for your Pinterest

Pinning..

Just as your marketing people were starting to figure out how to use Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn effectively in business, along comes Pinterest. You may have read recently that Pinterest is now attracting more unique visits than Google+, hit 11 million unique visitor in the US, and increased its traffic by 68% in January alone - and Mark Zuckerberg has set up his own Pinterest page.

What does Pinterest look like? Click here

Now sit down, take a deep breath: it’s not really that scary. Pinterest is an online bulletin board for images found while trolling about the web. It has been described as “Twitter with pictures”, or the online equivalent of the fridge magnet collection. Do you need to immediately integrate it into your business marketing plans? Well, maybe not today. On Pinterest there is presently a preponderance of recipes, wedding dress ideas, travel, arts and crafts, and so on - just the sort of things you would expect to find in a virtual scrapbook. But that is not to say that we won’t soon see a transformation of the ways in which Pinterest is used. Already some businesses are scrambling to find ways to access all that web traffic.

For example, a marketing team responsible for boosting visitors to a city or state can set up a Pinterest page with gorgeous pictures of the location: ideal for that type of promotion. Pinterest has obvious applicability for companies selling lifestyle products and services. Mashable has a topic thread devoted to Pinterest, with a million and one ideas on how to use it.

Pinterest could also be about more than marketing. Lawyers and other service providers, especially in IP, might want to keep their own Pinterest account just to check on the activities of clients using the site. What are they doing with their brands? What reactions are they getting? For solo practitioners, it could also be a tool for networking with other lawyers, and with clients, since its main focus is sharing interesting information. Think office products, travel destinations, new restaurants...get creative. Everyone else is.

I've seen suggestions that an attorney firm might want to have its own page, with people shots, powerpoint slides, firm events and so on. But at this stage of Pinterest's evolution, keep it casual. Potential clients are unlikely to go to Pinterest to look for an attorney. Having said that, potential clients might like to know that you understand Pinterest, especially if they are in the IT or social media field themselves. And the site is becoming something of a search engine itself, so you never know where that will go.

And here’s something to ponder: Pinterest is said to be generating more traffic to websites than YouTube, Reddit, Google+, and LinkedIn combined. So merely for driving traffic to your website, Pinterest could be worth investigating. Here’s a Techcrunch article by Reggie Bradford with some smart techie ideas for leveraging Pinterest in your social media marketing strategy. As Reggie says:

“Content is king, and anything that makes it easier for your teams to identify and curate great content represents a competitive advantage. The Pinterest “Pin It” button works quite well for consumers. Unfortunately it wasn’t designed for marketers and is therefore missing some features that would let you include analytics tracking as a simple part of the “Pin It” process. This won’t last long, as tools to fill this gap are already under development. 

Pinterest is still in its infancy, and time will tell if it continues its rapid growth or plateaus. But it certainly exhibits the potential to provide visually engaging experiences for consumers that marketers can weave into their social communities. Brands can start simple, then evaluate for effectiveness along the way. Being able to experiment with new and innovative platforms is part of the fun and excitement of social. And brands should start experimenting today.”

Happy pinning.

are you really my friend?

do your customers love you?

I’ve commented before about using social media for business, and suggested that it is something most businesses should be looking at. But let’s not close our eyes to the pitfalls. In a recent report in the Australian media, the supermarket chain Woolworths found out the hard way how not to handle Facebook posting.

It seems that it posted a question on its Facebook page: “Finish this sentence: this weekend I can’t wait to....” Perhaps subliminally offended by the inanity of this, some “friends” of Woolworths took the opportunity to finish the sentence with gems such as “...throw out the fruit and veg I bought at Woolworths only 3 days ago that goes off so much more quickly than the green grocers,” and other such complaints. See Woolworths Facebook page here.

In another Facebook blooper, Westpac bank began deleting critical posts about its interest rate rises, thus indicating that their social media people have not grasped the concept of marketing in this medium. If you invite people - everyone - into a conversation, you don’t get to control what they say. The real skill in using Facebook and Twitter is to see and use the positive opportunities that come with engagement with your clients and customers. 

The article mentioned above singles out Qantas as another victim of social media, with angry tweets filling the Twittersphere during an industrial relations dispute; and the National Australia Bank as an example of successful engagement with customer criticisms, responding to suggestions and critiques positively and pro-actively. Social media is an activist sphere, and a responsive business can actually be changed and improved by its customers’ suggestions.

In the past you may have paid big money to survey your customers to find out how well recognised your brand is, whether it is associated with good value, what customer concerns really are. Welcome to social media, where the customers will tell you all this in a nanosecond, given a platform. 

It’s time not to just broadcast to your customers and clients, but also to listen to what they have to say.

And they are your friends. Really.

some numbers to think about

Facebook has more than 800 million active users; more than 50% of the active users log on to Facebook in any given day; the average user has 130 friends. An average of 250 million photos are uploaded every day, and Facebook apps are installed more than 20 million times a day. 350 million active users access Facebook through mobile devices, such as smart phones.
(https://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics)

Some estimates reckon that, including Chinese language blogs, there may be more than 1 billion blogs worldwide - this equates to 1 in every 6 people with a personal blog.
(http://www.hattrickassociates.com/2010/02/how_many_blogs_2011_web_content/)

Twitter has registered 175 million users since its inception.
Foursquare has 7.5 million registered users.
The Huffington Post reaches 30 million people each month.
(http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-03-31/tech/30049251_1_twitter-accounts-active-twitter-user-simple-answer)

YouTube claims more than 3 billion videos are viewed each day. 800 million unique visitors visit each month.
(http://www.youtube.com/t/press_statistics)

Organization:   IBM
Social Media Stats:
No IBM corporate blog or Twitter account
17,000 internal blogs
100,000 employees using internal blogs
53,000 members on SocialBlue (like Facebook for employees)
A few thousand “IBMers” on Twitter
Thousands of external bloggers
Almost 200,000 on LinkedIn
As many as 500,000 participants in company crowd-sourcing “jams”
50,000 in alum networks on Facebook and LinkedIn
(http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-ibm-uses-social-media-to-spur-employee-innovation/)

These are big numbers - it’s kind of like trying to imagine the size of the universe. But this is the world of communications today, at least in the developed world. It’s time to join the conversation...and talk about how to have a meaningful interaction with the people most important to you.