Reb Carlson

Pinterest is a ‘virtual pinboard’ full of recipes, weddings and many pretty pictures. Is it a site to be taken seriously? Take a look at the following stats: unique visitors increased from 418,000 in May to 3.3 million in October, meaning traffic increased for this site sevenfold in five months alone. Beyond its impressive growth over a year, Pinterest has also emerged as a very new type of platform when it comes to the way people engage with content in its community.

Created out of founder Ben Silbermann’s love for collecting as a child, Pinterest has become a platform for sharing ideas, making lists and curating your favorite things. And, given its passionate user base, brands are beginning to pay attention. “People are going to Pinterest to get inspiration for their most important life projects, which correlate to the most important purchasing events in their life” says Jeff Jordan, partner of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (also a Pinterest Board Member). In fact, 360i has built out a Pinfluencer(SM) Services practice within our influencer marketing group to better reach high profile users on the rapidly growing platform.

Why Pinterest Is Like No Other Social Network

What Google did for organizing information, Pinterest does for curating inspiration. Pinterest differs from social networks like Facebook and microblogging platforms like Twitter and Tumblr because its focus is not areal time, up-to-date stream of status updates, but rather a curated collection of content that inspires a user enough to think “must pin this.”  There is no paid advertising or media (yet), so all engagement has been purely organic.  Pinterest also ties into multiple current social trends: image sharing, tagging, mobile, curation, visual self-expression and browser plugins.  It has the same content marketing potential as Tumblr for community and ease of sharing and is similar to Google+ in terms of link aggregation. 

Beyond amplifying brand presence within search,  Pinterest can also build community among people passionate about inspiration and self-expression.  That platform provides a rich opportunity for people to share life’s most important events, and therefore gives marketers a chance to create emotional connections with people around their brands.

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People love to play games on Facebook and through mobile apps, but do you know why?  To answer the question above, you need to take a small dive into gaming mechanics, which are different tactics on how to make a game enjoyable.  There are many theories about what constitutes as a mechanic of a game and whether these theories live outside of the world of gaming. For this post, we looked to what Seth Priebatsch of SCVNGR, a mobile gaming platform, outlined as four basic game dynamics at a 2010 TEDX conference.

What are gaming dynamics?

1. Appointment Dynamic – to succeed, one must return at a predefined time to take a predetermined action.
   • Ex. “Happy Hour,” Farmville (users must come back within a certain time in order to water their crops)
2. Influence & Status – the ability of one player to modify the behavior of another’s actions through social pressure.
   • Ex. American Express Black Credit Card, Foursquare badges and report cards
3. Progression Dynamic – a dynamic in which success is granularly displayed and measured through the process of completing itemized tasks.
   • Ex. LinkedIn (your profile is filled out 80%), World of Warcraft levels, progress bar on SCVNGRa)
4. Communal Discovery – a dynamic wherein an entire community is rallied to work together to solve a challenge.
   • Ex. Digg Leaderboard, McDonald’s Monopoly, playing on a team

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One of the advantages of building a large, engaged community is the ability to encourage and collect feedback from consumers about your product or brand. Think of it as a free online focus group, where one has the potential to tap into the minds of (in some cases) tens of millions of people – from all over the world.

An eMarketer report released this week supports the notion that consumers want to build meaningful relationships with brands they care about.  Crowdsourcing is hardly a new concept, but leveraging it for product idea generation and allowing fans and followers to be co-creators presents a mutual value exchange for both the brand and consumer.  Per research from Frost & Sullivan (below), the majority of crowdsourcing is used for idea generation.

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