I learned a long time ago that digital entrepreneurs don’t succeed by developing tools I understand immediately. So I wasn’t worried last summer when I first created a Pinterest account but couldn’t figure out why I would use it.
If it was going to become an important social tool, I’d learn by watching how smarter people used it. And I am.
I knew something was happening with Pinterest late last year when people in my social networks (and some people I’d never heard of) started following my pinboards (which at the time meant they were following nothing). I started seeing some Pinterest chatter on social media and in blogs.
Adam Burnham, senior vice president for local digital sales at Digital First Media, asked me early this year what I knew about Pinterest. I told him I didn’t know much but had noticed the growing use of it and chatter about it. A Google search found some articles that gave me some quick background.
If you haven’t been prompted yet to figure out Pinterest, here’s a quick explanation: It’s kind of a social media scrapbook of online images. When a photo or other image on the Internet catches your eye, you “pin” the image, saving it (with a link and whatever text you add) to a “pinboard” of related images.
An interesting factor in Pinterest use I noticed in reading about it was that women were using it more than men by about a 4-to-1 margin. I queried and checked out some colleagues about their Pinterest use and saw a similar gender gap. The most active users were female colleagues: Buffy Andrews, Mandy Jenkins, Cheryl Sadler, Lisa Jonaitis, Maryanne MacLeod, Helen Bennett and Jen Westpfahl. (Ivan Lajara was the outlier, a guy who’s using Pinterest actively and well. Daniel Finney, a friend at the Des Moines Register, is another outlier.)
I also see the gender gap in extent of use by people who are on Pinterest. When a woman I know follows me on Pinterest, I look and usually see multiple pinboards, with collected images telling me something about her interests. When a man follows me and I click on his account, I often see an empty account (like mine was for too long), indicating he’s heard he ought to check Pinterest out but hasn’t figured out yet what it’s good for or why he would use it.
Perhaps reflecting this gender gap, common topics for pinboards include food, fashion, entertainment and weddings. I’m expecting this gender gap will close faster than the one troubling Mitt Romney. While many women are never going to find a reason to vote for Romney, lots of men had baseball card collections when they were boys (or still do), and I see great potential for Pinterest to catch on with men. I have two pinboards of New York Yankees: Yankees who should be in the Hall of Fame and Yankees I’ve seen play in person (both works in progress). Men are visual creatures and collectors, too (I’m sure some men are already pinning sexy photos of supermodels, though I have refrained from compiling such a pinboard for demonstration purposes). When it becomes standard for guys to compile pinboards of their fantasy sports teams, favorite beers and golf courses they have played, remember that you read it here first.
Buffy and her York Daily Record colleagues won first place in my Valentine’s engagement contest with an engagement project that used Pinterest, and Lisa’s second-place effort with Mt. Pleasant Morning Sun colleagues also used Pinterest.
On a March visit with a niece who’s engaged, she showed us her wedding dress on her smartphone, and it was from her Pinterest account. (Other nieces and a daughter-in-law also are active on Pinterest, but I know of no sons or nephews using it.)
I decided I’d better start pinning some images myself and figure out how Digital First newsrooms and journalists should be using Pinterest. For a March workshop on job-hunting in digital journalism, I created a pinboard of my career, suggesting that students seeking jobs could use Pinterest not only to showcase their work, but to demonstrate their mastery of a social tool that prospective editors (still more likely to be male) had probably heard of but not used yet.
I had some fun compiling a pinboard of my homes. Where I couldn’t find a photo of my own to upload to Flickr and pin, I’ve used Google Street View and the satellite view of Google Maps to find old homes, if I could recall the address (I’m an Air Force brat and itinerant journalist who’s lived a lot of places). That pinboard isn’t finished yet, but I think the point is that most pinboards are always going to be works in progress.
I’ve pinned a few of my favorite places, but that board needs some more work, as does the Pinboard of old family photos (OK, for the last time, they are all works in progress; I think that’s the point). For fun, I created a pinboard of photos of me with large screens.
When Mimi published her novel, Gathering String, I proudly pinned the cover. At Buffy’s suggestion, Mimi is working on a Pinboard of images relating to her novel.
Buffy’s pinboard of old typewriters (I guess that’s redundant, but I left “old” in because it just looked right) inspired me to drop by the American Press Institute and shoot the collection of old typewriters there and pin them (I’m hoping that collection ends up at the Newseum, now that API has been swallowed up by the Newspaper Association of America Foundation).
Pinterest is in my second tier of social tools right now. I use Twitter and Facebook the most and post photos to Flickr, Facebook and Twitpic (my don’t-alter-photos ethic has kept me from embracing Instagram and its filters, but if it’s worth $1 billion to Facebook, I’d better start). Pinterest has a secure place somewhere with Foursquare, LinkedIn, TripIt and SlideShare among my lesser-but-frequently-used tools. (Yes, that’s a lot of social tools, and we didn’t even get into my third tier. I think it’s a measure of Pinterest’s appeal that it is gathering so many fans and commanding so much of their time when many of us are facing social-tool overload.)
I’m not loving Pinterest the way some of my female colleagues are, but I’ve used it enough now that I sort of like it and certainly understand the appeal.
This is the first in a four-part series on Pinterest that will continue next week. The second post will discuss how Pinterest can be useful for journalists. The third will be a quick primer for journalists who have never or seldom used Pinterest. The fourth will provide links to other helpful pieces about Pinterest as well as to some examples of journalists using Pinterest. I will be posting them soon.
I ABSOLUTELY LOVE PINTEREST! I started using it after I got an “invite,” from someone. At first I was like, what the heck is this? It’s just pictures. But the way that it’s designed and its ease of use quickly turned it into an amazing visual griot of my life. With Pinterest you can really see that a picture (or video) is worth a 1,000 words. It’s a great way to tell a story with 400 characters and powerful images. I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook or Google bought it because it’s like 100 times better for sharing imagery than anything they’re doing. (That’s the reason FB bought Instagram…have you ever tried to share a photo on FB…clunky…) It’s also a signal that our already visual word is becoming more visual by the minute. Text is not king, but content is, if you will.
I use Pinterest for personal and professional use and to showcase my amateur photography. There have been some copyright dust ups – Pinterest saying it you’re responsible for not violating copyright laws for anything you put up, also saying like most social networks that it has right to reuse original content the way it pleases – so that’s something to watch but I really love it.
I use it to design my outfits believe it or not. That’s a girly thing as well as plan my meals.
For journalists though it really helps to get a sense of place. I write mostly about places overseas and I like to embed Pinterest boards of a place I’m writing about in my blog posts. Also journalists can create boards on issues they want to cover and have their community add pins so they get a sense of how people actually see the issue they want to cover. It’s great for breaking news – I came off the El in Chicago and watched a van hit a pedestrian. I took a bunch of pics with the cellphone, my Twitter wasn’t working so well for uploading so I pinned it. You can write a short description it’s like publishing dozens of stories a day. It’s great. I encourage people to use it more to communicate. For now I’m trying to pin only photos I take but other stuff I pin like I would share on Facebook.
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At the moment, I have zero interest in Pinterest. I focus more on words than images. But those interests converged when I saw Buffy Andrews’ pinboard of typewriters.
I shared the link on my Facebook page.
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You didn’t like my Pinboard of API typewriters? 🙂
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I was so enchanted by your link to Buffy’s that I didn’t finish the rest of your sentence. Yeah, that’s the ticket….
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Here at The Lebanon Daily News (Lebanon, Pa.) I’m taking the baseball trading card approach with the Hershey Bears (AHL affiliate of the Washington Capitals) on Pintrest. ( http://pinterest.com/ldnews/hershey-bears/ ) I haven’t had a lot of time to populate it/promote it but it has taken off for only being live for a day or so. I’m hoping to do something with high school sports too.
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Cool! Thanks, Jeremy! Was good to meet you this week.
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My first interaction with or about Pinterest came from J.P. Hoonstra, our then-hockey reporter who now covers the Dodgers for the L.A. News Group. He first asked me about it, then sent me an invite. Not exactly the typical entrance into Pinterest that most users experienced, I’m thinking.
Neither of us had any hard and fast ideas about how to make use of this new fad, but recognized there was probably some potential. Fast-forward to a few weeks ago, and my advice to him was to set up a board for his blog and/or coverage, and then use relevant iconic images (player numbers, a baseball, logos, whathaveyou) to promote links of his choosing.
That’s what I did: I set up a board for my blog (http://pinterest.com/designergna/beyondtetris/) during my Social Media Month series last month, and kinda liked it. WordPress made it easy, of course, by providing a pin link on the posts for me.
For fun, I also set up a board I use to review movies I see “on purpose” via Netflix, PPV, or at the theater (http://pinterest.com/designergna/themovies/). I kinda like the fact that it limits the length of the post both as a writer (challenging) and a user (time-saving).
I definitely see some potential here — and with Instagram — for reader-engagement, and I’ve been brainstorming some ways to further test those out with our Redlands team. The trick, of course, is 1) establishing an audience, and 2) figuring out how exactly to translate those fun, quick, VISUAL posts into quantifiable clicks on our site. Still working on that… Ideas welcome. : )
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My experience with Pinterest mirrors yours, Steve. But in the very short time I;ve been actively using it, I’ve found that Pinning each of my blog posts significantly adds to their views.
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[…] I’m starting to like Pinterest: a digital scrapbook (but potentially a baseball card collectio… (stevebuttry.wordpress.com) […]
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I am currently doing some research into how it can be used as an academic research tool (in its early stages) – Because I am able to access a students ongoing visual research I can prompt them with my comments that then remain visible in the process. The student can then refine their commentary/annotation and also become more selective in what they look at and ‘curate’.
Before I used Pinterest with students they would hand in their research findings at the end (with some input through tutorials) my feedback would then be used to help them on the next stage of the research process or project but did not have the immediate impact a live, recorded exchange has.
I look at this on my blog – http://feltlikeit.wordpress.com/ a bit and I have a live cloud ready for interesting discussion at – http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/6206. (great if anyone wants to join in). As with any use of technology there are the lighter uses and the potential deeper uses and I do think Pinterest has lots of potential beyond the Twitter equivalent of ‘I am eating a doughnut’…
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That’s really interesting… I like it! I’d be interested to know along the way how well you think it works, and what the level of interaction on Pinterest is like in particular as the project progresses.
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Thanks for your interest! It is very much in its infancy and we are coming to the end of the academic year now but I will be building it into new schemes for September. Sharing ideas about how we might use social networking or technology in general is really exciting and a good example to set students I think.
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[…] I noted recently in my post on my own Pinterest use and in a post on sports engagement, I think use of Pinterest in sharing sports photos will grow and […]
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[…] I’m Starting to Like Pinterest… (The Buttry Diary) […]
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Very cool post, Steve, and I’ll be looking forward to the rest of your series! Like you, I was slow to get involved with the site, but have found more uses for it as I go along. I actually link to your post at one I just did, “<a href="http://rsmithing.com/2012/05/09/link-instagram-and-pinterest-with-flickr"Link Instagram and Pinterest with Flickr.” I’d be curious to know your thoughts there if you’d care to leave a comment.
And, “old typewriters” – ha! I suppose there may be old typewriters, and even older typewriters, so that does indeed apply!
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[…] written recently about my own use of Pinterest and about how journalists and newsrooms can use […]
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If you’re interested in Pinterest, you’ll love http://pinterest-out.blogspot.com
This blog has tons of editorial content and news items, all about Pinterest.
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[…] and newsrooms can use Pinterest also did well with 2,951 views. Two related posts, on my own use of Pinterest and helpful links for journalists using Pinterest, each topped 1,000 views. (I’m overdue to […]
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[…] I’m starting to like Pinterest: a digital scrapbook (but potentially a baseball card collection) […]
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[…] I’m starting to like Pinterest: a digital scrapbook (but potentially a baseball card collection) […]
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