What the Thought Leaders Have to Say About Pinterest

Pinterest continues to get plenty of buzz as marketers learn how to leverage the trendy social network to generate business. But what do the thought leaders of our industry think about the Pinterest potential?

After watching a video featuring some of the best marketers out there, I came up with six ways Pinterest is proving it is a game-changing social network with staying power.

1.  Accessible Content Sharing

According to Social Media Club Chairman and Founder Chris Heuer, Pinterest will stick around because it isn’t as geeky as previous social bookmarking sites. The Pinterest community is large and varied because the site makes collecting and sharing content more accessible to audiences. All users have to do is find an interest, and dive in. Finding new content and sharing with others is instantaneous, and Pinners can accumulate both pins and followers very quickly.

2.  A Lasting Impression

Ogilvy’s SVP of Global Strategy and Planning Rohit Bhargava believes the instant in which we can absorb information from an image makes all the difference. Because we are inundated with so much information, and we have immediate access to just about everything, visual content makes a more lasting impression on us. Images convey messages quickly and make concepts easy to understand.

3.  Targeted Audience

The CEO and Founder/President of Content Launch, Jon Wuebben, thinks Pinterest is so successful because it understands its biggest target audience: women. Pinterest gives women everything they want in a social network because it is so friendly to join and creating a niche community on the site is easy. As Pinterest has grown to appeal to other audiences, this growth has been organic.  But it’s hard to deny that Pinterest started as a major hub for the ladies.

4.  Merchant-Friendly

NetBase’s CMO Lisa Joy Rosner notes the trend of merchants moving their products from Facebook over to Pinterest. Not only is Pinterest an ideal network to showcase products, but it helps merchants understand what customers like. Successful product development and merchandising require an understanding of what will become popular next, and Pinterest is chock-full of new trends and hot items.

5.  Emphasis on Visual

Radian 6 Social Strategist Jeff Cohen stresses Pinterest’s emphasis on the visual. It’s not enough to produce great written content anymore – now companies must also produce interesting visual content if they want to be part of the social conversation. For many companies, this new direction will mean re-evaluating existing marketing strategies and re-assembling a team that can handle visual content production, too.

6.  The New Interest Graph

Finally, Likeable Media CEO Dave Kerpen believes Pinterest is changing not only social media, but also commerce as a whole. While Facebook introduced us to the value of the social graph, Pinterest is now demonstrating the value of interest graph. Kerpen believes this idea is even more relevant for businesses driving commerce. After all, a social graph will only take you so far, but interests run across multiple categories, and present numerous opportunities to connect and share with friends and strangers.

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What’s your take on Pinterest? Is it a social media game changer, or just another social flash in the pan?

Image courtesy of Mashable

This entry was posted on Friday, May 18th, 2012 at 9:00 am and is filed under Marketing, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.


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