If you happen to follow  social media news, you must have already heard about Pinterest, the visual social bookmarking service that is all the rage.

Why this sudden attention to a service which, at least at first examination, does something so familiar and so old?

It is the  twist in the approach that makes the difference: instead of relying on storage of links, article summaries and thumbnails , Pinterest utilizes the images of a page as possible visual markers.

This sounds like a trivial difference but it has some interesting implications:

• The link of a page is unique (or it should be). Same goes for the title and the first few lines. This means that if one chose  to bookmark a page the old way, there would be only one representation of the bookmark (or, more precisely, if there were more, they would look too much alike). Now, think of a page with 12 images in it, all interesting ones. A Pinterest user will have to choose which one fits best to his taste and employ it as the visual bookmark. If many different people visit and bookmark the same page, then, almost certainly, 12 different representations of the bookmark will appear in Pinterest. This means that if you casually browse pins, there is a chance that you will stumble upon the same bookmark more than once. But instead of skipping it as a boring repetition, you will probably be drawn to it when the next image comes closer to your taste than the previous. In aggregate, the consequence is a higher chance of clicking the bookmark and visiting the page. Which is exactly the observed behavior: Pinterest seems to send a lot of traffic to the sites bookmarked, leaving in dust all the other bookmarking services and climbing right next  to Facebook, Stumbleupon, Google and Twitter .
• An image in a page is of subordinate significance. It’s psychological meaning and allure is subject to the content of the rest of the page. Usually an image accentuates the text, rarely the opposite.  An image, standing on its own, is open to interpretations. We make free associations about it and are drawn to click  it in order to discover what lies ‘behind’. The way Pinterest harnessed this psychological process, makes it more of a discovery service than a simple bookmarking one. Bookmarking is about remembering, discovery is about revealing and exploring. There is an element of serendipity in it and  the path to discovery is not and cannot be predefined.
• Since bookmarking is combined with discovery in Pinterest, a new kind of activity emerges: collecting. Users collect pins not just to remember the beautiful, interesting or desirable things they once saw, but also to arrange them in sets that attribute them a new meaning. These sets are called ‘boards’ in Pinterest and the title and description of these board is full of semantic data that marketers will drool upon. The most important: boards dubbed “I want”, “I need” and the likes reveal the dormant or not so dormant consumer intention to buy.
• Brands of all kinds,  arranged in boards as posters or designs, exhibit what people think about them, how do they perceive them and how they classify them with or against their competitors.

There is always this week’s darling in the social media scene but a recent Comscore report found out that the average US visitor in November spent almost one hour and a half on the site, bringing  Pinterest only third behind Facebook and Tumblr and clearly ahead of Twitter and LinkedIn, a testimony to the sites’  high stickiness factor.
Pinterest is still in beta stage so no API, no third party apps and mashups are yet available. Once it gets to this stage, I think we are destined to see tools that will mine the aspects we hinted and provide the marketing professionals with a lot of surprises and a lot of potential. I could go on a lot more but I think you get the general idea. Pinterest is a discovery tool worth to be discovered.

Among the many discussions that took place on stage there was one that touched the subject of the Social Organization. In other words, the ways that enterprises organize themselves to cope with the challenges and the opportunities of Social Media.

The panel discussion in the video that follows, is between Richard Collin, Professor and Director Enterprise 2.0 Institute of the Grenoble Management School who moderates it, Sandy Carter, Vice President, Social Business Sales and Evangelism, IBM, Polly Sumner, Chief Adoption Officer, Salesforce.com and Nicolas Rolland, Director Social Prospective, Danone. Enjoy.

Nikos Anagnostou

This year I am also invited as official blogger. And I am pretty happy about it. Not least for the reason that I have not been in Berlin before.

The theme of the conference is “Data Love” which sounds cryptic, at first. It surely does to me. But I will try to decipher it before and during the conference and convey my experience through my personal greek and english blogs as well as this blog.
Stay tuned

Nikos Anagnostou

PS: If you are interested in participating, click the next banner above to take advantage of  a promotional 20% discount.

Nikos Anagnostou, scicada partner from Institute of Communication on Vimeo.

That is why on November 3rd, we are participating in the so called conference, and  talking, of all things, about Social Shopping (again).
Join us at the conference or attend online. More information here.

“it’s a great marketing tool. just not great with making profit.”.

The quote above is from an unnamed business owner and I found it in a recent study by Utpal M. Dholakia, an associate professor of marketing at the Jones Graduate School of Business, Rice University.

The study, an interesting read, states that only  66% of all deals accounted were profitable and that there is a correlation to the deal profitability and high % in findings regarding the following key areas:

• buying more than Groupon value (50%)
• repurchasing a second time (31%)
• running another Groupon promotion in the future (82%)

The major problem to deal profitability was found to be the employee satisfaction factor, which might sound strange but is all too understandable if we bring in mind that most of the Groupon deals are service deals and the way the employees perform determines the service outcome, both in monetary and non monetary terms.

So, what do we learn from this?

If you are to engage in Groupon like deals, do it with a long term view in mind. Quick cashing is risky and maybe not material, after all.

Groupon deals should be part of a marketing strategy for small business owners. They should use them to make known or reinforce their brand, give people a sample of their services and entice them to more, expand their reach etc

This means that these deals should not be offered in isolation. They should be combined with other marketing and promotional tools to yield a better result.

Even the offering itself has to be scrutinized upfont:

• What kind of signal does it represent? Heavy discounting can easily be taken as a signal of trouble. It has to be applied in a context where the image of the company will remain untarnished.
• How it can be combined with extra, more lucrative, promotions when the customer redeems the coupon?
• Profitability is not a prerequisite if one knows upfront what to aim for. The anticipated losses can be budgeted and treated as marketing cost, provided that the deal can create new loyal normal paying customers.
• Can the social embassies (if any) of the company benefit from the sudden and brief burst of publicity that the deal will bring? How should they be linked and related to the deal promotion?
• Can some of the Groupon newsletter subscribers become subscribers of company’s newsletter? How?

The future of Groupon’ business model is not yet determined, but group deals as a form of promotion are here to stay. And if this is the case, then we better treat them as part of the marketing arsenal from early on, rather than as an army that can win the war by itself.

Since it is always difficult to follow the rationale of a speaker by simply looking at the slides he/she has used, let me briefly explain a little bit here.

Social shopping is a subject discussed for many years but there is either not coherent all inclusive definition or a confusion with related terms like social commerce.  What I have tried to do is to create a thinking framework that can adapt to all relevant situations and be used as a mental map to help the newcomer investigate social shopping and categorize the various and disparate services he comes across.

I hope you will find it useful.