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Last day at the Ws (Taken with instagram)

"I always tell people if you try to connect the dots of your career, if you mess it up you’re going to wind up on a very limited path. If I decided what I was going to do in college—when there was no Internet, no Google, no Facebook … I don’t want to make that mistake. The reason I don’t have a plan is because if I have a plan I’m limited to today’s options."

Sheryl Sandberg

Social Media Presence is great-but connecting that content to revenue should be the ultimate goal

Pinterest as the Next Marketing Tool

To an active web connoisseur and anyone that enjoys idolizing images online, the Pinterest website is rapidly becoming an hourly destination throughout everyone’s day.

For those who are unfamiliar with the web phenomena – in essence, Pinterest is a digital scrapbook that allows users to pin, save, and share virtually any image on the web via virtual corkboards. Captivating its users by the clean and easy-to-use interface, the app creates an organized solution to keep track of you interests, desires, styles – you name it.

Having played around with the app and instantly falling into the trap of lost weekends, I am amazed by its potential to revolutionize digital marketing in the upcoming year.    

First off –
From the social perspective, the application has already taken off; now offering invite only access, Pinterest creates a platform for people to share, exchange and learn of new styles, recipes, outfits, gadgets, and most importantly consumer goods. As past social mediums have demonstrated, when an application generates substantial amount of social interest, it’s only amount of time until the consumer-good industry begins to follow suit. Pinterest has immense potential to become a powerful marketing tool that surpasses the lead generation potential of Twitter. The data gathered on each user will help companies identify not just a general demographic of age and gender groups, but rather pinpoint a detailed customer database, complete with preferred colors, styles and sizes.

Second -
A complete social network for gift giving. Pinterest has the potential of truly redefining the way people give and receive presents. If marketed properly, everyone will strive towards obtaining a well-defined profile with complete corkboards to remind themselves and loved ones of material items they wish to obtain. A social network for gift giving will take out the guesswork of shopping for holiday and birthday presents while simultaneously provide a platform where it’s socially acceptable to list what products you want.

Furthermore, the next step would be for vendors to create custom made corkboards that exhibit their catalogues on the Pinterest website; that way users can pin their favorite products to their boards without having to leave the site and seek out the product themselves. More importantly, a detailed catalogue corkboard complete with direct link to the product’s purchasing screen, will generate sales that otherwise could be lost to a third party vendor if the customer is forced to locate the item themselves.

I really enjoyed Bill Ross’s inforgraph, depicting some great ideas for small businesses to take advantage of Pinterest’s corkboards to promote their products – I believe the next step is the creation of a single catalogue platform where customers can make purchases from varying vendors from one single application.