Who’s Pinning From Your Website? And is it for inspiration, purchase or both?

I pin so I don’t buy but according to a survey conducted by Emily Carr University and research firm Vision Critical, more than 1 in 5 people who pin will purchase what they’ve pinned from a physical bricks and mortar store (source: Harvard Business Review). I won’t lie, I’ve bought a few things that I’ve pinned, but they’re usually online purchases and my pocket book certainly isn’t deep enough to buy that sustainable treetop home in Marin County Hills, California, or those amazing $395 wide-leg pants from Barney’s. (Both are items that I pinned.) But they do inspire me to find something similar and/or a bit more suitable for my personal financial status…

 

Rather, I pin for inspiration for purchase. I once attended an Oprah-inspired women’s retreat where we created inspiration boards using old magazines for pictures and words, a pair of scissors, glue, and poster board. When finished, the boards were supposed to help provide you a visual reminder of where you want to go or what you want to have in life or who you want to become, or how you want to feel about a particular someone or something. Pinning reminds me a lot of that – a source of inspiration for things we aspire to have…

 

Whether people pin to buy or pin to inspire to buy, Pinning is a signal indicating a person’s consideration or at the very least their “like” (if we were to liken this to Facebook) for a product, picture, information, etc. And for that, it’s worth noting.

 

If you’re a company selling a product and you want to see who’s pinned your product from your website, you can easily do so. All you have to do is type in pinterest.com/source/yourwebsite.com and you can see the pins (and the boards) that people pinned from your site. From there, you can click on the individual and/or their boards to see what else they pin and how they categorize their pin(s). For example, someone could have a board called Nursery Inspiration and another board called Must Have. The board names are clear indications of the individual’s intention behind the pin.

 

You can learn a lot about a person from their pins (and their boards), and with the right kind of planning you might even be able to influence a pin from inspiration to a purchase. We want to know: Do you purchase items you’ve pinned?

What It Means To Be #TrueApproved

 

When clients turn to a digital marketing and communication agency like True Digital Communications, they expect real, feasible solutions to help their organizations thrive. True works with digital public relations, search engine optimization, email, mobile marketing, training and analytics to facilitate client success. We want to pass along our best knowledge and use it to your advantage.

Our goal is for True clients to view us as trusted advisors. We’ve created the special hashtag #trueapproved to showcase great things for our clients that we use or agree with. When something is labeled #trueapproved, the entire True team is letting everyone know we think it’s relevant and meaningful; it’s our stamp of approval. It’s not #trueapproved unless our entire team is behind it.

 

We Only Approve the Best.

It goes without saying that we only post, tweet and write about #trueapproved material. We don’t have time to focus on anything but the best digital communications tools and strategies. That’s why we’d love for you to “Like” us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, join our group on LinkedIn, subscribe to our newsletter and read our “More To Come” blog. Only #trueapproved content goes up on those platforms, and we think you’ll love what you find.

What we post and write about is usable. It’s relevant. It’s part of the latest trends. A tool we write about is a tool we’re probably using in our own offices, and we just couldn’t keep it to ourselves. A story we tweet has captivated our own interest, and we think people should know about it. A conversation on LinkedIn about a “More To Come” blog post could expand your views on anything from viral videos to Facebook contests to new mobile apps.

 

From Us To You

Digital communication is True’s specialty and passion. We spend much of our days looking for the right tools we can use to achieve your goals and ours. The #trueapproved hashtag is a way for us to share that happiness with you.

Does Your Blog Comment Really Matter?

Anyone looking to develop a better online presence is often advised to build connections and create inbound links to their site by commenting on blog posts. Do you know how to comment correctly? Let’s look at two points of what I believe make a comment worthwhile:

1. Useful commentary. Don’t respond to a blog post unless you truly have something constructive to say that furthers the conversation. I think a simple “like” will do if you simply agree with and enjoyed the post.

2. Minimal self-promotion. It’s rare for me to click on a link someone includes in a blog post comment. The person is clearly advertising his or her own work, and it often doesn’t seem like a natural, thoughtful comment to me. Be careful that your comment doesn’t cross the fine line from constructively offering your own resource to blatant promotion.

A Better Way to Promote

My approach doesn’t allow for much self-promotion, and I question if it’s even worth commenting on blogs. Writing guest posts on blogs might be a better tactic for your time, depending on your strategy. An entirely new set of readers will read your content, and your piece will be front and center instead of squashed down the page fighting for attention. This article at Jeff Goins Writer further explains the value of writing guest posts.

For a discussion on whether you should allow comments on your own blog, check out this GigaOM article.

Let me know your thoughts about the ways of blog promotion! I’d love to hear them.

A Startup Went Viral, Why Haven’t You?

What happens when you have an idea that you know could be successful, but you just don’t have the cash for paid advertising?

Go viral.

Of course, that’s much easier said than done. The equation to what exactly makes online content viral has been under debate since the phenomenon began, with Gawker, TechCrunch, Social Media Today, Forbes, Mashable, Spin Sucks and countless others chiming in. With so many different analyses, how do we know what’s correct? Is there a correct answer? Let’s take a look at a specific brand example.

Dollar Shave Club, a new startup with few resources available to it, created a cheap viral video with almost five million views at this writing. It suddenly received thousands of orders, plus positive reviews and analyses like this. This article even claims the video and Dollar Shave Club are part of a new capitalism where startups can move forward with the help of social media.

Of course, Dollar Shave Club has other positive attributes as well. Its website is user-friendly, the product and how the service works are well-explained, it keeps an active social media presence, and it possesses a tagline that is easy to remember: “Shave Money. Shave Time.”

Does this mean a company can simply make a video and expect success from that? Of course not.  Dollar Shave Club is lucky that its video was one of the relative few to go viral. Nothing is ever viral until it suddenly goes viral. No one in public relations or marketing can control whether a video goes viral or not, even though plenty of people would probably like to!

The uncertain nature of going viral constitutes a risk. What if your brand spends a lot of money to create a professional video in the hopes it will go viral and it falls flat? What if your brand quickly slaps together a video and it suddenly gets viewed by millions within a few hours?

Of course, the Dollar Shave Club video is a case study to be celebrated. One video helped a company become an overnight success. That’s the power of social media and corporate social video, especially if your brand is lucky enough to go viral.