Bio

Principal
Referral Partners

Bio of a Pinterest Marketer

I make rugs, both woven and knit, and you can read more about my rugs on their website.

I discovered Pinterest as a marketing vehicle for the rugs, and it didn’t take long before Pinterest was sending much of my buying traffic. (Google sends people who want to read my blog posts about making rugs, which are not the same people who buy rugs.)

In the real world, I wanted to meet interior designers who could recommend my rugs to their clients. I thought designers might be interested in using Pinterest for their own marketing, so I put together a Marketing with Pinterest class and invited designers (as well as everyone else I knew who might like the class).

For the most part, the designers have not arrived, but plenty of other people did, and interest grew. Teaching Pinterest was a lot of fun. No-one in the area was working with Pinterest much, because the people who had moved into Social Media consulting and support were pretty busy with FB and Twitter and Google Plus, and Pinterest requires an entirely different way of thinking.

One day when I was talking about Pinterest, I said it would be fun to offer Done For You services, and two people in the room said they would be interested. It was that easy. I put up the website and started writing more about the business use of Pinterest. There are plenty of people teaching Pinterest Marketing for the solopreneur, Etsy-vendor market. Not a whole lot of Pinterest Marketers understand the difference between SAS and SAP, let alone SAAS.

Pinterest keeps sending traffic to my rug site, and I manage a few business accounts now, and I keep learning. I am writing an eBook, the Pinnovator’s Dilemma, about incorporating Pinterest Marketing experiments into a successful direct response marketing practice.

Corporate Bio

Karen Tiede

The oldest child of a Marine Corps family, Karen Tiede lived in Germany, Quantico, England, South Africa, the Soviet Union, and Camp Lejeune before college. She brings 15+ years of corporate process design and improvement experience to her work with professional, academic, and small business organizing. She has studied and practiced change management, training design and delivery, and quantitative evaluation of productivity and improvements.

Karen has a particular gift for organizing ideas and collections of data into useful, searchable bodies of knowledge. Previous projects include:

  • Analyzing unstructured information about the staffing and volume of a major city’s parking ticket administration to develop a clear map of the data and personnel flow in the system, including an outline of the technology needed to fully automate the department. Because the complete system was estimated to cost $20 million, the work saved the department the $5 million originally budgeted and prevented the severe cost over-runs that would have been inevitable, had the contract been awarded based on the preliminary understanding of the magnitude of the work.
  • Arranging a year’s worth of a chatlist’s discussions into an indexed and searchable paper reference book that could be carried into dusty, cold and damp environments not safe for PCs.
  • Sorting and editing several years of help desk queries and answers into a wiki that was available for use by all corporate employees, any time of day. Being able to look up their own answers, instead of waiting for a reply from a help desk operating in US business hours, allowed employees around the world to solve problems and get back to productive work during their work day, rather than waiting for an answer that could be delayed by 12 or 14 hours.

Over the course of her corporate career, Karen studied how teams completed projects, documenting their processes, lessons learned and improvement suggestions, and worked with the global process improvement community to standardize and share results. She has also worked with artists, helping them to understand the components of their art and how individual elements can be optimized, contributing to a more creativity.

Former co-workers have said,

  • Karen is able to balance what makes sense, with what needs to be done. I value her opinion and insight, which she is not shy about sharing. Karen does a good job of communicating her ideas.
  • Karen’s strengths are in problem identification and follow through to resolution. She is able to work through large amounts of information (written and verbal) from many sources to identify issues and then works well with those affected to reach appropriate decisions.
  • Karen is an excellent communicator. She is able to grasp unique situations and coach people in the appropriate behaviors. She can empathize with most situations and work through the issues to get to the win-win. She has amazing patience.

Karen is a graduate of Duke University (chemistry and Russian) and has a masters in Landscape Design from the Conway School of Landscape Design in Conway, MA. She lives in Moncure, NC, not far from the Jordan Lake dam. She is an exhibiting member of the Chatham Artists Guild and an active member of the Team Nimbus Community in Raleigh.

Assessment Results

Karen’s StrengthsFinder themes are:

  • Maximizer: transforming good systems into excellent systems
  • Strategic: seeing patterns and pathways where some people see only complexity
  • Input: collect information, strong need to understand information storage and retrieval systems
  • Intellection: like thinking
  • Command: able to take a stance and ask people to move in a certain direction
  • Empathy: ability to understand and hear unvoiced questions
    (Command and Empathy tied for fifth place on two separate assessments.)

MBTI: INFP

Referral Partners

Red Tuxedo works with professionals who want to find solutions to information management for collaboration, research, and case management. In the course of our work with clients, we sometimes encounter a need for assistance outside our training and experience. We are always happy to partner with people who are experts in their field:

Public Speaking

Alan Hoffler, at MillsWyck Communications, can help you overcome the fear of speaking in public, eliminate distracting habits, answer questions with confidence, use visual aids more effectively, and craft a message that will drive your audience to action.

Career Expansion for Physicians

Linda Rosen, at Rosen Coaching and Consulting, is an executive coach and consultant specializing in career expansion, transition and transformation for physicians.

Financial Behavior

Paige Armstrong, at Life Enrichment Resources, understands the dynamics and hurdles of changing money behaviors. They provide an non-judgmental environment for helping you achieve your goals to financial wellness. Life Enrichment Resources focuses on the interior aspects of what drives clients to spend/save money and encourages clients to take the steps toward honoring their best life by becoming money behavior savvy.

Estate Organizing

Eileen Stevie, at Stevie Organizing, manages the processing of home contents and personal effects for estates. When family members, especially from out-of-town, are pressed to find the time to manage even the legal details of an estate, Stevie Organizing provides a much-needed service.

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