Brandy's Pinterest Page
Agency,Media

Have you joined Pinterest yet?

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Lately, I’ve found myself spending more and more time on a website called Pinterest. If you haven’t heard about it, Pinterest is a site where users create virtual bulletin boards to curate inspiration they find online. They can share ideas, recipes, products, videos and photos, curate their favorite things, and make lists.

Users create theme-based collections on a Board labeled with titles such as “Inspiration,” “Things I want” and “For the Home.” Boards can also be used to organize events or projects like home renovations, weddings, parties and vacations. Boards are then populated with individual images (or “Pins”) by either using the “Pin It” bookmarklet, re-pinning content from another user on the site, or uploading original images from your computer or through the iPhone app (which still needs some serious work, by the way). Users can also decide if they want other people to be able to pin to their boards.

The site is still only about two years old, but it has seen rapid growth in the last several months. Unique visitors increased from 418,000 in May to 3.3 million in October, meaning traffic increased sevenfold in just five months. And it’s expected to explode in 2012. But that’s just one of the reasons that Arsenal now has its own Pinterest account where all of our employees can post their own inspiration for designs, ads and typography, among other things.

If you’re a brand whose target customers are women, you’ll be interested to know that 70% of users are females under 45. And users are highly engaged, with a reported 3.3 million users logging more than 421 million pageviews, so there are plenty of opportunities to get someone’s attention.

At this point, Pinterest is still purely organic, meaning there’s no paid advertising (yet). But that doesn’t mean that brands aren’t taking advantage of this fast-growing platform as one more way to connect with and influence customers.

Pinterest clearly states that it’s not a platform for self-promotion, which means you have to take a slightly different approach. Lands’ End Canvas launched one of the first contests on the site with the “Pin It to Win It” campaign prompting participants to visit their website and create virtual pin boards for a chance to win a gift card. Nordstrom is using Pinterest not only to share information and links to their products, but also to learn about what’s trending among their audiences. And it’s providing a great referral source for corporate websites. In October 2011, Real Simple noted that more people are clicking through to their website from Pinterest than Facebook.

At the moment Pinterest is still invite only, so if you haven’t joined yet let us know and we’d be happy to hook you up with an invitation.

Page One Movie
Media

“Page One: Inside the New York Times” Raises Questions About New Media

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I recently saw Page One: Inside the New York Times. It’s an interesting documentary that takes a look at how one of the nation’s leading news institutions tries to evolve while facing historic changes in the media landscape. For anyone in journalism or public relations, this is a film worthy of your attention, and not because it offers any answers. How could it? We’re literally experiencing this shift in real time. But it does raise important questions.

The combination of a 24-hour news cycle and the proliferation of bloggers and online news sources from Huffington Post and Breitbart to Gawker and even WikiLeaks, calls into question the role of – even the very need for – a daily newspaper institution like a New York Times. Combine that with the not-so-new-anymore trend of advertisers moving their dollars away from print to online and social media channels and, well, we’ve all seen what that means to traditional newsrooms. Layoffs. Cutbacks. Belt tightening. And we get to watch it happen to the New York Times over the course of 2010 when Page One was filmed.

During the film, we see New York Time media columnist David Carr in more than one debate (one of them a panel at SXSW Interactive) defend the role of his employer as far from irrelevant, and in fact, important. In my opinion, he makes the case for why we need accurate news gathering and objectivity, and that “old media” like the New York Times are still needed in that role even though (often ideological) blog sites are the darlings of “new media.”

Sure it’s easy to go to your favorite blog or Google News for a round-up of the day’s – or even moment’s – events. But where do they get their information? That’s right. “Old media” news gathering organizations like the New York Times, Associated Press and Reuters.

Page One reminds us once again that we’re seeing a pivotal time for journalism. More voices in civic discourse is a good thing. More access to information is a good thing. Opinionated blogs expressing an acknowledged point of view is a good thing. But we can’t overlook the vital role of old-fashioned, objective reporting. Feet on the street that are doing the hard work of finding original sources, gathering news, and then presenting balanced stories that are fact-checked and edited with the highest journalistic integrity.

For the moment anyway, most new media needs old media to continue to exist, literally to feed them news. And old media needs new media to show them how to evolve in serving consumers online. If some of the main questions Page One asks are: will the New York Times survive change? Should it? Do we even need it to? I have to answer yes. “Old media” like the New York Times, “new media” like the Huffington Post… it’s not either/or to me. It’s both/and. For now, we need both doing what they do best. But more importantly, we need an informed citizenry that can recognize the difference.

DS