Change Conversations

Pinterest, an online visual “pinboard” that allows users to share and discover images related to their interests, is the latest craze in social media. Attention has been fueled in great part by its rapid rise in just two years to become the number three social network. But every marketer knows that relevant quality trumps quantity, so let’s quickly review 5 questions to help you decide if this is a quality place to invest your marketing time and effort, before turning to examples of brands making the most of Pinterest if you decide to dive in.

Five Questions to Ask Yourself

1. Are your customers there?

Pinterest appeals most strongly to women, who represent 54-70% of it user base. That makes it a natural for a company marketing consumer product goods purchased by women, but if that’s not you maybe not yet.

2. Can you ‘own’ it?

Can the results of your investment get a copyright, trademark, be saved or protected in some way? If this is a new channel, should it be classified as paid, owned, or earned media? If not fully owned, what guidelines govern your relationship?

Pinterest is mostly designed to encourage ‘pinning,’ or sharing, of other people’s images. You can, of course, pin your own images. Make no mistake, however, you will not own or control the content on your Pinterest boards in the same way you own your website.

3. Can it offer synergy with other marketing efforts?

Something new that you can integrate into your strategic marketing plan and use to get more out of what you are already doing is generally a win-win.

Pinterest enables sharing just about any image online, with attribution. To support your other marketing efforts, you will need compelling visuals that link back to your website, blog, or microsites.

4. Is there a market advantage from being in early?

Depending on your industry and your positioning, being on the leading edge as one of the first to adopt a promising new marketing technology can be expected, if not necessary. Then again, if yours is a more conservative world, you don’t want to forget the wisdom in the term ‘bleeding edge.’

Pinterest is already the number 3 social network, so it’s too late to be on the leading edge. There’s still opportunity to be among the first to use the network well though — the number of successful brands on Pinterest is still small, especially in the B2B arena.

5. Do you have the capacity to do it well?

You can only do so much. It’s easy to be distracted and lose sight of the reality that no matter how promising something new is, you must execute it well to derive any benefit. In marketing communications, in particular, a low-quality implementation can be much worse than doing nothing at all.

Today, Pinterest represents just one more thing to learn and do for many small businesses and nonprofits. Pinterest is still a long way from the consumer marketing reach of Facebook’s 750 million users. And we cannot forget that despite all the never-ending buzz about social media, email is still the most popular way for most people to share information.

Your Decision

Every business will answer these questions differently, of course. If you can answer “yes” to 3 out of 5 of these questions, I generally think this new whatever is probably worth exploring further. If you answer yes to 5 out of 5, jump on it! It may still turn out to be a short-term infatuation, but it’s more likely to be a trend and a marketing opportunity you won’t want to miss.

Five Brands using Pinterest Well

The brands doing well on Pinterest are not overly promotional, but they are visually interesting and they offer ample opportunity to click through to their home website. Check out these examples to get inspired.

Whole Foods Market

Peapod grocery delivery service

Chobani yogurt

General Electric

Wall Street Journal

Resources

Connect with me on Pinterest:  http://pinterest.com/pheffernanvt/

Wall Street Journal primer on Pinterest

4 Reasons Pinterest Wins with Women (And Facebook Loses) – Forbes

7 Useful Pinterest Tools You Should Know

Brands on Pinterest: To $ or Not to $? [STUDY]

Crowdfunding for small businesses and nonprofits has been a hot topic in the news lately, especially since the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act was signed into law last month. So why is everyone so excited and exactly how does this new combination of social network and financing work? Let’s follow up on my interview with Michael Nedell from “Team Vermont,” the US National Champion Snow Sculpting Team, on his experience with the crowdfunding website Kickstarter.

Can you explain what your organization is and why you needed funding?

I have been the captain of a snow sculpting team for the past 11 years. It’s a hobby that my friends and I seem to be good at, because we have been entering and winning competitions for those 11 years. Until this year, we won the Vermont state competition 8 times and came in 2nd in the US twice. So it’s an art form, but its also in a competition form, and if you do well, you get to do more and more with the art.

Had you tried other ways of raising money in the past? What ways?

I have been sending emails and letters for a few years now. I figured we might be in line with local Vermont businesses because we are just local guys trying to do well in this circuit. We got an in-kind sponsor a few years ago – Kombi Sports in Essex Junction – so that relationship kept us going for a while. Not having to think about gloves and gear was and is a terrific boon to our hobby. It’s like the base layer. Then for the last three years we have been reaching out to other companies and art patrons with some relative success. Switchback has our back each year now — We tend to drink a lot planning these things so trying to talk to beer companies seemed to makes sense.

What made you think Kickstarter was a good fit for your organization? Did you see examples similar to yours before deciding?

Our team member Alex was part of a successful Kickstarter so we thought it might work for us. It seemed like a very low barrier to entry – I had a video camera and I can do basic video editing – so it made sense since we could actually pull it off.

Were there any unexpected barriers to starting your profile/account at Kickstarter? (For example, did you need an EIN, or proof of non-profit status, credit card, business checking account, etc.)

The only hassle with Kickstarter was waiting for them to verify by bank account – but even that was pretty easy.

Once you started the campaign, how did you promote it? Facebook? Twitter? Other?

We sent emails and promoted on Facebook, the blog we have, Twitter – what was surprising though was the number of random people reaching us just through Kickstarter itself – we got maybe 12 or so people that have no connection to us whatsoever – and that was pretty cool.

You reached your goal. Was it harder than you thought it was going to be?

We thought since our goal was low and tangible ( we showed pics and the price of what we wanted to by, and explained why) we would reach it. It took 3 weeks and the campaign was 4 weeks long, so we were able to get even a little over our goal.

Did you have preconceived notions of how this process was going to be?

No. From snow sculpting and life I have learned to just try it. See it it works. We had a lot of other ideas – party – do a sculpture on Church Street – Coin Drop – Benefit Rock Show. This seemed like the easiest to pull off.

Anything you want to add?

Alex said we needed some kind of hook to get people and we all sort of came up with the start of the video – the monster truck sort of announcer beginning – and I knew I could do a text over lay over things to make it a little more interesting – so yea – mostly it was a matter of knowing – with the limited resources and talent we had – that we could pull off a somewhat reasonable video for the goal we had in mind. I think if you were going for some more money then a 1,000 bucks for some tools – you would have to produce a little better video – but this really fell in line with our scrappy sort of attitude. We are all just friends and not really pro sculptors – but we find ourselves in these competitions with these real pro sculptors – so we figured the tools – which everyone but us has – would help. And it did! The tools ended up helping us immensely and we managed to win the competition!

I also think our cause was sincere. We didn’t have a product to try and produce, or an idea for a movie, but we really sincerely needed some better tools to help us.

More

• Don’t Abandon Crowdfunding — Manage It  (Harvard Business)

• Kickstarter: The King of Crowdfunding [INFOGRAPHIC] (mashable.com)