Tips for Brands As Pinterest Evolves
- Details
- Thursday, May 03, 2012
- Author: Skylar Schock
Brands and retailers are anxious to start “pinning”--unsurprising as the site yields 2.3 billion page impressions a month, with 4 million unique visitors daily. Ben Silberman, Pinterest co-founder, believes "What you collect says so much about who you are". His broad philosophy is a key to unlocking why millions of users love the “virtual pinboard”- and exactly what marketers should be paying attention to.
Before we create our boards, there are a few questions to keep in mind.
How can Pinterest users’ behavior help you understand your audience?
Pinterest users define themselves by organizing visual representations of things they like. For individuals, what they pin and how they categorize it allows them to present to the world, and brands, how they wish to be looked at. Consumers are essentially providing unfiltered access into their shopping psyche, and what they want to buy. The platform offers a unique opportunity for brands to learn about their audience, while capitalizing on consumer insights.
What do brands need to know about Pinterest?
As brands begin developing their Pinterest strategy, they must consider the broadly defined Terms of Service as well as the limited analytics available. After the site experienced negative feedback due to confusion over ownership and copyright issues, they updated their Terms of Service in March of 2012. Users should be forewarned that “pinners” need to be sure to heed copyright law, and only pin owned content. Pinterest, like any other publishing site requires that you own or have appropriately licensed content you pin to your board.
What can we measure on Pinterest?
Currently, Pinterest itself offers limited analytics. However, platforms such as Google Analytics, Pinerly, and PinReach have stepped in to help brands keep a close eye on metrics such as referral traffic, clicks, likes and repins. Some analytics that are currently not offered but would be beneficial to brands in the future include pin impressions and reach as well as deeper demographics metrics. While there is currently information about the demographics of Pinterest users in general, there is no way to gain insight into users following a specific account. Without impressions and demographic information, tracking the success of campaigns as well as analyzing content strategies will be difficult.
That said, Pinterest has created a Pinterest for Business account, with a board dedicated to Pinterest Tools which includes useful information for brands wanting to know more about the current ways to measure analytics.
What makes a brand successful on Pinterest?
When you look through a catalog, you are limited to circling what you want, and appreciating it within the context provided to you by a brand. With Pinterest, you are given the opportunity to interact with products more personally and incorporate them into your lifestyle. This unique user experience is what will make users excited to engage with brands in a new way.
More:
http://mashable.com/2012/04/29/pinterest-interest/
http://www.rightmixmarketing.com/social-media/why-pinterest-is-addictive/
Kyle Needs You
- Details
- Monday, April 09, 2012
- Author: Stacey Hunsucker
Four months ago, we learned that the 4-year old son of a Socialarc friend was fighting for his life.
Without the help of a perfect donor, Kyle Crawford’s family was told he had 6 months to live. Our team knew that social media would be critical to helping Kyle, so we volunteered and swung into action.
The Challenge:
Kyle’s severe case of aplastic anemia and mixed race ethnicity made finding a donor extremely difficult. Out of the 9 million nationally registered donors, a match for Kyle hadn’t been found yet, including his own sister. Working closely with AADP we learned that potential matches for Kyle would most likely be part-Asian and part-Caucasian. Adding to the odds already against us, fewer than 3% of all 9 million registered donors were of mixed race, and even less was the specific mix that Kyle was searching for. This mission to save Kyle’s life became a race against time.
The Strategy:
The campaign to save Kyle started on a piece of paper:
In two days, we launched a multi-platform social effort that quickly spread across the globe.
The Outcome:
Over the past 4 months:
* Over 500,000 Facebook impressions
* Twitter retweets by influencers including Jewel, Apolo Ohno, Lou Diamond Phillips & Kristi Yamaguchi with over 500,000 combined Followers
* Local TV news affiliates across the Bay Area covered Kyle's story: NBC, ABC, CBS
* kyleneedsyou.org launched in December immediately attracting over 2,000 visitors
* Over 2,500 people registered as bone marrow donors as a result of fan sharing and engagement on Kyle Needs You communities
And the biggest news of all, since December our outreach has found not one but two people who have been identified as perfect matches for Kyle.
There’s much more to the story, but to keep it short, sweet and blog friendly, we’ll say social media really helped spread a message so important to helping save Kyle’s life. There have been countless volunteers and participants who have put hours of their time, effort, resources, and heart into this campaign and we feel incredibly lucky to have been a small part of this miraculous effort.
For more information on the latest announcement about Kyle’s story, please see kyleneedsyou.org and visit our various social media communities.
Social Super Bowl
- Details
- Thursday, February 23, 2012
- Author: Cristian Gonzales
Socialarc partnered with the Visa NFL Team to bring live tweets and content updates from this years’ Super Bowl XLVI in Indianapolis! Our own Alexa Alioto and Cristian Gonzales were able to experience the game up close and share in the excitement with the rest of the fans. Check out a few snaps from their epic week of coverage, and keep an eye out for a more in-depth post about our social activation for this year’s Super Bowl with the Visa NFL team!
The Creators Project Comes to San Francisco
- Details
- Wednesday, March 21, 2012
- Author: Morgan Rogers
I walked into The Creators Project in San Francisco this past weekend tweeting. Signage directed visitors to send a geo-located photo of the event to #creators. To my surprise, I was greeted by my tweetpic aggregated amongst hundreds of others in the opening installation #Creators Live. As a social media enthusiast I found this interactive piece, created by Social Print Studio + Intel Labs, to be the perfect welcome to Vice and Intel’s groundbreaking celebration of the intersection of art and technology.
With over 25,000 in attendance, the event spotlighted leading edge technologists and artists, featuring music performances by The Antlers, Squarepusher, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, global artworks and installations by United Visual Artists + Scanner, Chris Milk, SoSoLimited, Superuber, Mira Calix + Flat-e, Quayola, and many more, as well as film screenings and discussion panels. Here are some highlights for those of you who couldn’t attend:
SuperUber brought the virtual game experience to a new level with, Octocloud, a multi-player gaming sculpture controlled by mobile devices. Russ Rive, co-founder of SuperUber, shared with me, “all the art we do is always interactive and usually a very playful, fun experience…creating a link between [people].”
Zigelbaum and Coelho’s collaborative installation, Six-Forty By Four-Eighty, proved to be an amazing visceral experience where pixels, no longer imprisoned by a screen, are now physical manifestations, responding to human touch by changing color and using the human body as a conduit for communication with each other.
There came a point in the day, after experiencing flight for a good half hour in front of Chris Milk’s Kinect-based The Treachery of Sanctuary, where I decided I needed a rest.
This is when I stumbled upon Sosolimited’s Overscan. I was looking at five screens, one featuring a basketball game, and the other 4 displaying visuals and text representing ‘the emotional and thematic layers of the broadcast,’ made possible by the software Sosolimited created. John Rothenberg, from Sosolimited, explained to me, “Really it’s a way to look at television in a critical or poetic way and to filter your attention to things that are contained in the broadcast..”
Thoroughly challenged by this mashup, I moved to the 40-foot by 40-foot audiovisual cube called Origin, created by United Visual Artists with a score composed by Scanner. Lying down in the middle of the structure amongst others was an incredible experience to behold. Ash, from UVA, was right – it is an ‘object that demands to be worshipped,’ especially at night when the structure lights up in different formations, accompanied by a myriad of sounds, giving off the impression of a dialogue.
After experiencing a 2-day event with groundbreaking artists and technologists, pushing the limits of human creativity and innovation, I’m thrilled that both, Shane Smith, co-founder of VICE, and Johan Jervoe, VP of Creative & Digital Marketing Services for Intel, agree that San Francisco is the center of innovation and hope to make The Creators Project an annual tradition for the city. For more, take a look at the photo and audio clips below.
All images by Stonia Seng. For even more, check out Fotobabble's blog post.
StumbleUpon Drives Over Half of All Social Web Traffic Referrals
- Details
- Wednesday, February 01, 2012
- Author: Liz Tahawi & Cat McBride
StumbleUpon’s 50.34% of all social media referral traffic beats both Facebook at 37.4% and Twitter at 3.23%. Additionally, an average stumble page view lasts 72 seconds, which is nearly 25% longer than the standard webpage view at 58 seconds.
StumbleUpon is a discovery engine and online social network that helps people find randomized web pages, videos, photos, and more based on their interests. Users can like or dislike recommendations to personalize and further clarify the type of content they would like to receive. Through its algorithms, StumbleUpon aims to serve up interesting and compelling content. Users can narrow down their search to a category, say ‘dogs’ or ‘photos,’ as well as rate and review one another’s blogs and even join interest groups.
The site’s namesake rings true in the virtual community’s ability to easily share favorite content & top sites with friends and peers. The dynamics of the social network produce the organic experience of “stumbling upon” content for users.
In late 2011, StumbleUpon announced it had crossed 20 million registered users and rolled out major changes to their site’s look, featuring a greater emphasis on graphics and visuals. One of the biggest changes was the addition of Channels, where brands, celebrities, and sites can create Channels that users can follow and find content from, while still continuing to be based on the recommendations that they have liked in the past. Popular channels already include brands such as the Food Network, Stanford University, and PETA, as well as celebrities like Jim Carrey and Jennifer Lopez.
StumbleUpon also launched Paid Discovery, where companies can pay to include their site during organic “stumble sessions”. If a company wants to target a specific location, demographic, or interest, such as shopping, the site will be delivered to the right audience. As more users like or share the site, more traffic gets driven there. StumbleUpon has evolved their reporting process thanks to Google Analytics integration and sharing statistics, making it easier to evaluate StumbleUpon paid presences. These additions of Channels and Paid Discovery allow a viable way for companies to drive referral traffic. Brands that hook people organically with their interest, such as food or clothing, have notably found a home on StumbleUpon. For example, the clothing site ModCloth and the publisher Chronicle Books have both developed their own Channels.
By allowing marketers multiple ways to harness its power, StumbleUpon has made their service a worthwhile business consideration. For all of us, it’s a great place to connect to the content we love. If you haven’t already visited, pick a few of your favorite interests and see what you can, well, stumble upon!
