It launched in December of 2009, but many small businesses have just started hearing the buzz about Pinterest in the past few months. Still officially in Beta (and invitation-only), Pinterest has joined the weberatti, sitting alongside Facebook and LinkedIn, as one of the 10 most popular social networking sites. It now boasts over 5 million users and has been touted as the fastest growing social network in history. Have I piqued your interest?

Brides, wedding bloggers, fashionistas, graphic designers and artists have embraced the site. And more recently, I’ve seen real estate agents, television brands and teachers jumping on board. At a time when nary a person would say that they need another social networking site, Pinterest has flourished. Why?

The compelling features

In my opinion, they have the magic formula for an over-stimulated and time-starved internet user:

• Simple – It is immensely easy to use. Click to pin, put it in a category, add some keywords, et voila. A great user experience, clean design and devoid of ads, interacting with Pinterest is a breath of fresh air. And, as easy as it is to pin, it’s just as easy to repin. In one click and a matter of seconds, thousands of people can share something that’s been posted.
• Visual – We see well before we read. Pinterest is all about sharing visual images and ideas. No laborious reading here.
• Controllable – Unlike many other social networking tools, YOU choose what’s shared with you.
• Scannable – Pinterest is like window shopping. At a glance users can get inspired and see what’s hot. You don’t need to dedicate hours to Pinterest. In fact, you’ll find yourself scanning during lunch, before you put the kids to sleep, while you’re watching TV, etc.
• Serendipitous – Pinterest is about discovery. Log in and find all the things you love that you didn’t even know you were looking for.

Is Pinterest Right for Your Business?

What makes Pinterest so interesting are the users behind the tool. Grandmothers, stay-at-home Moms, husbands, students and everyone in between. The thread that binds is that they’re looking for visual inspiration or to inspire others visually. In fact, there’s very little discussion altogether, which makes this tool totally unique to any other social networking site.

So, if you’re products or services aren’t visually compelling, this likely isn’t the site for you.

That said, as this tool quickly becomes the place to collect and bookmark things we love, we may see the way it is used shift over time.

20 Ideas for using Pinterest for Your Business

For the inventory-rich business

• Promote your products / inventory – Add a ‘Pin It’ button on each product page to allow customers and prospects to share and catalogue your images.
• Product popularity – Track which products/ideas from your site have elicited the most shares.
• Product ideas – Rather than simply show a photo of your product (like a chair, for example), create Boards by theme (i.e. Winter Wonderland) and show the chairs in different thematic environments. Showcase your knowledge of trends and catalogue products by trend types (i.e. color blocking, stripes, metallics, etc).
• R&D – Test new product ideas by pinning them on Pinterest. Ask customers to vote on the ones they like most by repinning them, liking them or commenting.
• Create an e-commerce board – With Pinterest, you can not only showcase your individual products, you can also attach a price to the item (by putting a dollar figure before the price). When you do this, your products are automatically added under the “Gifts” tab, which allow users to browse products by price.
• Crowdsourced photos – Ask customers to pin photos of themselves using your products and tag them with your company name or a hashtag.
• Weekly offer / sale – Deal of the day sites begone. Why not host your own flash sale site by creating an ‘On Sale’ board and posting sale items. Or create a weekly offer that you promote on Pinterest only.

For the event planner

Create an account for your event:

• Tell a story about the event – Imagine you’re planning a fundraising event. You could create a board of pictures from your events, a board on inspirational quotes, a board showing who you’re helping, a preview of products you’re auctioning, etc.
• Speaker videos – Ask speakers to create a video promoting their session, upload them to YouTube and then pin them on Pinterest. Don’t forget to add annotations to your videos about your event.
• Crowdsourced photos – Ask attendees to pin their photos to Pinterest and have them tag photos with your event name or a hashtag.
• Invitations – Create an invitation image for Pinterest and include the event details in the Details.
• Portfolio – Show transformations & before and afters. As I reported in my last blog post on How to Get PR for your Event Business, editors are scanning social media sites to find events and ideas to feature in their publications.

For all

• Find fans – Find out who has pinned content from your site. Simply type http://pinterest.com/source/yoursite.com into the address bar in your web browser and it will show you who has shared your website’s information and what they shared. Click on their profiles to learn about them and their interests. Consider commenting on their pin, providing more information, answering questions, etc.
• Humanize – Tell a story about your company by way of your pins and boards. For example, an event planning company could have boards for their favorite design books, office photos, style trends, quotes, employee photos, work samples, other interests (like favorite foods / recipes), other inspiration (like favorite decor ideas)
• Insights – Spend time looking into your followers to understand who wants to stay on top of what you’re pinning. Follow them back and track what their interests are. This can give you deeper insight into who they are.
• Contests – Hold a contest asking customers / attendees to pin photos – the one with the most repins, likes or comments win a prize. I.e. Event organizers, hold a contest asking attendees to pin their favorite moments from your event.
• SEO - Currently, when someone attributes a pin to your website (by including a link), this actually counts for SEO value.
• Research – Follow influencers and find out what they think is hot, important and interesting. A bonus is that a user is notified when someone begins following them. So, this can be like a tap on the back to let influencers know you’re there. You’d be surprised how many people research who’s following them.
• Seasonality – Match your boards with your business’ seasonalities. For example, a caterer might create a Valentine’s board to showcase great food ideas for Valentine’s day. A planner might create wedding boards during wedding planning season. A rental company might create a holiday wish list board to showcase products relevant to the holiday season.
• Think keywords – Many users take advantage of the search function on Pinterest, so ensure you’re thinking keywords when you enter your image/video description.

A Few Words of Caution

• Self-promotion – Every social networking site has its own etiquette. Pinterest is no exception. They discourage users from using the network as purely promotional. That’s just common sense.
• High quality photography needed – If you’re going to participate, recognize that if you want to be repinned, your images / videos need to be high quality and attractive.
• Open window into your thoughts, ideas & organization – Pinterest does not have the ability to make your pins private for now, although they have identified this is something they’re considering working on. So, be cautious about what you share. For example, you might not want to post ideas for projects you’re working on – for confidentiality and privacy reasons.
• Rules of conduct – As with any social networking site, there are specific (and legal) rules of conduct. Ensure you follow Pinterest’s Copyright, Privacy and Terms of Use Policies. The site is stirring up a lot of controversy over their copyright terms, so it’s important to read them carefully and ensure you understand and are comfortable with them.

Update

What are your favorite ideas? How are you using Pinterest for your business?

There’s an article by Jay Baer that’s getting quite a bit of circulation – in large part because it references some new statistics on social media usage and because it’s titled: “Is Twitter Massively Overrated”, a question sure to provoke and ruffle. Seeing social media statistics make their rounds with fervor is not a rarity. Statistics are impactful because they sound a heck of a lot more impressive than making a statement without them, they make us feel validated in our choices and they help to make sense of information that is hard to understand. Unfortunately though, research can also be misused. Just yesterday, I came across a few event professionals sharing Jay’s article and surmising from it that Twitter is not the powerful tool it’s heralded to be.

It can be dangerous to use external research to support decisions for a niche business because the research respondents likely don’t reflect your target market. Let’s say you’re planning an event for New York-based CFOs who work in the consumer packaged goods industry. Unless the respondents of a survey you are referencing are your market, the results are not reflective of your target’s usage and behaviors.

It can be time consuming to do your own research, but the results will be much more valuable to your business. If you have access to your market, ask them questions. And, if you don’t, you can use social listening tools like socialmention.com to do online market research.

We live in a time where statistics are shared at record speeds (not to mention sensationalized and misconstrued). It’s more important now than ever to understand how they truly impact your business.

In case you missed the free Event Marketing 2.0 webinar last week, MeetingsNet has posted the archive here. (Please note that if you were not previously registered, you will need to register before you can launch the webinar.) I encourage anyone interested in using social media for your event marketing to listen.

It was truly a fantastic session. Lots of great questions and my co-presenters: Kate Slonaker of Cvent and Julius Solaris of The Event Manager Blog were fab to work with. You can also view the conversation around the webinar or by track it yourself using the #event2pt0 hashtag.

Enjoy! And, if you have any questions, I welcome you to email me.

PS – For further reading, check out Meetings Blog‘s recap of the webinar.

A Guide to Twitter Advanced Search for Event Planners

Twitter advanced search is an incredibly powerful tool to track real-time conversations about virtually anything on Twitter. Smart companies are monitoring when people are seeking recommendations for businesses like theirs and tracking when people are talking about their brands or their competitor’s. It’s very easy to find these conversations and takes minimal effort to review your search queries every morning before you start your day. Here’s how you do it…

1. Go to http://www.search.twitter.com.
2. Click on ‘Advanced Search’. (see image below)
3. Insert the parameters of your search. See below for ‘UNDERSTANDING TWITTER ADVANCED SEARCH FIELDS’. (see image below)
4. Click ‘Search’.
5. If you would like to perform this search on an ongoing basis, you don’t have to keep going back to Twitter to search. Instead, you can save your search parameters as an RSS (real simple syndication) feed. Simply click on ‘Feed for this query’ (see image below)
6. Cut & paste the feed URL in the address bar and import this RSS feed into mac mail, your RSS reader or anywhere else you track and manage your feeds. (see image below)

UNDERSTANDING TWITTER ADVANCED SEARCH FIELDS

WORDS:

• ‘All of these words’ means that the tweet must contain all of the words you list, but the words can appear in any order. For example, if you input event planning, it might turn up a result like: “Planning an event?” Or, if your company name is Great Event, it will likely turn up a number of non-related results like, “Wow! That event was great!”.
• ‘This exact phrase’ means that the tweet must contain all of the words you list in their exact order. Using one of the last examples, if you input event planning, it can only provide you with results that use the exact phrase: “event planning”.
• ‘Any of these words’ is usually a field you use in addition to the previous two. For example, if you input “event planning
• ‘None of these words’ is a great tool for keywords or keyphrases that hold dual meanings. For example, if you’re a tent rental company and you want to search for tweets mentioning your business field, you’ll likely return a good number of results that mention camping (since tents are often used for camping). So, in order to avoid this, you can include words like: ‘camping, outdoors, camp, campgrounds, forest’ to remove non-relevant results.
• ‘This hashtag’ is relevant if you want to narrow in on conversations that are using a particular hashtag. Hashtags look like this: #eventprofs. A pound symbol followed by a keyword. Since there are millions of conversations taking place online, hashtags are a great way to organize conversations around a specific topic, like: #weddings or around an event, like: #esideafactory, or a community, like: #eventprofs. If you’re a speaker that wants to find out what people have said about you at an event, you can search for your name in the ‘This exact phrase’ field and add the hashtag for the event in the ‘This Hashtag’ field.
• ‘Written in’ is pretty straightforward. Simply select the language you’re searching within.

PEOPLE:

• ‘From this person’ would be where you would enter someone’s twitter handle to track what that particular person has said about your keyword or keyphrase. Let’s say you’re a florist that serves the event planning community and your objective is to provide help to key influencers looking for information on flowers. You’ve identified a small handful of influencers that serve your community. You might input their twitter handles (i.e. my twitter handle is @ready2spark <- so, in my case, you would remove the @ symbol and input ‘ready2spark’) in addition to entering some keywords / keyphrases into the ‘Words’ fields above. Now you’ll be notified when they mention your field so you can respond.
• ‘To this person’ might be a field you use if you’re tracking conversations to a competitor, for example. In the scenario above, maybe you want to track when the word flowers or florals are used (in the ‘Any of these words’) field to a competitor’s twitter handle.
• ‘Referencing this person’ might be a field you use if you’re tracking

PLACES:

• ‘Near this place’ is one of my favorite fields. If you serve a particular geographic area or you want to focus in on what people are saying within a geographic area, this is the field for you. For example, let’s say I want to track all conversations of people looking for an event planner within minneapolis, mn. I would simply enter Minneapolis, MN in this field, and…
• ‘Within this distance’ is where I would select the search radius around Minneapolis, MN. So, I could select within 100 miles to search for conversations from people who are tweeting within 100 miles from Minneapolis, MN.

DATES:

• If you want to narrow your search based on the date in which the tweet was published, you can enter a ‘Since this date’ and/or ‘Until this date’.

ATTITUDES:

• Attitudes refer to another commonly used term: Sentiment. Sentiment tracks whether someone is using positive, negative or neutral words in their tweet. So, for example, if you wanted to track specifically if someone is mentioning your brand in a negative manner, you could click on ‘With a negative attitude :(‘. This would turn up results from people who use negative words, like: “hate, bad, terrible, mad, angry”. This type of search is far from perfect. As we all know, many negative words are used to describe things that are actually positive (slang) – i.e. That event was bad / sick, but they really meant that it was great. There are many other nuances that affect the accuracy of sentiment ratings.
• ‘Asking a Question’ basically tracks if someone has used a question mark in their tweet. Again, this is not an exact science as you could turn up a tweet like: ‘Where should I go tonight? Oh, BTW, flowers suck.” This sentence included a question mark, but the question may not be relevant to flowers.

OTHER:

• ‘Containing links’ should be checked if you’re looking for tweets that include a link to click on, i.e.: “Check out this amazing event by Events Beautiful: http://www.xyz.com”.
• ‘Include Retweets’ should be checked if you want to include retweets in your search results. So, basically, instead of it just listing the original tweets, your search results will also include any time the original tweet was retweeted by someone else.
• ‘Results per page’ allows you to select how many search results you want to see per page.

Remember: People talk about things differently. Some may mis-spell your name, some may forget to use a hashtag, others may use a common short-form for your name. It’s often critical to do multiple searches based on all of these variables to ensure you’re capturing all conversations. Create the search queries once and import them into your RSS reader and you’ll never have to worry about performing the searches again.

Twitter Search Scenarios

SCENARIO 1 – EVENT PLANNING FIRM LOOKING TO TRACK WHEN PEOPLE ARE LOOKING FOR THEIR SERVICES WITHIN THE NY, NY AREA

Words

‘This exact phrase’: Event planner

‘Any of these words’: Looking for, recommend, does anyone know, who is

Places

‘Near this place’: New York, NY

‘Within this distance’: 100 miles

—

SCENARIO 2a – CONFERENCE PLANNER LOOKING TO FOLLOW CONVERSATIONS ABOUT THEIR EVENT (#EVENT101)

Words

‘This hashtag’: event101

SCENARIO 2b – SAME EVENT, BUT YOU WANT TO FOCUS ON F2F CONVERSATIONS ONLY

Words

‘This hashtag’: event101

Places

‘Near this place’: Tribeca, New York, NY

‘Within this distance’: 1 miles

–

SCENARIO 3 – FLORIST LOOKING TO TRACK NEGATIVE BRAND MENTIONS ABOUT THEIR COMPETITOR, XYZ FLOWERS

Words

‘This exact phrase’: XYZ Flowers

Attitudes

‘With negative attitude :(‘

Listening is a fine art – especially when it comes to Event Marketing. Following my recent webinar with MeetingsNet on Event Marketing 2.0, I have put together a video on how to use socialmention to listen to what people are saying about your event, your competitor’s, or what your target market is talking about through social channels.

Let me know your thoughts!

Do you want to annoy people to get business? If so, do these things and (in some cases) do them repeatedly:

1. Send me emails I didn’t sign up for
2. Send me way too many emails when I do sign up
3. Send me emails that are of no value to me when I do sign up
4. Call me without doing any homework on me, my business or what I may need (hint: I’m on the social web…it’s really easy to find out who I am, what I do and what my needs are)
5. Put a pop up all over your site and make it really difficult to close
6. Make it overly complicated to find what I’m looking for on your website
7. Interrupt me with annoying ad-like messages on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc
8. Autorespond in any way, shape or form when I do connect with your company
9. Buy a Promoted Tweet that clogs up my twitter stream
10. Get a whole bunch of people to ‘tweet’ about your products / services when your products / services suck
11. Approach me as a blogger like I’m a mainstream media outlet in hopes that I will spread your message (i.e. stop sending me press releases)
12. Use marketing jargon in your ads or collateral
13. Hand me a business card that’s too big to fit in my rolodex because ‘it stands out’ (yes, yes, rolodexes are going the way of the dinosaur…but take heed until they’re extinct)
14. Have a flash site that takes over 15 seconds to load (and if I do have to wait that long…15 seconds is an eternity on the web, it had better be good)
15. Use a ‘tricked you!’ email subject line to get me to open your emails
16. Tag me in a photo that has nothing to do with me on Facebook in hopes that I’ll find out about your event, product or service
17. Use a company logo as your social media avatar and never disclose who’s managing your account
18. Litter your website with a whole bunch of flashing images in hopes of attracting my attention
19. Hand me an uncreative promotional item that has nothing to do with your business at a tradeshow
20. Talk about how amazing you are when you accept an award
21. Send me bribes in hopes of winning my business
22. Call me after I’ve told you I’m not interested and no I would not like a follow up call
23. Stuff your website full of keywords
24. Aggregate all of your social media streams so you say 1 thing and it’s replicated on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, your blog, etc
25. Share a status update about your hygiene practices, your sex life, your alcohol regimen or anything that your body is doing that it shouldn’t be with me, a business connection
26. Do anything that could be considered a gimmick

Last year’s What’s Next In Events eBook was focused on how Social Media would impact the Events Industry. And did it ever! There’s no doubt that social media provided organizers with new ways to connect with and engage attendees, created new revenue streams and at the same time put strains on already tapped-out budgets and resources, spawned new formats of meetings, conferences and education, and enabled planners to hear what people really thought about their events.

As planners become more entrenched in the tools and the strategies behind using them, many are recognizing a need to take an inward look at their organizations and events to deliver extraordinary experiences.
This year we have organized an incredible panel of 9 experts in their respective fields:

• Jeff Hurt, Director of Education & Engagement for Velvet Chainsaw Consulting – Conference Education
• Paul Salinger, Vice President of Marketing for Oracle – Sustainable Events
• Michelle Bruno, President of Bruno Signature Events – Tradeshows
• Jessica Levin, CMP, President of 7 Degrees Communications – Event Engagement
• Adrian Segar, Author of Conferences That Work – Unconferences
• Michael McCurry, Strategic Account Manager for Experient – Hybrid Events
• Yours truly, President of READY2SPARK – Branding & Marketing
• Ryan Hanson, Chief Designer & Creative Conversation Starter – Special Events
• Carolyn Ray, The Enthusiastic Planner – The Next Generation of Event Professionals