Sitting through stuffy lectures with a monotonous teacher is a student’s worst nightmare. But Pinterest may be changing that. Yes, Pinterest, the site where people pin their favorite pictures on boards to share with the world.
With Pinterest gaining traction by the day, it’s becoming a valuable tool for educators. Not only are teacherssharing tipsand using the site to grabideas for lessons, it’s being used as a teaching tool too.
Pinterest is helping inspire students, increase student participation, and helping them tell stories.
For example, University of Minnesota adjunct instructor Leslie Plesseris usingPinterest in her basic media graphics class. Though her students are not graded for their use of Pinterest specifically, they are required to use it with their activity being factored into their participation grade.
“I am looking at their design work and comparing it to what they ‘like’ on Pinterest to see where they are drawing their inspiration from and it helps me to understand their personal design aesthetic, which I can then use in determining their project grades and in any advice I give on their work,” Plesser told theDaily Dotvia email.
The students are interacting with each other on the site as well, as they follow each other and often repin items their peers have found.
More at: http://mashable.com/2012/03/22/teachers-using-pinterest/
Some have questioned the effectiveness of Facebook as a commerce platform, but can you dismiss an ad and marketing channel with 800+ million users?
Here are some tips for increasing the opportunities for commerce on Facebook.
Recently, Bloomberg published an article about several retailers, J.C. Penney, Nordstrom, Gap and Gamestop, who all closed their Facebook stores in 2011.
As a consultant implementing s-commerce (Social Commerce) solutions for my clients, I am writing to let you know that Facebook commerce (f-commerce) is alive and well and customers are making money selling products and services via Facebook.
I can’t speak about the f-commerce implementations of the aforementioned companies, only from my own experience.
For one company, Grassroots Festival, we created a Facebook store to sell discounted tickets on the festival’s Facebook fan page.
The Facebook store generated a 4.1% clickthrough rate, resulted in a significant ROI and also cut-out the middle men in terms of ticket sales, who require substantial commission.
We have also seen considerable success with smaller clients who do not currently sell their products online. The success of their s-commerce efforts has prompted them to commercialize their businesses online with e-commerce functionality on their websites.
For larger online retailers, unless they are offering specific incentives for their Facebook Fans to purchase from their Facebook stores, why would a consumer purchase something anywhere other than their website?
It is even more effective to find a specific niche or focus on clearance lines, rather than replicate your entire inventory in a Facebook store.
We have many hotel clients who have seen considerable volume in their Facebook stores specifically for gift vouchers, a growing category in the hospitality sector. Their websites are not usually geared up for anything other than booking rooms, and even then, they usually use a third party booking engine rather than managing their own functionality.
More at: http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/9428-why-facebook-commerce-is-alive-7?
Brands are being increasingly successful in social media by using humorous mascots, according to the WSJ. We’ve seen plenty of evidence of that in the UK with Dulux recently reinstating its dog and how brands as diverse as Burger King’s “The King”, Compare the Market (Meerkat) and Go Compare with its opera-singing mascot, Gio Compario, have used them.
The report says that ad executives believe consumers on Facebook are more likely to bond with a character than the traditional company page on the social-media website pumping out company and product news.
The piece cites US brands such as eBay-owned ticket-resale website StubHub, which uses a 25-foot-high animatroni tree, insurance firm Progressive with a sales agent called Flo (played by comedienne Stephanie Courtney, Spam with Sir Can A-Lot, Diageo with its live action Captain Morgan rum pirate not to mention the Old Spice guy and Geico’s popular talking gecko.
“Consumers are less likely to have a conversation with a logo or a PR guy on social media,” said Jeff Charney, chief marketing officer for auto insurer Progressive Corp. Since 2008, Progressive’s TV ads have centered on a perky sales clerk named Flo, who touts the insurer’s rates. She now has 3.5 million fans on Facebook, where she posts comments about new Progressive products.
Characters also offer a softer way to sell a product, which is important on social media where executives fear that blatant selling or promotion can turn people off.
“You can put fairly bald product benefits into the mouth of a mascot and it doesn’t come off as hard sell,” said Parker Channon, partner at Duncan/Channon, a San Francisco ad firm that crafted the StubHub pitch, from the WSJ.
More at: http://wallblog.co.uk/2012/03/26/does-your-brand-need-a-mascot-to-be-successful-in-social-media/
More at: http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/9342-peugeot-uses-pinterest-to-launch-puzzle-competition
Peugeot Panama has launched a Pinterest-based competition that asks people to complete puzzles by repinning images of its cars.
Last week the brand created several boards depicting different models with pieces missing.
People can search for and find these pieces, pin them on their own boards and share it with Peugeot. The first five people to complete their boards win prizes.
Though a visit to the brand’sPinterest pageleaves you somewhat confused at first, since several boards have been used as placeholders – separating the cars into different price brackets.
One such board is titled ‘Starting at 35,000us’ and is toally blank, with no content pinned. It’s an interesting way to use the space, but isn’t immediately obvious.
On the bottom row (on our screens at least, see below) – the first four board titles are used to explain the contest, with another placeholder then showing the ‘contest boards’.
People are asked to click any board to find out where to look, which is explained as follows:
This is a 5 piece puzzle of a Peugeot 3008, as you can see there are 4 pieces missing. Look for them in our website (peugeot.com.pa) or in our Facebook fan page (www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1797346790), pin them in your own board and share it with us. The first 5 people to complete their boards win!”
Using boards as placeholders is certainly one of the most creative uses of Pinterest we’ve seen so far, but sadly it’s overshadowed by the fact that the puzzle itself isn’t very clear.
It’s difficult to work out how you’re supposed to get involved, and even the brand itself has had to step in to inform a participant that the goalposts had been changed:
Hi Julia!, thank you for participating in the Peugeot Puzzle Contest, sadly as you may know, Pinterest changed our layout so we were forced to adapt the contest again. Please feel free to leave your board and start pinning again. Best Luck!”
That said, Peugeot Panama uses a conversational tone in its outreach above and is trying something new - so should be applauded for doing so.
However, it might transpire that a simpler competition, with mechanics that are easier to understand, might be more successful in driving participation in the long run.
The never-ending chicken-and-egg issue of gaining ground in Google results is about to take another abrupt turn. According to Google’s Matt Cutts, the company is working on a new set of tweaks to the fabled “GoogleBot” that will penalize sites that over-optimize for prime Google results.
Search Engine Land’sBarry Schwartzreports that Cutts let the impending tweaks slip out while speaking at a panel at this year’s South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. The goal, said Cutts, is to “level the playing field” between sites that focus on excessive optimization to achieve strong Google results versus sites that hit Google naturally through strong, relevant content.
“We try to make the GoogleBot smarter, try to make our relevance more adaptive, so that if people don’t so SEO we handle that. And we are also looking at the people who abuse it, who put too many keywords on a page, exchange way too many links, or whatever else they are doing to go beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now,” Cutts said.
Cutts added that the optimizations could hit anytime between the next few weeks to a month from now. Google hasn’t gone on record with any additional details as to what its optimizations might include – fair, since additional details about how the GoogleBot will rank sites could invariably assist those looking to re-game the rankings for their benefit. It’s also unclear as to how Google plans to “penalize” sits that over-optimize, or even if there’s going to be a way for website operators to determine whether they fall below this threshold or not.
More at: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2401732,00.asp
Imagine standing at the Eiffel Tower and being able to see messages and videos overlaid through your smartphone from all visitors who have come before you.
A new app called Wallit combines augmented reality, a virtual view of the real world that can be extended with graphics and other content, with a socialexperience.
It allows users to post and view content atvirtual wallsin popular places, tourist attractions such asthe Eiffel Tower, stadiums and stores.
“Think of a virtual wall on the face ofthe Golden Gate Bridgefrom one end to the other where people can leave sentiments, photos, movies and even audio that are persistent at that location, even though the people who generate the content constantly keep changing,” said Veysel Berk, the founder of Wallit.
The goal, he said, is to record a cumulative, human experience at a location that exhibits the character of a place over time.
“We wanted to move the physical experience of a public wall that everyone can see content on and move it into digital and virtual life,” he explained.
To maintain the quality of content posted to the app users cannot create their own wall, which ensures there is only one wall for a place, producing a common experience for visitors. Content must also be generated and posted from the physical place where the virtual wall is located.
More at: http://news.yahoo.com/app-leaving-virtual-mark-physical-places-051821927.html
Graphic available From: http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/17/thumb-sxsw/?
Every year, before, during, and after South by Southwest, everyone’s eager declare someone the winner of the conference. Then comes the inevitable backlash, with questions about whether Popular App X will ever catch on with “regular people” — or if it’s just useful to techies who are constantly checking their iPhones in search of the next party.
For the second year in a row, mobile Q&A app Thumb (formerly known as Opinionaided) is offering its own take. It made a list of the apps that seemed to be getting buzz at the conference, then polled its users on whether they actually used the apps. The results (there were 4,700 responses total, with at least 220 for each question) are being pitched as an answer to the question, “Which SXSW Apps Do Real Americans Actually Use?”
Now, you could make a list of caveats to the results that’s longer than this post. For starters: Do we really think Thumb’s userbase is fully representative of “Real Americans”? And doesn’t the survey’s definition of “SXSW App” seem a bit arbitrary? But I have to admit, I was still curious about the results, so here they are. The most-used app seems to be Instagram (22 percent of respondents said they used it), followed by Spotify (14 percent), Waze (12 percent), and Foursquare (12 percent). Highlight, the app that many predicted would be this year’s big hit, was used by 5 percent of respondents.
Instagram’s victory is no surprise, given the rapid growth the company announced on-stage at SXSW. But if you want to argue about winners, it’s too bad Thumb didn’t ask about the Mophie juice pack.
Since women turn to online sources for information during critical times in the purchase decision process, marketers might benefit from knowing that 35% turn to sources at the beginning of the process and 42% at the end to narrow their choices, according to BlogHer’s Fifth Annual Women and Social Media study.
The study identifies emerging platforms that women use to gain information about products and services. It also traces the connection to specific media channels and analyzes the influence of each on purchase behavior.
Seventy-seven percent of women use Facebook for fun, while 87% turn to Facebook to remain up to date with with family. More than 61% of active blog readers admit to making purchases based on a blog recommendation, nearly double the rate of Facebook and Twitter active users — 33% and 31% — respectively.
Purchase conversion among the BlogHer community was 87%.
While Facebook ranks the highest for fun and keeping up with friends and family, blogs rank the highest in learning about new products and research recommendations that can turn into purchase decisions. Some 41% seek out blogs to learn about new products, 39% look for product recommendations, and 36% use blogs to make purchase decisions.
Read more: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/170164/blogs-influence-womens-shopping-experience.html#ixzz1pHNJnqul
Pinterest is planning to release redesigned profiles this week, according to CEO and co-founder Ben Silbermann.
“I’m so excited about it,” said Silbermann (pictured, left), who spoke at the South By Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, on Tuesday. “We wanted to make it more beautiful … to make your profile different in kind than the profile you have on Facebook.”
Silbermann emphasized new discoverability features in the redesign, saying he and his team wanted to make it easier for users to stumble upon other like-minded users, and highlight the people their connections are repinning images from.
He also said the team is working on expanding the number of things users can pin, including video. Soon, people will be able to pin from Vimeo, Hulu and Netflix, among others. And, as was revealed earlier this week,an iPad app — as well as a public API — are also in the works.
At the beginning of the interview, Silbermann spoke of his inspiration for Pinterest, saying it was a project he always wanted to build. “I collected insects, I collected stamps,” he recalled. “I was obsessed with this idea that what you collect says something about who you are.”
He also talked about the site’s original design. “We labored over that grid,” he said. “There were literally dozens of that which were fully coded. We felt like, if your collectios didn’t look awesome, if they weren’t beautiful, why would anyone spend the time to build them?”
More at: http://mashable.com/2012/03/13/pinterest-redesign-api/
