Pinning - The Marketing Onslaught Begins

This is another social network unlikely to escape the marketing onslaught for very long. I imagine creative minds are trying to find ways for their brands to jump in as I write.

I'm talking about Pinterest, of course, the addictive image sharing social network in which people pin cool, bizzare, bland, stupid (to my mind anyway - no more shoes please) or instructive images to 'boards' for others to see, comment on, or trash. The demographics so far skew to 25-34 year olds, the majority (80%) women.

There are personal uses that make a lot of sense, as I found when I asked the question on Twitter a few weeks ago. The responses talked about its value as a wedding planning or interior deisgn tool for example. My boards will be devoted, as expected, to quirky or artsy images.

Such leading brands as Whole Foods have boards (followed by close to 11,000 people already) and Lands End (only 526 followers so far) which have lovely stuff to look at and "pin". In a post at Search Engine Watch, blogger Kaila Strong list seven ways companies could use the Pinterest platform to meet and interact with customers:

1. Hold a contest
2. Conduct market research
3. Feature customers
4. Present concepts in a new way
5. Put a face to your brand
6. Promote your image content
7. Sell more products

All good . . .

For those who work in reputation management, current affairs and the social web, we'll likely be scratching our heads for some time yet about how Pinterest can provide value other than in promoting image content (good for building affective loyalty to a company or organization). Suggestions welcome.

Cannes Eye

Sorry for the blatant promotion of my own firm and its marketing communications arm, but the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival is underway until the end of this week and we (in the global sense, not me personally) are there.

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, my firm is posting video interviews with a variety of leading public relations, advertising, technology and entertainment VIPs on a dedicated online TV channel called Cannes Eye.

You can check it out in the right navigation bar on my website. The first onsite interview in Cannes is with Sir Martin Sorrell, my boss (although about 12 levels higher in the pecking order, in fact at the top the WPP heap).

And for my marketing and advertising friends, episode two posted to hours ago includes interviews with Peter Krainik of the CMO Club and Bob Kilbreath of the digital marketing agency Bridge Worldwide.  

Facebook and Twitter on a Tear

Reading studies about trends in digital marketing is not how I prefer to spend leisure time. But they can be a nice counter balance to the time spent trying to convince organizations that social media are not going away (unlike mainstream media).

A comScore Inc. recap of digital marketing in 2009 in the U.S. released yesterday tells us, among other revealing findings (Would you have guessed that the largest growth rate in e-commerce in 2009 was in the purchase of books and magazines?), that people in the U.S. continue to flood to Facebook and Twitter, and to a lesser extent MySpace.

According to the study:

"Facebook grew substantially across nearly every performance metric in 2009. Unique visitors, page views, and total time spent all increased by a factor of two or more. Frequency metrics such as average minutes per usage day (up 6 percent) and average usage days per visitors (up 37 percent) also saw gains. As more people use Facebook more frequently, the site has grown to account for three times as much total time spent online as it did last year."

Others with an analytic predisposition can deep dive into the charts and graphs in comScore's study. Suffice to to say from my perspective this even more important than the huge numbers tossed around which compare Facebook's 350 million or so users to the populations of various countries.

The numbers are telling us that people are coming to Facebook more often, spending more time there, and exploring the Facebook landscape more broadly.

As for Twitter, someone commented on a recent Tweet of mine which asked whether I should try to be funnier in my posts that I shouldn't because it is a "business medium."  The comment may have been justified a year ago given the demographic composition of users, but the change in the age of Twitter users (which now total 20 million in the U.S.) may bring that assumption in question:

"The initial success of Twitter was largely driven by users in the 25-54 year old age segment, which made up 65 percent of all visitors to the site in December 2008, with 18-24 year olds accounting for just 9 percent of visitors . . . Despite Twitter's initially older skew, as it gained widespread popularity with the help of celebrity Tweeters and mainstream media coverage, younger users flooded to the site in large numbers, with those under the age 18 (up 6.2 percentage points) and 18-24 year olds (up 7.9 percentage points) representing the fastest growing demographic segments."

There may be troubling questions about the options for monetizing these platforms so they can be sustained and about the ability best ways to harness online networks for marketing purposes, but there is clearly every reason to keep at it. These platforms are in increasing part of how the world plays out its relationships, idea and information excahgne, civic engagement and, yes, product and service research.