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/

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/

Pinterest’s potential isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. But if you’re a digital manager, you need a clear point of view on this for those you advise.

Yes, there’s hype, butPinterestis the front edge of at least two important digital marketing trends.

This is the first in a series of three posts taking a strategic view of what’s shaping-up to be 2012’s breakthrough new social network.

What’s Pinterest?

Pinterest, in case you haven’t heard of it, isTumblr with some different features. Like Tumblr, it allows you to post your own stuff, as well as stuff you find around the internet, with the click of a button.

Where Tumblr is a blog variant, Pinterest lets you set up sub-blogs built around a particular interest or topic. So you can post all thecute pictures of pugson one board and all the picturesabout the economyon another. It also lets you search everyone else’s boards easily.

That’s really about it. One friend described it as “Delicious for pictures”. Of course, delicious is text-driven and used by guys, while Pinterest is a scrapbook designed to drive relentless word-of-mouth referrals among women and apparently, Silicon Valley investors.

The size of Pinterest’s splash

So why is there so much buzz around this? The numbers: The site beta-launched in March 2010 and is still invite-only.

Despite this, the user base surpassed 10m in December, and according to Google DoubleClick, now has 21m worldwide unique visitors per month.

Forrester analyst Darika Ahrens sums up Pinterest’s allure below:

Pinterest is well known for having a demographic of 18-34-year-old, upper-income women from the Midwest - if that’s not who you sell to, then Pinterest may not be for you,’’ she said. “I’d ask, can you afford to be playing with pretty pictures when there are other, more urgent, interactive marketing priorities?’

Of course, as women make a huge range of purchase decisions for themselves and others (think travel, health care, home goods, food) having first-mover advertage can be an attractive proposition to many brands.

One of the things I appreciate about Pinterest is who uses it. When I look at the people I’m connected to on Google+, most of the posts I see are from a small number of tech-savvy ‘early adopter’ social media windbags.

They post a lot. But I don’t see ordinary people on G+. Not as they are on Facebook, and Pinterest. There are many more ordinary people in this world. Unlike G+ and Twitter, Pinterest didn’t have to jump a chasm to get to a majority market, its where they started.

And Pinterest is easy to use. Lots of people don’t get Twitter, or the value of an unstructured stream of 140 character utterances. But organizing collections of inspiring images is a natural, even reflexive task. Its social media, but with only the need to curate images you like. That’s a low barrier to participation.

The social media hype cycle is suggesting the solar system has a new axis called Pinterest. Is it wrong?

• SJ Mercury News: Pinterest, not Facebook, is Silicon Valley’s hottest social network. (Guess it’s too late to get in on Facebooks’s IPO.)
• CNBC: “He credits the fast-growing site Pinterest for amplifying his online sales to 50 percent of his current business. On the site, he can let his art speak for itself.” (Was it speaking for someone else on another site?)
• Tire Review (not making that up):Is Pinterest of Any Interest for the Tire Industry?
  
• There’s already a service whichclaims to analyze one’s influencethrough Pinterest.
• Heck, the U.S. Army has evenput out a manual on using the site. (File under: You know you have too much money when…)

Is Pinterest for real?

This just has the feel ofColor– remember Color? Less than a year ago itscored $41m of investmentfor its photo-sharing app from Sequoia and Bain Capital. And in social media it was everywhere — for all of two weeks.

Then everyone forgot about it after realizing its business model was the classic “Make something cool and hope Google buys it.” (And believe me, I have nothing against that business model. All offers cheerfully considered, Mr. Brin.)

More at: http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/9290-what-is-pinterest-and-why-should-anyone-care

Pinterest is arguably the hottest social media site on the Internet—user traffic to the online social catalog has skyrocketed since mid-2011—but the website also boasts strong audience engagement, retention, and “virality” among its core demographic, according to a report by RJMetrics.

Based on data collected and analyzed by RJMetrics, key findings from the report include: 

• Pinterest is retaining and engaging its users 2 to 3 times more efficiently, on average, than Twitter was at a similar time in its life cycle.
• “Pins” link to a huge array of websites. For example, Etsy is the most popular source of pin content, but it accounts for only 3% of pins.
• 80% of pins are “re-pins,” attesting the viral nature of the Pinterest community. By contrast, at a similar point in Twitter’s life cycle, roughly 1.4% of all tweets were re-tweets, according to a study conducted by Hubspot in 2009.
• The “quality” of the typical new Pinterest user (where quality is defined by a user’s level of engagement and likelihood to remain active) is high, but declining. Users who have joined Pinterest in recent months are 2 to 3 times less active during their first month than users who joined before them.

Below, detailed findings from the RJMetrics report Pinterest Data Analysis: An Inside Look.

Pins Connect to a Vast Array of  Web Sources

On Pinterest, every pin (or linked image) ties back to an external link. Among a sample of roughly 1 million pins, more than 100,000 distinct source domains were found. 

 

Among those 100,000 domains, the following chart shows the top 20 sources. The most popular domain was Etsy, which powered just over 3% of pins. Google was a close second, though almost all Google links point to Google Image Search, which is technically misattributed content from other 3rd party domains, RJMetrics points out.  

 

Flickr (2.5%), Tumblr (1.1%), and weheartit (1.0%) round out the top 5, after which no domain represents more than 1% of pins.

The Viral Nature of Re-Pins

The analysis also broke out the population of pins by how those pins were posted to Pinterest.  

Remarkably, over 80% of pins are re-pins, demonstrating the impressive level of “virality” at work in the Pinterest community.

 

By contrast, a study conducted by Hubspot at a similar point in Twitter’s history found roughly 1.4% of tweets were retweets.

Surprisingly, a low proportion of pins originate from pinmarklet, a browser bookmarklet that allows users to pin content from any website via one click.  

Read more: http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2012/7173/whats-driving-pinterests-amazing-growth#ixzz1nWWleNvG

A recent study has shown that Pinterest is more popular with men than women in the UK. This is, at first glance, quite surprising seeing as 83 per cent of Pinterest’s US users are women.

However, a closer look at the data reveals that many UK users are in fact professionals working in the media industry. This perhaps explains why the gender split is more even in the UK (44 per cent female, 56 per cent male) compared to the US, where women have adopted the site for social rather than professional reasons.

More at: http://www.thinktank.org.uk/blog/2012/02/uk-pinterest-users-buck-us-trend.php

One of the social media success stories of 2011 was easily the photo-sharing app Instagram.   Despite only running on Apple ‘iDevices’, Instagram boss Kevin Systrom reckoned he had 16+ million users at Christmas.

Post Christmas sign-ups combined with Apple naming Instagram app of the year means that total is probably not far off 20 million by now.  And the company estimates that the Android version finally in the works will result in the numbers doubling.

One of the most interesting things about Instagram, is its community, which unlike many other early stage social networks doesn’t consist exclusively of people who work in tech or marketing.

Thanks to Instagram allowing its users the kind of freedom Facebook won’t, that community has also created a fairly unique sub-culture, which it is worth any marketer understanding:

The etiquette of posting and hash-tags

Instagram has often been described as a visual Twitter.  Like Twitter, most feeds are ‘open’ and you don’t have to follow someone for them to follow you.

Like Twitter, you refer to other users by putting an @ in front of their username.  And like Twitter, hash-tags are added to posts to denote topics.

However, as Instagram users aren’t restricted to 140 characters, a lot of hash-tags can be added – up to 30.  As a result, it is worth knowing what a giant list of hash-tags under someone’s post actually means.

They will denote one of several things:

• • The 3rd party app used to edit the photo  There is now a whole eco-system of iPhone compatible camera apps, for example #lenslight, #snapseed or #dynamiclight

• • The location, e.g #london, #londonlife or #thames

• • If the image is being tagged against a competition, for example #instahub or #prestige_challenge01

• • The situation, one example is pictures of people on public transport – #sneakycommutershot

• • Whatever is being taken #airplane, or (in 6600+ cases!) #powerlineporn

• • Finally, images are often tagged against Instagramer groups – #igerslondon, #rebelseurope, #implus   More on these in a minute

More at: http://wallblog.co.uk/2012/01/19/popping-sneakycommutershots-and-ig-ers-a-look-at-instagrams-sub-culture/

Google is to ease restrictions on brand engagement on its social media start up Google+ following a stronger than expected launch.

Previously brands which had created Google+ accounts had been deleted by Google on grounds that the service was strictly for use of individuals only until proper brand support was built in.

Now however the search firm has had second thoughts and is in fact allowing brands which have created accounts to keep their presence in place, so long as a person is assigned to the account.

The change of heart comes amidst plans to re-think their engagement with brands as the service grows to become a meaningful driver of web traffic.

It follows a period of confusion in which several major brands to have established a presence on the platform, including Ford and Mashable, were first deleted and then reinstated.

More at: http://www.thedrum.co.uk/news/2011/07/22/23931-google-relaxes-brand-ban-amidst-confusion/

Most “average users” are locked into Facebook and aren’t willing to consider a new social tool until they hear about it from their friends. Since most of the people who are on Google+ so far are geeks, insiders, social media stars, journalists, and other people (Google admitted tonight they are only accepting people who have strong social graphs so that they can both make sure everyone has a good first experience as well as test out some of the technology before opening it up to a wider audience) the chances normal people (metaphorically speaking, your mom) won’t hear about Google+ from normal users for quite a while.
By then I’m sure Facebook will react (ie, copy) Google+’s best features (Facebook already has called a press conference for next week where they are going to announce something “awesome”). This will mean that normal users, who aren’t really going to get involved at this point in Google+’s life, won’t feel the need to switch.

So, what is Google+ for then?

It’s for us!

Come on now, we geeks and early adopters and social media gurus need a place to talk free of folks who think Justin Bieber is the second coming of Christ. That’s what we have in Google+ right now. Do we really want to mess that up?

Summary: +1 is a strategic move that reinforces Google’s core

Google may be investing in self-driving cars and planning YouTube channels to compete with traditional television networks, but one thing is clear:  Search is Google’s Castle, Everything Else is a Moat.  For Google, success is not defined as an end result where +1 buttons become as pervasive as Facebook’s social plugins.  Instead, +1 will augment Google’s core competency: providing the best search results available and placing ads that complement the search experience.   For the reasons outlined above, +1 will enable that mission.  Deriding the “version 1.0″ of +1 is a shortsighted view that fails to take into account Google’s long-term goals.