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

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
December 18, 2012 By Leave a Comment

How to Pin Existing Blog Posts into Pinterest

One of my clients, Team Nimbus of North Carolina, has an extensive collection of “all star” posts about people who have taken the small business marketing and lead generation course, 100 Days to Abundance.  We would like to send more traffic to some of the older posts, so we decided to pin them to an All Stars board on his Pinterest account.

These are the steps we followed:

    1. Install the Pin It button on your browser.
    2. Create a board labelled “Team Nimbus All Stars.” (You can do this on the first pin.) (Use whatever title works for your business.)
    3. Open the blog post from the outside, NOT logged in.  (That is, do NOT use the Word Press “preview” button from within the blog post itself.)
    4. Click the “Pin It” button in your browser bar, and a new overlay will display all the pinnable images on that blog post.  In our case, one is the image of the business owner, and others are ads from the sidebars.
    5. When you click on the image you want, Pinterest will display a “Pin” box.  Check to make sure the right board is selected.
    6. Pinterest will add some field from the image file to the description field.  This is rarely adequate.  Go back to the blog post and select up to 500 characters of relevant and useful text, including (in our case) the name of the business person and the name of the business.  You can edit text within the description box.
Pin-in-process

Pin-in-process

    1. Click on the red Pin It button, and the pin will be saved to the board.
Post-pin screen

Post-pin window allows you to see your pin. Don’t tweet or FB unless it’s a REALLY good pin.

  1. If you’re not sure about what it looks like, click on “see it now” on the window that appears next.  You can edit the description from this view, too.
  2. Don’t tweet or FB the pin when you’re loading a lot of blog posts into Pinterest; you’ll irritate your friends and followers.
  3. Go to the next blog post and repeat these steps.
  4. From time to time, visit the Pinterest board, click Refresh on your browser, and make sure everything’s working the way you expect. You can edit and delete pins from this view, too.

Happy Pinning!

Filed Under: How to 680
December 18, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Hubspot says, Dump Pinterest

In a free eBook, Hubspot says,

If the social networks you’re using aren’t working — 2013 is the year to stop using them. For example, if you gave Pinterest the old college try, and it simply is not driving any meaningful business results for you, cut the cord. Just make sure you’re making your decision based on analytics, not gut feelings.

Then, to make sure you didn’t miss it, they repeated the book in a blog post.

OK–so it’s “an example,” not a directive.  Not so fast.

I’ll have more to say about this in a different article.

Not clear why they singled out Pinterest as the target. Seems that Instagram might have been a better example of a social site not designed to drive traffic.  For that matter, Twitter has been around long enough so that it’s possible to know it doesn’t work for you and your business. I don’t think the same is true in ANY way for Pinterest.

The people who are “not seeing any meaningful business traffic” from Pinterest are the ones who gave their Pinterest account to the receptionist at the front desk, who has no marketing guidance or oversight, who pins images from the company website with captions like, “cool kitchen!”  (Face it, if trained marketing department employees are writing those captions, the business has an entirely different problem…)

Or what about the images that are all “uploaded by user?” They CAN’T drive traffic–no link!

Sigh. So let Hubspot run your marketing and decide that Pinterest (which has only offered business accounts for a month when this post was written) won’t work for your business.  My clients would rather you weren’t using Pinterest anyway.  All the more traffic for us…

From the comments on that post, added after I wrote this one:

Pinterest is a complete waste of time for most B2B companies, unless you’re a company like Procter and Gamble that can promote through multiple channels.

Interesting.  P&G is not a B2B company. SAP, which IS exclusively a B2B company, is testing Pinterest.  CSC is even more active.
Pinterest is definitely a hit or miss for some businesses. But, if you know exactly how to market it to your audience, then it is sure to succeed. One must think outside the box 🙂
I would say, NOBODY knows “exactly how to market it to your audience,” because Pinterest is far too new and much too fluid and metamorphic right now for “exactly” to apply in any way.

OTOH, if you have even a glimmer that Pinterest may be a game changer that we haven’t figured out how to use reliably yet, give me a call or come to a class and let’s see what we can figure out together.

Filed Under: B2B 658.8, Content marketing 658-8, Pinterest
December 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Follow Your Customers

If your business is closely aligned with the kinds of items your clients will pin, consider putting a form on your website or a sign-up sheet at the front desk:

May We Follow You?

May We Follow You? Sign up sheet for a brick-and-mortar business

For some businesses, this is a non-starter.  If you sell children’s music lessons, you may see more crafts and recipes than you can stand.

However, for a business selling home decor items from a brick-and-mortar store, it’s an instant winner.  The owner can keep an eye on what her customers are wanting, pinning, and sometimes buying.  Because “following” is often reciprocal, individual users she follows will generally follow her store account back.

Notice that you must include a note about what you are using the email address for and that you will not (or do, if you do) share the email address. Use text that works for your business about why they may not want to be subscribed to your list.

“Following” Etiquette

If most of the people you will follow this way have personal accounts, consider following them at the account level (follow all), and then unfollowing any individual boards that are outside your  business interest.  This way, Pinterest will tell your customers that you followed their account, and they won’t know you unfollowed individual boards.

If you only follow the boards that fall under your business category, Pinterest will tell those clients that you “followed their ‘living rooms!’ board,” and some of them may feel a bit hurt that you didn’t like their “brunch recipes” collection. Better they don’t find out…

Website “Follow You on Pinterest” Experiment

I’m testing this on my Rugs site now using one of the Fast Secure Contact forms.

DIY Follow You form

DIY “Follow You on Pinterest” sign up form for a website.

If my programming skills were better, I’d create a button that performed the same function. It would look better.

I may have to go back and add a captcha. Will post here when I have results.

Filed Under: Marketing examples, Pinterest
December 12, 2012 By 1 Comment

Better Before and After Pins

I created a before-and-after pin to illustrate photo cropping for my Improve Pinterest Images post. In order to manage the way text flows in a WordPress post, I created a one side-by-side image image with both the before and after versions in Photoshop Elements. That way, I didn’t have to worry about how WordPress would align the images and the surrounding text.

Horizontal Before and After Pin

Horizontal Before and After images in pin format.

I pinned the image to the Pinterest Photography board so it would point back to the blog post. The pin looked pretty insignificant on the board, because it was wider than it was tall and Pinterest formats all pins to be the same width.

OK enough, but not really eye-catching enough to drive traffic to the blog post, which was the point of creating the pin in the first place.

The next morning, I thought about the problem while I was writing my Daily Pages.

Because you can edit the link in an “uploaded by user” image to point anywhere you want, you don’t HAVE to use exactly the same images on both sides of a Pinterest board-blog post pairing.  I could create a vertical before and after pin, load it to the board, and edit the link to point to the blog post.

The new pin is shown below.  It stands out much better on the Pinterest board.

Vertical Before and After Images

Vertical Before and After Images in Pin Format

Here’s a picture of the board before I deleted the horizontal image:

Pinterest Photography Board

Pinterest Photography board, showing both versions of the before-and-after cropping pin.

Understood, this exercise took way too much time for the potential value. I’ll know better next time. Stack images vertically for pins; horizontally for WordPress. Edit the link. Repeat.

Filed Under: How to 680, Images 770, Pinterest
December 8, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Pinterest for Home Improvement

Insider’s joke about green building

One energy company experiments with Pinterest

Drywall board

Replacement windows from an end user’s (client) perspective (look at what else he is pinning and think about how you might also intersect with him, or at least, understand him when you’re in the sales conversation)

As expected, the window treatment companies (in this example, Levelor) are already playing well in the Pinterest.

Eugene is another user with an interest in home improvement, although these boards might also be created for his SEO clients.

Vic Resto pins home improvement information to feed his website design business.

Garage doors

Security doors and related products. Good pins, account needs logo or headshot.

Insulation

Boards found while searching on “insulation”  (Note that most pins called “insulation” are pictures of glass electrical insulators.  Fiberglass, foam and foil insulation falls way down the chart.)

Underfloor acoustic and heating

Basement waterproofing: GREAT use of before and after! (or at least, “afters”)

Filed Under: Marketing examples
December 7, 2012 By Leave a Comment

How To Showcase Clients’ Work on Pinterest

Last month’s newsletter from the NextGen photo gallery plugin for WordPress contained an invitation to showcase a gallery on the NextGen Pinterest account. I use NextGen on two sites to manage large numbers of photographs, and Pinterest sends lots of traffic to one of those sites, so I jumped at the opportunity to create additional pins.

Their system could be used by anyone who makes a product / app / system used by other creators to further their work.  First, create a board named for the most common name of your product (the name your users call your product = better SEO value).  Use the description of the board to spell out the steps your users need to follow to be invited to guest pin.

Then, add a logo pin to that board.  In this case, anyone who comments on the logo pin will receive an invitation to be a guest pinner on the board.

Because NextGen is a live photo display system, they are asking users to pin screen shots of the software in action, rather than any actual live gallery display.  Anyone who uses the NextGen plugin will know how to do this; it’s possible that people who make other apps may have to provide more detailed instructions.

Because the screenshot images will, most likely, be uploaded from the users’ PCs, the instructions include a reminder to edit the pin so that it points back to the original website.  Again, NextGen users who play in Pinterest will probably know to do this already; other users who are uploading images may need a few more instructions.

The board is fairly new and I expect it will grow quickly.

NextGen Gallery Board

Board showing screenshots of image galleries created with the NextGen plugin for WordPress.

Filed Under: B2B 658.8, Content marketing 658-8, Pinterest
November 16, 2012 By 1 Comment

How to Photograph Jewelry for Pins

Look at the following boards:

Diamond jewelry on white background

Diamond jewelry against white background looks flat.

and this one, from Michaan’s Auctions:

Jewelry on a black background

Jewelry shown on a black background shows up.

Any one of the pins on the first board is probably worth more than everything seen on the second, but which one are you more likely to repin?

If you don’t have Harry Winston’s brand recognition or advertising budget, make your jewelry do your marketing work for you.

(I’ll write a whole ‘nother post about all those “uploaded by user” tags that leave clickable URLs on the table…)

Filed Under: How to 680, Images 770, Marketing examples
November 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Linkedin Endorsements

Linkedin is, in general, not full of LOLs. However, its new “Endorsements” functionality has made me smile more than once. I’ll have to go back to find the one about my best friend and politics. I’ll collect future funnies here.

Jan Swicord


Does Lt Col Jan A Swicord, USA (Retd), USMA’83, know about “Army?”

Here’s another one:

Bob Burridge


 Does Bob Burridge Know Art?

Funny how these go by. Some people are obviously endorsible; I worked with them and know they have the skills they claim. Others are claiming (or be associated with) non-obvious skills that make sense for what I know of their profession; fine. Other people are strangers to me (albeiit connections, from one source or another, and I just let them go. ANd a few I don’t like now and never did, so I skip them, too.
And then you get something like this:

Billy


No, no, not at all. C’mon, Linkedin, what ELSE would a guy like that do for a living?

Filed Under: How to 680, Marketing 658.8
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