So excited to hear about my crack, I mean Pinterest, from Jennifer Evans-Cario, President of Sugar Spun Marketing.  What makes Pinterest different, how do we know if it will last?  The key things that make it different is 1) It does something useful in a new way. Basically bookmarking with images – easier to process than a list in a feed. 2) it solves a problem; and 3) it appeals to publishers, curators, seekers and stashers.  Oh – and it’s easy to use.

Demographic now is women age 25-44, $25k to $75k per year, married, west, central & southern US – have kids. Jenn is SURE this will change in the future.

“Pinterest is an Inspiration Platform”  ~Jennifer Cario

Not really…..but I love this Someecard.

Hashtags will work on Pinterest.

Use Pinterest to Crowdsource Ideas.  Daily Grommet uses Pinterest to get ideas from users on what products to sell.  Unique products, or products repurposed to be unique are great on Pinterest.

Pinterest Tool – Check out Curalate – needs a little budget.  Is an analytics style program for Pinterest, pulls together nice data.

Pinterst is not about sharing ONLY your own content, be a curator for a variety of content for your target audience.

What you can do today:

• Segment your content – create a board for each category of your brand.  Gardening, food, style, tools, etc.
• Organize Pinboards – set your best images as covers for each Pinboard.
• Seasonal Pinboards move to top, move the summer content and move it down.  Pinboard “homepage” is adjustable
• Revamp the default Pinterest description.  Go into the image code on your site and make sure your alt attributed on your images is descriptive.  Many will not edit this and they end up with image0068 in the Pin description
• Visit http://www.Pinterest.com/source/yourdomain.com – will show you all content from your site.  Not exhaustive or comprehensive, but it’s a lot of what has been shared.  Great wake-up call for clients.
• Don’t give too much info in the image.  Use the image to entice the click through to the website.
• Entice the click – before and after pics are great.  Show information on what the content will be on the other side.
• Repin-proof your description.  Overlay text on the image itself.  If the text description gets changed, the image is still descriptive and branded.
• Tools – no api yet, so apps are a little wonky – if pins are made through the app – most are using URL forwarders and changing url of your content.  Not end of world, but be aware.  2 Tools Jenn likes are “PinAlerts” – can do competitive research and get alerts when content is pinned from a competitors website
• Curalate is the other tool Jenn likes, uses image recognition technology