Archive for January, 2012

How Pinterest Is Changing Business Management & The Creative Process

divider

January 13th, 2012

Created in 2009, Pinterest rose to popularity late last summer and has since been on the road to becoming a worldwide phenom to join the ranks of Facebook and Twitter.

Pinterest is an invite-only website where users create image boards of ‘pins’ (web content they find fascinating), organize those boards into categories and share them with their community of ‘pinners.’

While popular board themes usually include home decor, recipes, DIY projects and arts & craft ideas, we’ve found Pinterest to be a very useful organization and ideation tool for our company.

Here are a few ways to use Pinterest to optimize campaign management, organize internal projects and stay on top of trends:

- Create a board to represent your company (pins could represent your business’ culture, recent projects, press highlights, etc.) When a user is interested in one of your posts, they can ‘repin’ or ‘like’ your image and share it with all of their followers.

- Organize mood boards for upcoming campaigns. Give permission to team members and clients (with existing Pinterest accounts) and invite them to post their ideas on the board. This is a great strategy for idea sharing among multiple parties (especially when clients are in different cities/states/countries)

- Dedicate one board to industry and social trends. Pin campaigns, ideas or advertising products you found interesting–having a visual representation of others’ creativity will inspire ideas of your own.

- To further increase your SEO capabilities, consider embedding Pinterest to your company’s website or blog. Also, note that Pinterest can be linked so that pins will appear on your Facebook wall and Twitter feed.

While Pinterest provides unlimited opportunity for creative organization and expression, remember the site is still in its baby stages. It has not, yet, been designed to accommodate the needs of brands and businesses. There are no privacy settings for limiting visibility of certain boards or pins–if you are using Pinterest to brainstorm ideas for upcoming pitches, all of your pins will be visible to the site (and potentially the companies pitching against you).

Happy pinning!