Pin it to Win it!

Pin It to Win It
Brands Discover Pinterest
by Sam McMillan
Hit the Pinterest homepage at Pinterest.com and it’s hard to see what all the fuss is about. At first glance it looks like a highly-caffeinated editorial meeting for Us magazine. Images of cupcakes, beefcake, celebrities and inspirational sayings abound. And recipes. Lots of recipes. Call it food porn.

So why are brands as diverse as Whole Foods’ Whole Planet Found­a­tion and fashion forward shopping site Rue La La clamoring to get their boards on Pinterest?

Well, the numbers don’t lie. In a few short months Pinterest has climbed the ranks of the top-trafficked sites, joining Facebook, Amazon and Wikipedia, to become a search engine that rivals Google—and drawn over 20 million unique visitors in the US, who looked at 1.5 billion page views in one month. Stats like that get the attention of brands who want to reach customers, build loyalty, and foster engagement. But it’s Pinterest’s ability to drive sales by enabling a visitor to click through an image, and go directly to an e-commerce website, that has marketers stampeding.

SHOW DON’T SHOUT
Lisa Weser, senior director of brand communications at Anheuser-Busch, discovered Pinterest two years ago, “When you had to request an invitation to join,” she says. “I knew it was going to be big when I spent two hours on the site in a single visit.” Since that time, Weser has become a passionate advocate for the site. Pinterest users are an ideal brand demographic Weser explains. “They are overwhelmingly affluent, educated and female. They represent a desirable demographic when it comes to purchasing power and influence.”

To speak to their audience on Pinterest, brands must learn to lower the volume. “Audiences are exhausted from the non-stop chatter of Twitter and Facebook postings,” Weser believes. Pinterest represents a societal shift toward a preference for visual story­telling that enables brands to show without shouting.

It’s a more quiet medium Weser thinks, and it facilitates an experi­ence that’s akin to leisurely flipping through a magazine. In addi­tion to the enviable demographics Pinterest delivers, a recent report from Digital Trends indicates that the average time pinners spend on Pinterest is over an hour. Combine that with the organic pin and share mechanism built into Pinterest boards that connects consumers to brands (and their e-commerce sites) and it’s no wonder that, in Weser’s words, “Every brand wants to reach them.”

http://www.commarts.com/columns/pin-win-it.html