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 10, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Improving Your Pinterest Images

Professional product photography is a wonderful resource. If you can afford to have a professional photographer take images of your products, services, and events, use them. (Make sure you have have permission to use those images on Pinterest, according to your contract with the photographer).

However, you can spend a lot of money on good product photography, and Pinterest is hungry for more images than many smaller businesses can afford.

You can improve the photos you take.  This post talks about how to train your brain to think about images differently; plenty of pins point you to information about the technical elements of improving your images through camera settings and lightroom processing.

Crop!

When in doubt, crop your image! Cut out as much of the background as possible and get in close to what matters to the pin.

Pink bicycles example of cropping

Example of cropping to remove most of the sidewalk and show more of the color.

If your photo processing software offers a 3×3 grid during the cropping process, get one of the intersections of the grid close to the center of interest in the image.

Real world lesson: TV close-ups of a character (Law and Order pre-commercial fade-out) ALWAYS show the character’s face on one side or the other of the screen, NEVER in the middle.)

Educate Your Eye

Before you can create better images, it’s helpful to be able to recognize better images. As you read trade magazines, end-user retail advertising, or any other source of images including Pinterest, notice which images catch your eye. Tear out pages from magazines and keep them in a notebook or file folder. Pin interesting pin images to secret boards if you don’t want to do your learning in public.

From time to time, look over your collection and let it talk to you. You may find that the images group themselves into categories, by distance from object; time of day, color scheme.

Ask yourself:

  • Where is the camera?
  • Where is the light source?
  • Is there more than one light source?
  • What time of day is it?
  • What’s in the background and how did the photographer make the background look that way?*

*It’s possible to blur a background by changing the apeture on your camera; it’s easier to make sure the background is as simple and plain as it can be (or at least, interesting and deliberately selected) before you take the picture.

When you’re ready to create your own images, take this information with you and your camera.  Chances are, simply thinking about how an image you like was created will help you create images that you like a lot more.

Books

The board below shows pins about books and other sources of information about improving your photography. I focus on shifting your point of view and general artistic understanding rather than the technical information about how to use software.

Photograph Daily

See Everyday:  A Year Long Photo Diary, by Byron Wolfe.  Anohter book that has the same effect on me are Speck:  A Curious Collection of Uncommon Things, by Peter Buchanan-Smith.

Wolfe is a photography teacher who set himself the assignment to make one good image every day.  Lisa Creed did the same thing with her paintings.  Julia Cameron teaches this about writing daily in The Artists Way.

Carry your camera / smart phone everywhere.  Allow / force yourself to stop and take photographs whenever something catches your eye.  Photographing the same thing every time you pass it will have much the same outcome, if that is easier to do.  (I have a series of the nuclear power plant plume; another of a highway intersection construction project in process.)

If you’ve ever watched a professional photographer work, you may have noticed that he or she took HUNDREDS of photos in order to get the 20 that appeared in your wedding album, or the three that were used in the magazine article.

The point of these exercises is to help you let go of the idea of “one good image” and move into an understanding of “lots of images will lead to one good one.”

Jim Krause’s Index Series

Jim Krause’s Index Series

Jim Krause Book image

Books that can help you be a better designer.

I love all of Jim Krause’s books.  People doing their own product photography should buy the Photo Idea Index (bright green plastic cover in the picture on the site). The chapters in this book take you through 350 ways of looking at the world (and products!) around you and taking pictures that will make people stop when they see them on the pin flow.

If your business is more specific and you KNOW you only need landscapes, or people, or products, you might want to look at one of Krause’s focused idea books.

If you do nothing but set yourself the exercise of duplicating each of his images with your landscape and/or products, you’ll have 14 boards full of images that work. Add your paid professional shots in with your own images, and your business account will look as good as any big business.

Caveat: I have not been able to duplicate professional interior design photography worth a hoot.  The pros use lights; more lights than you can image.  Using the homeowner’s in-home lighting is NOT enough.  If you pin in the interior design trades, pay for professional portfolio images.  Focus your own photography on close-ups and products, rather than finished installations.

Pins about Pinterest Photography

This is a board where I collect pins about how to create better images for Pinterest; not pins about photography in general.
(Board keeps disappearing, and I’ve submitted a help ticket into Pinterest. Stay tuned.)

Filed Under: Books 028
October 31, 2012 By 1 Comment

Pitch Anything and Pinterest

Pitch Anything is a new book about presenting-to-sell by Oren Klaff. One of my marketing teachers, Glenn Livingston, said it was the best marketing book he’d read in the past five years. I’m not so sure I’d go that far, but I just finished the book and it is engaging.

Pitch Anything, by Oren Klaff

Pitch Anything, the new marketing book about using framing and hot cognition to influence your audience.

Klaff’s recommendation is, IMO, not quite as revolutionary and innovative as he’d like to think: Guy Kawasaki has been saying the same thing for a few years already. Tell the story. Don’t let them get you into the weeds. Give people something to believe in. They don’t care about your pedigree, resume and backstory. Use your business’ version of puppy porn…(that link is safe for just about anyone). (In his case, the big sale involved airplane porn. I hope you already understand the use of the word in the internet context…)

If you’re someone who reads marketing books, you’ll enjoy Pitch Anything. I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it because it’s difficult to apply. Klaff uses examples from his own investment fund raising past, and they don’t directly translate to the kind of selling most of my clients do.

One point, however, struck me powerfully. Klaff talks about the importance of Hot Cognition–the instant, primal brain response that says, “I want it.” When buyers / clients are in hot cognition, they want what you have.

Reader, Pinterest is nothing BUT hot cognition.

I see it I want it I click it’s mine.

There is no sales letter than can compete with puppy porn, if what you sell can be represented by your market’s equivalent of this pin (also safe on a public PC).

As I write this post, I also realize that Pinterest is, in Klaff’s terms, a way to “stack frames.” The board and surrounding pins provide context you control, setting the scene for the item and how it will fit into your client’s life. Providing more detailed examples of boards and frames is more than I have time for in this post. More later.

Filed Under: B2B 658.8, Books 028, Pinterest
August 9, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The Little Book of Wrong Shui

In the course of study of professional organizing, sooner or later, you’re going to encounter Feng Shui. While in no way a trained practitioner, I can nevertheless drop a bagua on any building I visit and tell you where the Love and the Money sections are in the house. If you’re broke or lonely, declutter here first, the general advice holds, and your luck will change.

I found The Little Book of Wrong Shui at the checkout line at Barnes & Noble. If you, or anyone you love, has been the subject / victim of a drive-by Feng Shui treatment (look for octagonal mirrors and red ribbons on the drainpipes), you’ll get a chuckle.

Examples:

  • A bright idea: if parts of your home are prone to darkness, a light, carefully located, will solve the problem.
  • Nice to see you: attract visitors to your home by placing stereo, video, and computer equipment where they can be seen from the road.
  • The ups and downs of stairs: stairs going up are good Wrong Shui. In your home only have stairs going up.

New copies are less than $5 and you can get them used for $2. Buy a handful and help all your friends to a more prosperous, love-filled life. At least, they’ll be laughing so hard at the Feng Shui jokes, they won’t notice they’re still broke and alone.

Filed Under: Books 028, Design 745.4, How to 680
September 17, 2009 By 1 Comment

ICE Entries and, Your address book is a database

ICE = In Case of Emergency.  First responders are learning to find the cell phone of an unconscious person and look for an ICE = In Case of Emergency entry.  The numbers in that entry are to people who would be useful or should be notified that the cell phone owner needs help.  Help the EMT help you by creating the entry, and by making sure your friends and family members create ICE entries for their own phones.

Along the same lines, consider that most phone address books can hold more than phone numbers, especially for “smart” phones that sync to a PC and have a “notes” field for each contact entry.

I wish I could remember how the subject came up.  Someone asked when I had my most recent tetanus shot.  I pulled out my cell phone and went to “T” in the address book.  I had the answer.  My friend was astounded. (A friend recently needed an emergency tetanus shot, and went to the emergency room on a Saturday night. The total bill was $426, with only $27 of that being for the injection itself and the remainder for ancillary ER services.)

My dogs each have entries in my phone, with their microchip information and date of last rabies shot.

For that matter, the date of my own rabies series is filed under “R,” but that’s a long and different story.  (Make CERTAIN the administering nurse codes the injection as “treatment for exposure,” not “prophylaxis.”)

I know a woman who keeps her son’s preference in beer in his entry’s Notes field.  When he visits, she knows what to buy.  (I suppose, if one had enough sons with different preferences, it might be easier to create a “beer” entry, but that’s not the case in this particular family.)

I have the rental rates and minimum head counts for my favorite meeting space in the Notes field of its entry.

I’m usually pretty well prepared for planned medical visits, and I can assemble the relevant records a day or two before.  However, “tetanus” (in particular; there are others that have a similar unexpected quality) is one medical outcome that is often unexpected, the result of an unplanned trip to the ER or urgent care clinic.  I will almost always have my phone with me on that kind of visit.  Common sense note:  the notes I make are somewhat cryptic, and I don’t keep my entire medical history on a device that can be pickpocketed out of my purse.  However, I’d rather a thief find out my tetanus history than get a shot I don’t really need because it hasn’t been very long since the last one.

Filed Under: Backups 005.8, How to 680, Process 153
September 16, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Cell phone, phone home!

If you lost your cell phone and an honest and helpful person found it, could they get it back to you? If you’ve filled out the owner information, and if your cell is not password-protected, probably yes. If your phone is protected, though, the finder might not be able to get to the owner information. The same logic applies to cameras, calendars, paper-based address books, and planners. A phone number on the inside cover, or inside battery cover (Sharpie), is usually accessible to anyone who would take the trouble to find an owner.

Don’t use your cell number on your cell phone.*

I found a well-used planner in the exit lane of our office parking lot once, where it had fallen after its person had placed it on the roof of the car and forgot it. It had six weeks of future appointments and no owner information. Because it was clear it belonged to a Realtor®, I left it at the front desk of (one of) the attorneys’ offices in the building, in hopes that the owner had a) been at a closing and b) would remember the last stop. Never heard.

A return address label in the front, along with a cell phone number, would have solved that problem much faster. One of my friends adds a “reward for return” note next to her phone number.

*I have a friend who locked the keys to a padlock ON the hasp of the padlock… For sure, he never lost the keys.

20091109 Update:  In the process of packing up my PC to carry it to a convention, I wondered how many other people might have the same model (few, but this is a theoretical thought).  Then I realized I had no identifying information ON my PC itself!  Oops!  Added an address label with my phone number on the bottom of the case, and another inside the battery pack, and one in the laptop sleeve, and on the charger.  I’m certain I’ve missed something, but I’ve covered what I can think of at the moment.

Filed Under: Backups 005.8
July 31, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Are you on top of your credit report?

A friend received a solicitation from a credit monitoring agency that offered to keep on top of her credit report for $300 / year.  Although I’m as sensitive to the risk of identity theft as anyone outside the ranks of security professionals, I also know there’s a lot of fun to be had for $300 a year.  That’s almost the annual cost of a cat!

In the ensuing conversation, it became obvious that my friend was not aware she could get a free credit report from each of the three monitoring agencies every year.  The website that provides this service is: https://www.annualcreditreport.com/cra/index.jsp (You have to order the free reports from this site; you will be charged for reports from the individual reporting bureaus’ websites. You also have to pay to see your actual credit score, rather than just your account information, total debt ratio, and payment history.)  What you do about what you see in your report is outside my skill set.  However, I can help you stay on top of the situation without too much remembering.

The trick to getting cheaper-than-$300 year-round coverage is to order one report from one agency every four months.  Four months later, order a report from the next agency, and so on, and you’ll never be too far from having looked at what the agencies know about you.

Either a paper-tickler file reminder or a repeating Task (Outlook), scheduled to recur every four months, can be used as a reminder to go out to the site and look.  Because the site tracks your visits, it can be helpful to note the actual date of your report in the Task’s Note field (or on your 3×5 card) so that you wait 366 days for the next one from that agency.

Filed Under: Backups 005.8, Income 331.2 Tagged With:
July 28, 2009 By Leave a Comment

On-line backups / flood insurance

The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago.  The next best time is now.

One of my external hard drives is dying. On the way to the store to buy a replacement, I thought that perhaps I should price on-line backup first. If I am willing to spend $80 on a piece of hardware that offers more of the same protection I already have, I should be willing to spend at least that much for a different type of protection altogether. Gina Tripani’s Upgrade Your Life recommends mozy.com; $5 / month buys backup for unlimited amounts of data. Discounts apply when you prepay for two years at a time.

I forked over my credit card number, downloaded and installed the application, and clicked the “backup now” button. The application did its thing and came back to tell me that it would take five days to back up my hard drive at my current connection speed, a little less if I could accept some performance degradation in my system.

Wow. Five days’ of data? (15G, BTW) Five days to PROTECT my data? Good thing my (internal) hard drive isn’t already making funny noises!  At the end of the first 24 hours, the system reports that 5.1G have been backed up, so perhaps they’ve overestimated.  (The FAQ tell me that if I have to disconnect, Mozy will pick up where we left off.)  Future backups will be incremental and take much less time.

It was at this point that I thought about flood insurance, a useful policy to consider for people who live in the path of hurricanes (among other forces that make water cross property lines).  Flood insurance is sold with a 30-day delay.  You can’t wake up one rainy morning and buy coverage that will be in effect by nightfall.  You have to decide that floods are a possible risk for your home and take action long before it is possible to know that any given rainfall will threaten your property.

For almost all of my readers, the relative risk of hard drive failure: flood damage is 1:0.  Unless you have a much faster connection, or less data on your hard drive, than I do, the time between deciding to back up online and BEING backed up online is measured in days.  Get that tree planted now.

Filed Under: Backups 005.8
June 23, 2009 By Leave a Comment

And now, a word from your hard drive

I miss corporate IT; people who ran incremental backups nightly and could restore files across servers after hard drives started making funny noises and screens turned blue. I have to solve these problems mostly myself now. Agreed, there are excellent private tech support people in the area who can help. But backing up my hard drive is my problem.

Stephane Grenier, of Landlord Max, wrote about testing backups yesterday. I’ve pondered this problem. It’s a partial solution to dutifully kick off a complete backup to an external hard drive once a week or so. But if I never test the restore, I don’t really know for certain that I’ve done much good. I have at least looked at the files on the hard drive, although I still have to take them to a (trusted) friend’s PC and see if I can get what I need on a different system. I admit I have not tested the backup that puts selected files on the internet automatically. Emails appear the next morning saying the backup ran and XZ MB of data was copied… but it could be garbage. Next action: Check this.

When I had an office outside my house, I would regularly copy off highly-important files to CDs and kept those CDs in my cube, figuring that it was unlikely that both locations would be hit by a fire on the same night (less so for a hurricane strike, however…). One local photographer mails external hard drive backups to her parents in another state.

As with any property insurance, I need to consider the amount of money at risk against what I would spend to protect it. In this case, the “money” is both cash (hard drive recovery starts in the lower thousands) and time. The unknown-to-me variables are those of house fire or catastrophic storm (or errant dog, or diet drink), and hard drive failure. The outlay is the cost of an online backup service, and perhaps a second external hard drive (maybe a thumb drive?), stored at a friend’s house and updated regularly (which carries its own additional time cost).

When it comes to keeping paper records, David Allen has two suggestions: If in doubt, throw it out, and, If in doubt, keep it. If you’re not backing up your hard drive regularly, sooner or later, you will have selected the first option for your digital data.

Filed Under: Backups 005.8 Tagged With:
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