficient way to road-test and gather feedback on a new product or idea. Can you?

The site attracts almost 12 million active users a month. Women are 70-80 per cent of its members, most under the age of 45.

But it goes further. What an opportunity for entrepreneurial marketers wanting to target consumers in an environment designed to connect people according to the things they love and desire. Many brands are already embracing the new frontier with some success.

Clothing brands run pin-it-to-win-it competitions that involve customers browsing the brand’s website and pinning the images of their favourite outfits to win.

This encourages users to interact with the site, and to visit and browse the products on the brand’s own site.

As Pinterest continues to develop, no doubt some great brand stories will emerge, but similarly there will be brands that do not respect the site’s raison d’etre and will push the boundaries, upsetting users who find yet another social space encroached upon by brands trying to sell, sell, sell.

The site has loose rules on promoting products: “Pinterest is designed to share things you love . . . try not to use Pinterest purely as a tool for self-promotion.”

But the creators are also very tight-lipped on how they plan to make money from the enterprise, so I predict a few changes to the way the site operates. I guess it’s a wait-and-see game for now, and I for one am intrigued to see how brands tread the fine line between wooing customers, building relationships and selling products.