January 22, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Repin for (Re)Exposure

After you’ve been in Pinterest for a while, you start to notice pins that have “been around.” For me, the first pin I noticed again and again in the pinflow was glass candlesticks made to look like sea glass with Elmer’s glue. (Epic Fail, BTW—bugs got in the glue).

Seaglass Candlestick Pin

Seaglass Candlestick Pin

A silver beaded dress does the rounds of the Art Deco boards, too.

Last weekend, I noticed a book cover pin come through my pin flow one too many times. I had already read the caption. The book didn’t appeal. I didn’t think that my pin-friends would be reading it, either. But the book kept showing up in the pin flow.

I investigated.

It turns out that the author was repinning the book. There’s only one pin of the book on the relevant board. The author deletes the old pin when the book is repined.

Repinning your own pins to keep them visible in the pin flow struck me as a useful Pinterest marketing practice.

Benefits of Repinning Older Pins

I noticed the book because I saw it so many times. The price banner in the upper left tells me the book is for sale (Kindle store).

How to Repin Your Own Pins More Effectively

In this case, the book description never changes. The image never changes. (That is, I haven’t noticed any other images linking to the same book. It might be that the author is pinning more than one image from the book and I simply haven’t noticed the others.) On one hand, this helps me notice the book; OTOH, once I recognize the pin I have already looked at, I am less likely to investigate a second time.

Recommendations for Repinning Old Pins

Refresh your business product boards by repinning your items. Regular repinning displays your pins to newer followers, in both the “following” flow and in the “categories” listings.

In Karen Tiede Art Rugs, I loaded all my rugs to the Rug board early in my membership, before I had any followers. Nobody noticed a glut of colorful rugs in the pin flow. New followers don’t see the pins on the established boards unless they happen to look at any of my boards in detail.

If you have a limited amount of inventory, don’t overload your boards with more than one pin of the same product (unless the images are different). When you repin an existing item, delete the old pin with the identical image from the bottom of the board.

If you pin more than one, different, image of the same product, point the pins at different website pages. Point one pin to the sales page for the item, one to the newsletter sign up page, one to your home page, and so forth.

If you’re really good at split testing and record keeping, you can keep track of which pins generate the best traffic. I am not and I can’t tell you how to do this. If I figure it out, I’ll write a new article.

Until Pinterest allows us to rearrange pins on boards, repinning is also the only way to adjust which products are next to each other on your boards.

Filed Under: How to 680
January 18, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Should I follow this person back?

A question from one of my “Pinterest Done 4U” clients:

Well, this was sort of a surprise.  My first unknown follower.  It is the best etiquette to follow back?

I looked at the Pinterest account that followed hers (she has three accounts following her naturally. One is her personal account, and two are mine). This is what I saw:

  1. He is active (lots of pins, lots of boards), so maybe.
  2. All of his boards are “group” boards with multiple pinners. (Group boards have the little logo of three heads, next to the # of pins.)
  3. This could be a Pinterest spam account, although the boards look legitimate enough.
  4. You don’t have to follow him back today.  You can wait.  He won’t notice your pins in the flow of pins from 17,000 people he’s following.
  5. You can follow some, rather than all, of his boards.  OTOH, none of his boards are in your industry.

All of that said, I might sit tight for a while and not worry about him. With the number of users he has (> 3000), he won’t notice whether you follow or not.

Filed Under: How to 680
January 17, 2013 By 1 Comment

Use Quozio to Create Text Pins

Quozio is a bookmarklet available from Quozio.com.  Intended to create pinnable quotations with attribution, I use it for much more than quoting other people.

First, install the bookmarklet onto your browser toolbar.  I keep it right next to the PinIt bookmarklet.

Quozio Bookmarklet on my browser toolbar

Quozio bookmarklet on my browser toolbar

When you have something to quote, click on the bookmarklet.

Quozio Pop-up

Quozio pop-up

 

Type your quotation or text into the large field, and the person who said it into the smaller field.  See the Quozio how-to if you need more information.

Quozio background and font choices

Quozio background choices

Scroll through the background and font choices till you find a combination that works for the message you want to share.  You can probably get close, although I wish they had a few sky-cloud backgrounds.  Don’t use the casual handwriting fonts for serious messages, and be careful about the black backgrounds–they can look very serious.  You’ll know when you get it right.

(Notice that the thumbnail second from the left in the screen shot above is the US Flag.)

Quozio will pin to your open Pinterest account (or most recently-opened) and your most recently pinned to board.  You can change the board on the fly.  Unless you edit the link, the pin will point back to to the Quozio site.  You can open the pin from the “Success” pop-up window and point the link to a page on your own website that fits the text.

I use Quozio when I hear a useful business idea, or when I find a quotation in a book that I want to share.  (Add book and page information to make the pin more useful to other people.)  But those aren’t the only ways to use the tool.

Other Ways to Use Quozio Beside Quotations

  • (Links in these bullets all go to pins and boards within Pinterest.)
  • Create cover pins for your boards—pins that explain what the board is about, better than the board title can do.  (I use Quozio for a board cover when I don’t own m/any of the images on the board itself, esp. for my teaching boards.)
  • Post text-based information, such as an announcement about a class that would interest people looking at the board.  (Be sure to include a year, because calendar-based information gets old fast.)  Point these pins to the website for the class or event.
  • Passing comments on Pinterest itself.  (Why do they keep showing me boards about Vegans when I have never pinned any food-related content at all?)
  • Live pin-journalism, from an on-going event.  I will point these pins either to the speaker’s website, or to the website for the event itself.  (Article about pin-journalism in process as you read.)

If you find Quozio useful, be sure to like them on their FB page!

 

Filed Under: How to 680, Images 770
January 16, 2013 By Leave a Comment

PinIt Bookmarklet Passes Alt Tag

Inquiring minds want to know:

What image meta tag gets pulled into a pin?

Does it matter which pinning tool you use?

Your personal Pinterest Investigative Reporter to the Rescue.

I tested Pinterest’s PinIt Bookmarklet (first option on the list) on my Rugs from Rags site (better image collection) to see which of an image’s metadata fields was passed to the Description field on a pin.

It’s the Alt Tag.

PinIt Bookmarklet passes Alt tag to pin description.

Test of PinIt Bookmarklet


When you load images to your website that you want other people to pin, make sure you have useful content in the Alt field. Some pinners will delete this and add their own description (often lame, unfortunately) but if you offer good content, you have a better chance of your words making it into the pin flow.

I’m off to review all my alt tags. (Will test other WP plugin pinning options as I come to them. I use NextGen to manage a lot of the images on Rugs from Rags and I don’t like the way any of the Pinterest plugins work with NextGen.)

I’m writing a separate post about using Pinterest’s image-specific PinIt button (third option on the list).

Filed Under: How to 680, Images 770
January 15, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Don’t stress over your precious images

I have heard people say that they “don’t want to go near Pinterest because of their Terms of Service.” Hum, I thought. That’s your choice.

Pinterest’s terms of service (TOS) are shifting and changing frequently, by the way, so I can’t be sure which version anyone saw when they made that decision. The TOS on the site as of today are the most clearly presented I’ve ever seen. Pinterest has good graphic designers.

But later, I wondered. I run a site for a balloon twister. As a rule, event planners don’t exactly Search for these entertainers. They see a clown working one party, and they save the idea, and then they try to find the person they saw at the last event, and if they miss or lose the business card, they get whoever shows up in Google.
From a balloon twister’s point of view, being seen by an event planner, working parties in Pinterest, is almost the exact same thing as being seen working a real in-person event.

Ubi the Clown

Ubi the Clown’s Pinterest Account

What’s so bad about letting people copy your images, if you’re a balloon twister? You’ll be in the picture. Most balloon animals are stock items, known to all in the trade. Twisters have to be seen. Why not be seen in Pinterest? An image of a line of children waiting their turn for their own balloon animal, –what twisters call a “45-minute line? THAT’s good marketing!!

The problem, I believe, comes down to a mistaken evaluation of the dollar value of images.

Few pictures are “worth something.” The photographers who create images with resale value work VERY hard to market and sell them. I am not talking about professional photographers or their work in this post. I’m talking about pictures taken of balloon twisters at work entertaining children or convention-goers, when the photographer is the spouse or partner, and the camera fits in a pocket, and the lighting is ambient. What we used to call “snapshots.”

Understood, “Pinterest wants GOOD images,” but “good” is defined by your market. Trust me, the balloon twisting market will accept snapshots. If you’re marketing to the wedding crowd, God bless you; you need good photography. Child’s party planning? Not so much. You can go a long way with a well-planned snapshot. (Photoshop Elements helps. Crop. Crop. Crop.)

I can drive 100 visitors to a clown’s website because they saw a picture of him twisting balloons at a church picnic. If one of those people calls him and book a party, the picture is worth the party fee, which is 100% MORE than he would have been able to sell the image itself.

I don’t know about you, but I do not search the web so I can decorate my home with pictures of balloon twisters working at parties. For that matter, I don’t print and frame pictures of granite countertops, or place settings, or chimineas.

But really: what are you worried about losing if someone repins your image?

Caveat: I am NOT writing about professional photographers, fine artists, or jewelers, or anyone else whose work can be knocked off by a factory in China using only an image.

I’m talking to the balloon twister here. The professional seamstress selling steam punk. “They’ll copy my ideas.” Yeah, somebody will. But anyone who can sew that well would have copied them anyway once she saw the dress at RenFaire. Just as many might want to buy one for themselves, and they might find you through a good image on Pinterest.

So go ahead. Don’t put yourself in Pinterest. I can use all the lack-of-competition I can get.

Filed Under: Content marketing 658-8, Images 770, Marketing examples
January 14, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Don’t Mess with Downton Abbey

In the past two weeks, I received two sales emails with short-duration, late night deadlines. The second arrived on Sunday, at 5 pm, with a 10 pm EST deadline. The offer was enticing—get more, free, traffic in six weeks with this course—and had bonuses that were also appealing, for less than $200. I had my hand on my credit card when I backed off. Something was wrong, and it required more thought.

As it was, I thought “not” and went back to my regularly scheduled programming. When it comes to spending money, the default is “No.” (At least, it should be.)

While writing my morning pages today, I noticed resentment about this email, and I wondered why it was still on my mind. That’s part of what morning pages are for: exploring the leftovers.

  1. Do Not Mess with Downton Abbey. 10 pm EST is Downton Abbey time (9-10 pm). In effect, the offer ends at 9 pm. You are not on my wavelength if you do not watch Downton Abbey.
  2. Why can’t you let me sleep on your offer?
  3. The class was not very expensive, which was its own warning flag. How good can it be for that price? Why the rush to fill a super-discount, potentially low-value class?
  4. There was no mention of what the increase would be after the deadline, so I could not make an informed decision about the cost of waiting.
  5. I saw more than one typo in the sales letter, indicating that the author didn’t sleep on it.
  6. People with active lives are not looking at email late on a Sunday afternoon.

    If a virus had not infected my partner’s PC, forcing him to use my PC to check email, I would not have seen the offer until Monday morning. I hate seeing offers that both arrive and expire in the time between email logins. (Offers that sit in my box noted but unopened are my fault, so I don’t let them bother me.)

    Therefore, the class will be full of people who check email late on Sunday and who don’t care to sleep on a decision. These are not my peeps. (Actually, they are. But it’s not the life I want, and you don’t get the life you want by hanging around people who live a life you don’t want.)

  7. There was no PayPal option, so I had to reach for a credit card. I used to know my credit card numbers by heart, but it’s turned out to be better for my bank balance not to know them. The last time I got a new card number, I didn’t learn it.

    Reaching for a wallet that happened to be empty of cash reminded me that I don’t need to spend money I don’t have on a course offering to supply traffic I might need by learning how to do social media I already know I don’t like using. (Unless a marketer calls out Pinterest by name, any mention of “social media” means LI, FB, and Twitter primarily. Pinterest is an entirely different set of skills.)

  8. See #1. Edith got jilted and Downton Abbey stays in the family because Matthew came to his senses about the inheritance from Lavinia’s father. Did you think your offer is more important than that?

    I can make the case that your promise—more traffic, from free activities that I can do in one or two hours a week—is just as improbable as one ordinary lawyer coming into two massive inheritances within five years. (OTOH, Matthew had the massive demographic impact of both WWI AND the Spanish Flu on his side. The sales offer in question had no real proof.)

I asked the first marketer who sent an “expires at midnight tonight” offer, “why do you want to have people as customers who are reading email at 11 pm?” He laughed and said most of his list lived in CA, so it would have been 9 pm for them. At least that was a weekday offer, and he had a good cover story: last-minute opportunity for a romantic get-away with his wife if he could fill the class early.

There was no cover story on the second offer.

If you’re going to set an East Coast deadline on an offer, do yourself a favor and figure out what might be going on in your target audience’s life at that time.

Downton Abbey Cast photo, season three

The major players in Downton Abbey, Season Three.

Don’t try to compete with Downton Abbey. You’re just not that good.

Filed Under: Marketing 658.8
January 7, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Notes on Optimizing

From Bob Lewis, IS Survivor: July 9, 2012

Posted here because I can never remember all six of the “good, fast and cheap” real life dimensions, and they matter.  Just like change comes in project change and application change, and defects come in project defects and application defects, and they are all very different things.

Understand, I’m a theory-of-constraints guy.

Theory of Constraints says that for every business function, right after ranking the six dimensions of optimization (fixed costs, incremental costs, cycle time, throughput, quality, and excellence) in order of importance, the next step is identifying the most serious barrier to improving the top-ranked dimension, doing what’s necessary to remove it or reduce it until it’s no longer the most serious barrier. If that means customizing the supporting software, so be it.

Repeat ad infinitum.

It’s straightforward. It works.

Even better, you won’t need to renegotiate terms after the thrill of an outsourcing deal is gone.

Filed Under: 80/20 658.3, B2B 658.8, Leadership 303, Metrics 389, Process 153, Project management 658.4
December 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Adding Pinterest Boards to WordPress Posts

Pinterest’s new Business Accounts allow you to add a Board widget to an external web page. This widget puts a live image of any one of your boards on a webpage. Visitors who click on the board will be taken to that board on the Pinterest side.

It’s a great idea, when it works. Unfortunately, WordPress isn’t always very friendly about “non standard” HTML code. I’m a bit surprised that Pinterest didn’t work this out before releasing the widget, but they didn’t ask my opinion.

I have found that the widget goes into the page easily enough, as long as you add it on the “Text” (WP 3.5) or “HTML” (earlier versions of WP) tab and not on the “Visual” tab, which renders HTML as the text entered, not as the code.

However, I have found that the board sometimes disappears when I come back and edit the page for some other reason. When I asked Pinterest about this, they simply said that the widget wasn’t designed for WordPress and that you could not currently confirm Business Accounts against a Word Press site.

Well, that second part is not true because I have confirmed three WordPress sites as Pinterest Business accounts, and the bit about not being able to display a board widget on a WP pages is not completely true, just more difficult than they provide instructions for.

Pinterest tells you to include this SCRIPT tag once per page, but there’s no where to put it on a WordPress page or post.

Javascript to display Pinboard

Javascript to display Pinboard on a web page.

I tried adding it to the “genesis  after” Hook on a SimpleHooks plugin, but that didn’t work.

When I asked a technical person, I learned that the script belongs on the “Header and Footer Scripts” boxes under the Theme Settings option (for Genesis themes from StudioPress). Other themes probably work similarly. This is the same place you put your Google Analytics tracking code, except the Google code goes in the Header Scripts box and the Pinterest script goes in the Footer Scripts box.

Good luck! Please let me know if you find a different way to use these boards in WordPress! If I learn anything new from Pinterest, I’ll come back and change this post.

Filed Under: How to 680
December 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Pinterest Power, the book

Pinterest Power, by Jason Miles & Karen Lacey

Four stars.

Full disclosure: I paid full (Amazon) price for my copy of this book (that is, I did not receive a review copy) but I did receive a ton of associated “reserve your copy in advance” material as part of the purchase. The goodies aren’t changing my review. I reserve five stars for books that pretty much change my core thinking about something, and Pinterest Power doesn’t do that. However, it’s good, it’s as good as any of the current crop of Pinterest how-to books, and I like the tone.

One of the business-popular-tech magazines (Inc or Fast Company or Wired) covered the previous books about Pinterest a few months before Pinterest Power came out, and the reviews were all a bit dismissive. At that time, I held on to my money as a result. It may well be that Pinterest itself has matured and those books were premature. YMMV. I have followed Jason’s pins and blog for a while and I like his approach. Tested, responsible, pragmatic, proven.

The book is easy, straightforward, and thorough, and if you’re serious about using Pinterest to generate traffic, leads, and sales, you will be able to learn a lot. It’s WAY cheaper than any of the on-line education I’ve seen, and covers at least as much if not a great deal more. More accessible, IMO, and bathtub friendly in a way anything online is simply not.

I’m not completely happy with the explanation of how US Copyright law intersects with Pinterest (in short, the authors punted with an “IANAL” clause). IMO, businesses are much more likely to be the target of a copyright challenge, because we have (at least in the eyes of the prosecution) the money. Copyright law is not difficult. If you’re pinning for a business, you owe it to your business to understand how it works a little better than is explained here, although, I agree, the gist is correct: credit your sources (and, IMO, stay away from Tumblr).

After I posted the original Amazon review, I found an additional paragraph about copyright that more actively irritated me.  The authors advise NOT linking to any site that has the “do not pin” code.  Perhaps they meant to say, “do not copy from and then link back to,” but I don’t see any problem with linking TO any website, as long as you’re not stealing their content to create the pin.  (I link to non-pinnable websites with Quozio.) (This paragraph is is a call-out box several pages BEFORE the section on copyright law, which is why I couldn’t find it when I wrote the first review.  Didn’t think to look backward.)

I don’t know whether the “don’t pin from this site” functionality was available before the book was written; I wish it had been addressed. National Geographic is the most prominent site I have discovered using that code; stolen NatGeog images are all over Pinterest (and probably a few on my boards, although I have deleted some that I since came to recognize).

Somewhat minor quibble, unless your business is photography itself, which appears to have the most at risk.

Elsewise, you’ll do well with Pinterest Power, you’re bound to learn something, and follow Jason’s blog and boards to stay up to date, because Pinterest is changing faster than paper can keep up with.

Filed Under: Books 028
December 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Moving Pins Between Accounts

Now that Pinterest offers business accounts, some of my clients wonder how to move their more “business” pins from their personal accounts to their new business accounts.  These are pinners who are happy to have two accounts and don’t want to share all of their personal boards, full of everything they’ve pinned over the past year,  with the people they know through business.

Moving pins is easy.

Another word for “moving pins” is “repin.”  It’s just that it happens between accounts you own.

  1. Log in to your new business account.
  2. Search on your personal account, using the search box in the upper left and the “pinners” option.  You can also type the URL of your personal account in a new tab.  Pinterest “holds” the last log in, so you will open that account but not be able to change anything in it as long as you are logged in to your business account.
  3. Find the pin you want to “move.”
  4. Repin it to a board on your new business account.

That’s all there is to it!

If you no longer want that pin on your personal account, you can delete it the next time you are in your personal account.

If you discover that you find a lot of interesting pins that belong in the account you’re not logged into, create a board called “moving pins” or something that works for you, and pin to that board.  Then go over to the other account, repin from that board, and delete the pin from the “moving pins” board.

Make this a “group” board so that you can pin to it from both accounts. To do this, go into the Board Settings and enter your “other” email in the “invite pinners” field. The next time you open that other account, you’ll see an invitation in the upper left corner of your pin flow. Accept it, and you’ll be able to pin to the board from both your business and your personal accounts. (You can only delete pins from the account that pinned them, however, so you may still have some account switching to do.)

If you don’t leave pins on the “moving pins” board for long, your business followers may never see that you’ve pinned some really cool shoes you wouldn’t wear in the office…

Filed Under: How to 680, Pinterest
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