MEDIA & MARKETING:PINTEREST IS pretty hot right now, although mostly it's just pretty. The image-based social media site describes itself as "a virtual pinboard" that "allows you to organise and share all the beautiful things you find on the web".
Most Pinterest boards are curated like fancy paper collections, with users aligning fashion and “foodporn” images in a pleasingly symmetrical array of colour and consumerism. It’s the things you love, and the things you covet, collated via a visual bookmarking tool called the “pin it” button.
But there’s no reason why the “ugly” things found on the web, and in life, can’t gatecrash the Pinterest party and turn it into a photo-blogging site of wider media appeal.
I first saw mention of the two-year-old Pinterest.comjust three weeks ago in an article about "trendfear" headlined: "Do you ever feel you're being left behind?"
Soon after, a more tech-savvy colleague showed me her Pinterest and sent me an invite – you need an invitation from a current user to join, a tactic that reliably sucks in anyone with a bad case of trendfear.
A BBC College of Journalism blog by documentary-maker Charles Miller properly piqued my Pinterest interest, however. Miller quotes Liz Heron, social media editor at the New York Times, saying she was looking closely at Pinterest, implying that New York Timesjournalists might be encouraged to add Pinterest to their social media repertoire.
It’s not hard to see why. Rather than publishing onsite slideshows, compiling galleries of consumer-flavoured journalism on pinboards linked to and from the media company’s own website could have the benefit of being more easily shareable among the Pinterest community, and from it to other social media and back again.
The preference of existing “pinners” to use boards to “plan their weddings, decorate their homes and share their favourite recipes” doesn’t mean that it has to stay cute. There’s nothing to prevent a newsroom taking advantage of its platform to document harder- edged stories: Miller suggests social campaign galleries on housing problems and pollution.
The challenge for a news organisation would be to promote photojournalism and avoid joining in the “photochurnalism” that comes from endlessly repinning images found elsewhere on the web. In this regard, Pinterest has obvious ambiguities in relation to copyright, though it has now offered sites a code that blocks the pinning of their content.
Retailers certainly love the visual focus of a referrer such as Pinterest, which is already proving successful at driving traffic to shop sites. Its potential to make cash through affiliate marketing means the site may wind up becoming more, rather than less, like a department store shop window.
Bookseller Eason's has already joined in the display, having added 275 pins to 30 boards at Pinterest.com/easonsireland, including one board titled "125 best books of all time" more accurately described as "some books currently available in a three-for-two offer at Eason's".
The sudden attention being paid to Pinterest could spark a multi-faceted evolution of the site, however. Right now, it’s a vaguely personalised catalogue being scoured by intrigued marketers, especially those who want to sell to its female-skewed user base. But it’s also an attractive storytelling vehicle with a simple interface and frictionless sharing capability.
Buried within, there are boards dedicated to astronomy, atheism, “slutwalks” and political protests everywhere from Athens to Iran – topics that don’t easily sit into Pinterest’s suggested (but ignorable) board categories.
Such boards require actual work, sadly, and so, to date, I’ve stuck with the “things you love” pinning model suggested by Pinterest, pinning 13 images, none of which were my own uploads, and all of which directly relate to a product you can buy or will be able to purchase at some point in the future.
Being a words person, not a photo-essayist, I've taken Pinterest's 500-character caption restriction as more of a target than a limit, which slightly spoils the image-centric point of the whole geeky endeavour, but does encourage me to share – with precisely no one, as of yet – such random waffle as my enjoyment of the film Young Adult, my weakness for Psychologiesmagazine, some observations on a recent appearance by Eighties singer-actress Clare Grogan in an episode of Skins, and, for the week that's in it, Delia Smith's foolproof pancake recipe. Just add sugar.
This was originally meant to be next week’s column. But online obsessions move pretty fast these days, and mentions of Pinterest are proliferating – or at least they are on Twitter and Facebook. All of this visual bookmarking fuss could be over by March.
In the meantime, social media editors such as Heron of the New York Timeshave as much of a professional duty to check these things out as the head of marketing at
Eason’s – with almost 12 million monthly unique users, some of Pinterest’s loving pinners are bound to love you too.
