For me, Pinterest is one of those sites that I can’t stop making fun of. I mean, since when are mood boards a mass movement? I guess “Express Yourself!” really is back.
Of course, I wouldn’t feel the need to have a Pinterest page myself, or know much about the site except for the fact that I’m supposed to know about these things, and so are you.
According to Venda, a provider of cloud-based (SaaS) commerce solutions, their clients are seeing a 1.47 percent increase when they implement a Venda-optimized Pinterest strategy.
Venda Vice President of Sales and Marketing, RJ Stephens, says, “Venda clients are finding that Facebook is great for brand loyalty and interaction, both important elements, but initial interactions and sales shine with Pinterest.”
I don’t know who Venda’s clients are, but I do know Pinterest is made of more than knitting clubs and tattoo fetishists. Major League Baseball, LL Bean, The Wall Street Journal and General Electric are all playing. Perhaps you, or someone you know, is managing a client’s Pinterest page right now. Yes, while reading AdPulp — talented Millennials can do almost anything!
Venda believes consumers want to “shop their lifestyle” and buy the items that represent and reinforce their chosen lifestyle whether it be geek, urban, celebrity or what have you. With this in mind, Pinterest isn’t a collectors’ haven, it’s a shopper’s “wish list” with pictures.
Pinterest may also be little more than a repository for digital debris, but since digits are so tidy — unlike their physical counterparts — what’s the worry? It’s just space on a server somewhere in the coal-powered grid, paid for by VCs you’ll never meet. Space, I might add, that is filled with other people’s works. Snap.
If you’ll allow me to reach a bit, I’d like to weave in yesterday’s self-promotional “Guest Post” by Laura Ries here. She posits that language may soon be “obsolete” in marketing communications, replaced by the power of iconic images. The idea lacks merit, on its surface at least, because we must first endow the images we create with meaning for them to be useful, and we use language to do that. Take Tony the Tiger. You can not separate Tony the Tiger from his line, “It’s Grrrrrrrreat!”
Which brings us back to Pinerest and our current obsession with lightweight, visually-driven push-button updates, particularly as they relate to brand building and direct selling. You can say a lot with a look. You can say even more with words and Pinterest has a place for words, as does Flickr and Facebook. Use these fields wisely is my advise, and get your copywriters and copy editors producing real time copy.
There’s a place for pictures and a place for poetry. A picture is worth 1000 words, for sure, but what’s a poem worth? Or how about a brand line crafted by a poet, or a whitty conversation with a customer, what are those worth?
Previously on AdPulp: Visual Mosaics In The Stream