The Strategic e-Blog

Is this you? You finally came around to recognizing the B2B utility of Facebook. You installed Twitter on your website and are even doing some consistent posting, tweeting, and blogging. Finally, you are feeling like you are “all set.”

Sorry. There’s a new kid on the block and it’s time to welcome her to the neighborhood. We use the feminine pronoun as estimates of the female membership hover around 70%. And, not just any females – about 28% earn in excess of $100,000 per year.

In a world where quick start-ups are commonplace, the development of Pinterest over the past two years has been nothing short of breathtaking. The website has leaped from conception in December of 2009, launch in March of 2010, to top ten status today. In January of this year, it drove more than double the referral traffic to retailers than YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google+ combined. That should attract your attention! Check out this infographic provided by our friends at Mashable for some additional interesting statistics.

The factors that separate Pinterest from the other social media sites are its uncanny simplicity and the fact that it is easy on the eyes. The entire site is largely a collection of photos and graphics curated onto “boards.” You “pin” an image or video onto a board and hopefully, develop followers on Twitter or friends on Facebook.

Here is the most attractive aspect of Pinterest for B2B or B2C marketers: if you play your cards right, you have a good chance of getting your board to rank on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).

Here is a step-by-step guide to getting started with Pinterest:

1. Go to the website and request an invitation. Yes, there is a bit of snobbish aspect to this process. It’s part of their marketing process and it has merit. To them. If this seems overly burdensome, either suck it up or ask a current member to invite you. Just keep in mind that you must have either a Facebook or Twitter account to activate a Pinterest account. If you don’t, it’s time you did. Another caveat is that if you enter via the Facebook route, the next time you log on you will have activated the timeline.
2. Within a day or two, you will receive the exciting news that you have been accepted.
3. Go to the help page under the “About” drop down and read it all. Unlike many similar sites, you can accomplish this in about 20 minutes. Stunning simplicity defines this site and it is quite a welcome change from the complexities of so many others.
4. Go to your board and start pinning. You will want to install the Pin It button to your bookmarks toolbar so you can pin any images, photos, or videos you run across that are consistent with your product or service. As you might imagine, there is Pin Etiquette involved so that the source is credited and decorum is maintained. Predictably, nudity is not allowed.

Now, optimize your board for Google placement. Keep in mind that as of now, Yahoo and Bing are not as aggressively courting Pinterest and you may not see the same results. Here are some tips:

• Use your complete business name in the “First Name” field. There is no limit to the number of characters, so use whatever you have been using with your other optimization efforts.
• The “About” field allows for 450 characters. Use them all. Make it concise, interesting, and of course use your primary keywords one time each. However, readability should always trump keyword density.
• There is a separate board description that will accommodate up to 500 characters. Don’t just copy and paste the About content. This is a terrific opportunity to add more keywords and input more interesting information about your company.
• Watermark all proprietary photos and images by using any of a number of online services for about $20. The good ones will allow you to test-drive about five of them before buying. All images should have keywords in the file names and of course, a link to the appropriate landing page on your website.

If you have been wondering how to gain a marketing advantage, you will notice that in spite of the tremendous growth of Pinterest, few of your competitors have jumped onto the bandwagon. Jump first and you’ll get a better seat!

Whether or not it should be called a revolution, there’s definitely a marketing shift taking place thanks to social media.  As the video below says, social media brings products to consumers and turns on its head one of the primary ways in which we, as consumers, find products.  If your business hasn’t yet setup a social media account, or at least gotten started with a simple Facebook business page, you’re missing a vital connection with your customer base.

Social media will continue to grow.  Of course it may taper off here and there as one service wanes in popularity and another takes over, but the underlying model will be in place for several years (at least until something new comes along to replace it).   What is that underlying model?  It’s something akin to active rather than passive marketing.  While it may seem like putting an ad on TV or on the radio is an active way of reaching out to your customers and prospects, it’s actually pretty passive.   Besides commercials during the Super Bowl, most ads are just perceived as filler, a chance to get up and walk away from the TV during a program.  Toss DVRs and Tivo into the mix, and it’s even harder to reach a TV audience.

When it comes to radio, you’ve got something of a similar phenomenon going on.  As more and more cars get outfitted with direct audio inputs, iPods and other media players will continue to take an audience away from radio and more toward their own selections of music, audio books and podcasts.   If you want to reach these plugged-in listeners, you don’t have a lot of choices that let you piggyback on their audio choices.  Of course you can underwrite a podcast, but that might not give you the kind of reach you want to achieve – nor enough room to deliver the type of marketing message you want to put out there.

Which is where social media steps in.  Unlike radio or TV advertising, which a passive audience can simply ignore, social media lets you engage actively with active participants.

Let’s say you’re in the business of guide books.  You can use social media to search and indentify people that are into guidebooks and then develop a strategy for targeting them.  In Facebook, it could mean a pointed advertisement, while in Twitter, it could mean following some people and building up a relationship.  That’s the difference with social media, it’s not always an instant message that’s delivered – and, ironically, sometimes the active marketing approach takes a bit more time than the passive one.

In the active marketing world of social media, invasive ads don’t always get received well – especially through a service like Twitter.  With social media it’s more important than ever to show some patience in marketing, but also to make sure that you’re using your marketing opportunity to share compelling information with your audience.  It’s a lot like building your social media brand – but it’s even more about building your social media rapport, which means you have to make sure that once you start building your social media persona, you continue to interact with people that respond.  That’s where the real work comes in, and that’s where a disciplined strategy is of the essence – without it, you can end up with a nice-looking Facebook or Twitter page that nobody sees after the initial push.

As I’m writing this sentence, 729,349 people like Gap on Facebook.  That’s a sizeable number of fans for any product, so it’s no surprise to find that Gap turned to their Facebook wall to announce their decision to go back to their original logo.  Here is what Marka Hansen, President of Gap North America, said on Facebook:

Ok. We’ve heard loud and clear that you don’t like the new logo. We’ve learned a lot from the feedback. We only want what’s best for the brand and our customers. So instead of crowd sourcing, we’re bringing back the Blue Box tonight. http://bit.ly/9xvtvJ

The link takes you to the full press release on Gap.com, but even when you read that, it’s clear that Gap is not addressing the press or investors with this press release.  Rather, Gap’s press release is talking directly to the customer – to the online community of Facebook and Twitter – that immediately started to protest, complain and even spoof the logo as soon as the redesign was leaked.

Still, despite the quick, loud (in cyber terms) and direct response Gap received, it was still surprising this afternoon to hear Kai Rysdall mention the Gap’s move on Marketplace and suggest that very few people might even have noticed:

These final notes today. Gap has dumped it’s new logo. In other news, did anybody out there know Gap had a new logo? Apparently, the clothing chain swapped it out for a new one, online, a week ago without telling anybody.

As happens in this Internet age, though, somebody saw it, customers complained, the company caved… You know how it goes. Can’t say as I blame ‘em. That new one was uuuuuuuuugly.

Perhaps Rysdall/Marketplace continues to favor traditional marketing and press releases in order to assess the impact of a marketing or branding campaign.

What we can take away from Gap’s logo gaffe is that connecting with the online community is far more important than even the largest companies in the world seem to recognize.  A decade into this new century we can safely say that marketing isn’t just about the message companies deliver, but also about the interaction of the company – and of the message – with their community.  It’s a funny word to use with a business, but that’s what we have now, isn’t it?  Online communities of followers, fans, friends, people who like, link and retweet?

Ignoring the value of that collective voice, however irrational it might seem at times, can cost a company its own closely guarded image – and also cost a company the chance to connect with their community and allow that community to feel important – to feel like they are part of the product they support with every purchase and with ever click of a Like button on a web page.

Just in case you missed the logo debate, here are the failed, new and the beloved, old logos: