How our clients are using Polyvore and Pinterest

Pin it! In the social marketing world, a new player (just two years old, and still by invitation only) is making waves. Pinterest is a pinboard, an electronic version of a bulletin board for photos. The beauty of Pinterest lies not just in the ability to pin, curate and share these idea morsels (everything from a favorite vacation spot, to a tip to a pair of shoes you covet), but in the fact that it retains the original links to the source, even if others 'repin' your pin. This is key for marketers using Pinterest to share photos and ideas with their customers.

Pinterest works by allowing users to set up pinboards. They can set up multiple pinboards - vacations, style, house and home, crafts, DIY, kids, photography, art, architecture - anything you can curate from the web or upload as an image. Users can follow one another or see pins in a variety of categories that others have pinned. Repinning them to one's own board creates a unique collection to return for how-tos, or inspiration on future projects. For marketers, since each pin goes back to it's original source, users can readily share photos of your products and no matter who pins it down the line, the link is still active to your product! Here are five great ways to foster customer engagement on Pinterest.

We're bringing our clients who have a natural match with Pinterest - retail clients with visuals as their primary selling tool - to this unique medium. Christine Jonson Patterns, a web-based sewing pattern design and high-end fabric e-retailer based in Detroit is one such client. Christine's customers love to sew, and her unique content includes not only the sewing patterns she designs, but the endless variations of them that she and her staff post to their web site as DIY variations. This extends the customer's use of their product, and fosters fabric sales as well. 

Christine posts photos to virtual pinboards and uses her Pinboards to share new DIY tips to extend the use of her patterns.

We use a combination of Polyvore and Pinterest to showcase outfit ideas. Polyvore is another internet sharing tool, this one is designed for the fashion, art and interior design world, and allows users to create fashion-magazine-like collages of garments, shoes, accessories, backgrounds and text. While there isn't a direct hook yet between Polyvore and Pinterest (there is between Polyvore and many other social sharing tools like Facebook), it's easy to pin a Polyvore collage to a pinboard. 

For several months leading up to Christine's use of Pinterest and Polyvore, Ann Siegle had been creating and pinning to her own Pinterest boards (Ann has a lot of followers and has had her pins repinned more than 1,000 times) as a way to sharing Christine Jonson's designs with the DIY fashion community. 

Some logical uses of Pinterest for clients include those selling housewares, clothing and accessories, vacation rentals, rental properties, gifts and accessories, children's items, interior decorating accessories, furniture, and others.  On the services side, photography, art, design, architecture, interior design are a natural for Pinterest. But there are a myriad of ways to use Pinterest, and a clever, unusual campaign using it will help your business stand out. 

Want to know how it works? We'll give you a fun how-to walk through for free, just by scheduling an appointment with Ann. 517-886-9708.