Kibbe on Marketing: UnPinterested

Bowing to significant peer pressure, I recently decided to join Pinterest, the flavor-of-the-moment social networking channel.

If you aren’t familiar with Pinterest, imagine a virtual vision or wish board meets the “Like” function of Facebook, singled out and on steroids. Once you’ve installed (more on that later) the application, you browse the Internet to your heart’s content Pinning (e.g. “Liking”) anything and everything to a board you create. Folks following you on Pinterest can see what you’re into, comment and share, and you can do the same on their boards.

I find the concept truly ingenious. Many times, I’ve done some virtual window-shopping and have simply left half a dozen browser windows open as I peruse and compare. Pinterest would allow me to pull all my ideas together in one place, adding and editing as I went. I could leave the project and come back to it at anytime.

Here’s the inside scoop that I’ve discovered so far, so if you haven’t tried it yet, take a read. If there are already Pinheads out there that know where I’ve gone wrong, I’d love to hear from you, too.

First, unlike joining Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, your access to Pinterest isn’t immediate. At least it wasn’t for me. You had to be “invited” in, presumably by Pinterest creators or Skippy the geeky intern. I had to wait two whole days before I was allowed to begin. That irritated me and made me wonder what background check they were doing and to whom were they were selling the information.

Another caveat – it looks like you must have a Facebook or Twitter account to join Pinterest, so if you’re not on either of those channels, either you join those, too, or you’re SOL.

After receiving my Pinterest invitation, I had to install its bookmark. This isn’t just any bookmark –it strikes me as more of an app that allows the Pinning function, rather than just a short cut to a website. Can you say Cookie Monster?

Fine, I swallow my pride and install. All goes well, and I decide to put the Pin It button on my Windows Task Bar. That way I can Pin in a single click and I don’t have to keep opening my browser bookmark menu. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work there and gives an error. I can use the Pin It link from the bookmark pull down menu, but that’s a few steps. Do I really want to keep doing a number of mouse clicks just to Pin?

I actually had two cool projects I wanted to create Pin Boards for – pre-vacay shopping (YAY!) and home office ideas as I want to do a bit of a shoestring-budget redesign (any erstwhile ASID members out there that want to do a small project for trade, let me know).

I started with the shopping board. Looking for sundresses and swimsuits, I begin Pinning a few ideas. It seems to work just as easily as you would think – find something you like, click the Pin It button, and it appears on your board.

Well, not everything can be Pinned, apparently. Either the URL of the particular item I wanted to Pin (a very cute dress) had something in it that caused the action to malfunction or the Pin It button itself has a glitch, I don’t know, but I couldn’t Pin the dress. I tried a number of things, including reinstalling the Pin It bookmark, but to no avail.

Then I started thinking – do I really want my social contact to know my dress size? How much information is being revealed here, anyway?

I went back to Pinterest to search for ways to make a private board. Guess what? YOU CAN’T. (For the record, FAQs say that they are considering it. How nice.) Everything that goes up is seen. I believe the security functions are tied to whichever social network you’re using so it isn’t completely open, but I don’t even want that much revealed.

Pinterest pretty much lost interest for me there.

I started thinking some more – do I really want marketers to know my size? Heck, they probably already do, but still. At least with other online shopping and social functions, good marketers and bad hackers have to do a bit of mining to gather data about you before they can use it for good or ill. With something like Pinterest, we’ve just done they’re work for them.

I suppose there’s no real harm in getting spam from companies that are in genres I do, in fact, like. But my private life is just that – it’s mine and it’s private and I intend to keep it that way. It’s the principle of the thing.

Until Pinterest creates a completely private board function, I probably won’t use it much. Again, I find the idea of the site wonderful, useful and downright fun, but my privacy concerns overshadow its novelty. I caution you to consider your use of it, too. You don’t want your vision board to turn into a privacy nightmare.



Cindy Kibbe is owner of Cindy Kibbe Creative Communications, a writing services firm based in New England. She was an editor for a regional business publication for nearly a decade. She can be reached at cindy@kibbecreative.com.