Is Pinterest Your Next Profit Center?

Pinterest is undoubtedly the social media platform du jour. With 100 million users and an estimated market edging over $300 billion, Pinterest already ranks third in size behind Facebook and Twitter.

Pinterest shines with its exquisite simplicity. You'll need to request an account with your email address, or receive an invitation. Then you can grab an image from any website, pin it, and voila, you're a Pinster.

The low cost of entry has a flip side, too. Your major competitors will coexist with you alongside smaller companies. If this sounds frivolous, think again.

Because of the low cost of entry, Fortune 500 companies will coincide with smaller companies, and mom and pops. And compared to many other platforms, it's relatively easy to monetize your participation and track it through analytics services like Pinerly.com. Here's how it works:

1. Pinterest drives traffic to product pages, ecommerce stores, and your website, where you can track value through conversions.
2. Lead off with a Pinterest promotion to increase participation on your boards, drive traffic to your website, and introduce existing customers to a new side of your brand.
3. Pinners regularly share images or videos by repining, which can virally extend your reach.
4. Pinterest, like other social media, positively impacts SEO.
5. Pinterest makes it easy for your customers to share your products with friends and co-workers, e.g. creating a board for fixtures you want in your new home.
6. Pinterest is visual and emotional, so it's a great way to show the depth of your brand. Tell the story of things, people and ideas that inspire your brand. Find images that communicate what your brand feels like. This is the stuff of brand loyalty.

Would you like to talk about the strategic use of Pinterest for your brand? We would be happy to send you an invitation. Call Susan or Mike.

Learn more

• Great Ways to Use Pinterest – A collection of articles and examples from numerous sources.
• Pinterest Demographics – Find out who's using Pinterest now.
• 26 Tips for Using Pinterest for Business – Solid nuts and bolts ideas

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Content Marketing to 20-Something Media Hogs

Young consumers are gobbling up media faster than ever and, as marketers, it's our job to constantly feed the beast. According to a recent study in Advertising Age, millennials swap media devices roughly 27 times an hour, which means there's never been a clearer call for fresh brand-driven content.

So what exactly is content? It's a pretty broad term that encompasses social media updates, blog posts, newsletter stories, print articles, YouTube videos and any piece of communication for your target market. Content isn't about hard selling. It's about building and maintaining brand loyalty.

With that in mind, here's what you need to know:

• Content breeds consumer engagement. When you send out an email, update Facebook or make a new blog post, you build credibility. It shows you know what's going on in your industry and you're in touch with your audience. More importantly, it keeps your brand at the forefront of their daily lives.
• Each platform demands a unique approach. Facebook content is more casual in nature. Twitter is quick and conversational. Blog posts are detailed, informative articles. And your visitors love to share tailored content, which is also more likely to go viral.
• Good content sells without selling. Sometimes described as corporate journalism, it has the power to persuade consumers to buy without a hard pitch. If your company sells drills, try a newsletter story about how your tools helped build a fancy new skyscraper.
• It makes your brand portable. When you consistently create new content, you're ready to quickly adapt to the next big media trend. Whether it's a new Facebook or super-sized Pinterest, you already have content ready to feed it.

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Mobile Eyeballs Are Watching You

They say the eyes are the window to the soul, but for us, they're the root of a mobile campaign for Haag-Streit USA. To demonstrate the company's superior optics, we created this mobile landing page to "wow" doctors with stunning images wherever they go. Here's a sneak peek. Take a look on your desktop or smartphone.

Looking for more mobile eye candy? Check out the new mobile landing page we designed for Reliance Medical that lets dealers quickly convey the importance of Made in America.

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Take a Chocolatey Bite Out of the Solar System

We know certain foods boost creativity and brainpower, but what about bite-sized chocolate planets? For $50, a Japanese chocolatier is selling boxes of all eight delightfully geeky planets in our solar system. And because you were wondering: Uranus tastes like milk tea. Have your own chocolate planet tasting, and make sure to hit Google translate.

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Robotic Breakthrough Demonstrates Creativity

Has your latest round of ideas crashed, burned and scraped? Take a new look at your problem with a technique called reframing.

Researchers at Cornell and the University of Chicago, for example, reframed the problem of creating robotic hands, which are notorious for dropping things. Instead of mimicking human hands, they reframed the hand problem as finding a way to reliably grip objects. The Universal Jamming Gripper is a plain latex balloon filled with coffee grounds. Its lowered over an object, e.g. a pair of scissors, and the pneumatic pump sucks the air out of the balloon that makes the coffee grounds rigid, and enables it to pick up odd shaped objects, small pyramids, and a coffee mug. Occam's Razor rules again.

Reframing starts with letting go of your previous ideas and assumptions, and redefining a problem. For example, drinking a cup of coffee turns into finding an efficient way to get caffeine into your system. Other good questions to ask are:

• Why are we thinking about this anyway?
• What will happen if we don't solve this problem? What will we do then?
• Let's solve that problem.
• Instead of retooling products for existing customers, find customers that match your existing products.
• Or, instead of balancing a budget by nibbling away at line items, why not find a new job?

So next time your brain is stuck in the mud, redefine your problem and find a better solution. Your team will be happier, and you won't come up with a robotic hand covered in mud.

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Agency Insider: Party On, Garth

On April 1, Ideopia celebrated its 20th Anniversary with laser tag, Mexican food, and gallons of beer. Our thanks to all the wonderful people who've made it possible: especially past and present employees; our awesome clients; the suppliers that we can proudly call partners; and our families and parents who believed in and supported our crazy ideas. Special thanks to our moms and dads.

This month, we became an official Apple Developer, and a partner in Google's Engage program for agencies. This means our clients get access to special tools and rates for search engine marketing; and a much faster path to placing apps in Apple's iTune's store.

Sarah Reynolds and Emily Babel launched Ideopia's Pinterest presence with an eclectic range of boards about squirrels, our work, typography, creativity and our favorite beverage.

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Search Rankings Get Pumped by Press Releases

High search engine rankings on keywords can drive the success of a business. So it makes sense to extend search engine optimization (SEO) to all aspects of the brand. Public relations and SEO press releases are a great place to start. They drive higher search rankings by:

• Creating backlinks from high-value news sites
• Bolstering keyword authority through coverage in all media
• Visibility on secondary media properties like blogs and RSS feeds

How to Write a SEO Press Release

• Choose 1 or 2 keywords your planning deems important.
• Use the keyword(s) in the headline (H1 tag) and subhead (H2 tag).
• Be brief. Keep the release tightly written around the keyword wander off into the bathroom. Off target copy just dilutes the impact of the keywords.
• Don't stuff keywords into your copy to boost rankings. It doesn't work. And editors and readers alike won't read your mangled jargon.
• Use keyword phrases as links back to additional information on your website.
• Circulate widely by using press release distribution services like PR Newswire, not just to traditional media and bloggers.

This might sound like SEO trickery. But, if you remember the last time you got thumped with a copy of Strunk & White, it's just the foundation of good writing.

Call us to find out more about incorporating press releases into your SEO program.

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Top Stories on Ideopia's Facebook

Need your Ideopia fix in between Kloud 9 issues? "Like" us on Facebook for more juicy marketing bits, creativity tips, squirrel talk and peeks at what goes on inside our office. Here's what you may have missed last month:

• Booze makes you more creative. We'll drink to that.
• We ponder how to use the world's scariest stock photo ever taken.
• Photos from our 20-year year celebration at Scallywag Tag.
• See what happens when copywriter Eric House tries to draw.
• Everyone fell in love with this cat and squirrel snuggle session.

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