How Pinterest Will Evolve for Business Marketing

Pinterest will be the hottest social media platform for business marketing…in a year from now. 

Despite the hype and the record-breaking growth rates, as it exists today, Pinterest is not ready for business marketers; the demographics are wrong, the categories are too consumer focused, and there are significant copyright and measurement issues to overcome.   

As it stands today, Pinterest is following the “next big social media thing” strategy of getting the audience first, and figuring out the business model later.  That audience for now is mostly women, who are, as Ryan Deshazer, VP of Search and Social at GSW Worldwide described in a recent post, doing “social scrapbooking.”  However, within that audience there are also business decision makers.

As Pinterest’s internal analytics capabilities evolve those business decision makers will become known, and when they do, the marketers will follow.   As a result, Pinterest could quickly become the best social platform available for business-to-business content marketers. 

While other platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, are mostly content distributors (sharing), Pinterest’s platform has the potential to offer far more value as a content aggregation and curation tool, as well as a content destination and repository.   Here’s why:

• Scalability and Scanability – the rate of which new content is being added to the “www” is mind-boggling.  According to Hubspot, 70% of bloggers add new content weekly or daily, 500,000 new posts are added everyday alone on WordPress.com   As a result, it’s becoming more difficult to find high quality, relevant content.  The “internet” must evolve in order for audiences to navigate faster through this growing mass of content to find what they are looking for, which opens the door for Infographics and Pinterest.  By making content visual, it also makes it more scanable.  The average person reads between 200 to 300 words per minute, but visually it takes only 1/20th of a second to process an image.  Pinterest platform accelerates the process by aggregating and organize images by category or theme making it easy to search. 
• Valuing Content – business marketers are constantly wrestling with trying to understand the value of their content (relevancy, insight, utilization, etc.) based on how and when it’s consumed by various audience segments.  Lacking a closed loop system to provide feedback, it’s been difficult to know exactly what resonates, with what audience, and why. Curating content naturally within Pinterest provides marketers the opportunity to capture deeper insights into audience consumption habits.   For example, business marketers tend to organization content along the “buying process,” which is typically defined by steps within the sales process.  Marketers may find that business audiences within Pinterest organize and consume content by categories defined as “applications” -- how they intend to use the product, and not how they will buy it.  This insight could help define the real purchase path and key influences along that journey.    
• Audience Insight - lastly, and perhaps most interesting, will Pinterest have the ability to provide “affinity data”?  As Scott Bayer, CTO of Baynote wrote“individual pinning choices are interesting, but there is even greater opportunity to analyze segments of people who express an affinity for a product or category in aggregate.” 

If available, this information could allow marketers to create new segmentation clusters based on common interests, which could help improve messaging and targeting.  “Clustering” could identify brand advocates, key influencers and connectors, local “hot spots” and new ideas for reaching them.   

While we still have some time before Pinterest evolves there are few things to consider now:

1. Integrate “Pin it” button into your website - it will do nothing for conversions, but it may drive some traffic that could provide some insight.
2. Make your content more visual – if content marketing is part of your marketing plans,  experimenting using Infographics (visit Visual.lyfor a starting point).
3. Experiment – whether or not you’re a believer in social media platforms, the fact remains that Twitter and Facebook have impacted how we go to market.  Pinterest also holds the same potential to change the way we create, produce and consume content.  Start to brainstorm on what that change might be and/or what you might like to change given its functionality. 

I realize that there are skeptics out there, I might even be one, but as we’ve learned with other social media platforms, if you don’t think it’s valuable tool, then you’ll be right…it won’t.  Pinterest holds great potential for business marketers, but that “potential” will only realized by those who seek to define it by experimenting…or dare I say, “pin it.”  

Using Content Curation Tools for B2B Thought Leadership

Years ago, I ran marketing for a professional services firm.   As with most consulting firms, our demand generation efforts were based on thought leadership.  Getting the content for those programs was a long and painful process, worse than pulling teeth because, most of the time we had to fabricate the teeth and then pull them out. 

One would think that with the rise of social media and the focus at the corporate level on blogging, that content creation would not be a problem. However, according to a recent HiveFire research poll, the challenges I encountered ten years ago still exist today; finding, developing and producing high quality content.  Could the latest content curation tools be the answer?  

Content Curation tools like Scoop.it, and Storify, are the next generation digital content tools having evolved from content aggregation (gathering links, like Google News) and social bookmarketing tools (like Delicious and Digg). The key difference in this evolution being the human “curator.”  To this point, those tools have been aimed at consumers to help them manage and sort through the vast spaces of web content.  

The latest version of these tools, Curata (a HiveFire company, the sponsor of the research) and Curation Station are aimed at B2B.  With a value proposition focused on their ability to drive awareness by improving organic search, and providing organizations with an opportunity to build thought leadership.  

The curator is an editor who sorts through the content to find the information relevant to them and/or their audience.   They are not content creators.  And this is where I think the challenge lies in using the tools for thought leadership.

First, creating a content farm on a “hot” topic will not improve a company’s organic search results (Google has already figured this out).  It also will not establish an organization “thought leadership” in a area on its own.  

As the survey referenced, Marketers stated that “Creating Original Content” was the number one challenge; companies must establish a point of view, not just aggregated content on a particular subject.  So what value do these new tools offer?

To understand that it's helpful to first understand how thought leadership content is developed.  For example, the process I used in the past involved five steps:

1. Deciding on a issues set
2. Developing a point of view
3. Conducting research to validate the POV
4. Summarizing the research and drawing out insights
5. Writing and publishing a content piece  

Challenges related to this process involved:

• Limited time and/or resources…often both
• Limited view on the issue – often our only perspective was through our existing clients lenses
• Drawing out insights – sometimes the research didn’t reveal anything new and/or enlightening
• Distributing content – after all the effort the distribution of the content often fell short of expectations
• Maintaining the program – continuing to create content beyond the initial launch

By taking these opportunities and challenges into light, we can begin to see where the tools provide value.  Using this as a framework, the tools can add value by:

• Reducing the time required to collect research for developing the issue set
• Providing a real-time, broad view into top issues and/or hotpoints on a subject area
• Integrating multiple content formats (tweets, video, etc.)
• Creating leverage for staff on content creation and management
• Being a ready made vehicle for distributing and measuring content

Content curation tools are enablers, not end solutions. To fully realize their potential, they will need the human elements of curation and creation.   It will require staff (#4 on the challenge list), and time (#2 on the list).  The good news is with these tools it will require less of it to be successful.

Keep in mind, thought leadership must be established.  It’s not a campaign...it is a program.  It’s also not something you say you have, but rather something others recognize that you provide.  

For more information on the subject, Susan McKittrick has written an excellent white paper on the subject.