By now you’ve probably heard a lot about Pinterest, (especially if you follow my blogs here!). Is it just hype? I’ll let you decide after showing you some of the recent Pinterest campaigns that caught my attention recently.
Inspiration Day – Kotex Women
Smoyz, an Israeli creative agency found a way to generate buzz on Pinterest. Recently, the company launched a campaign called “Inspiration Day” which involves finding 50 influential Israeli women on Pinterest. From there, they got them to repin items and sent some of the items that they pinned as gifts.
The result? According to the video, almost 100 percent of the recipients posted a photo of the prizes on Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram which resulted in more than 2,000 interactions and 684,853 impressions. Quite impressive results when you realize that all this happened through a mere 50 boxes of gifts.
I would say that this is definitely an innovative campaign. However, as a marketer, I question the calculation of ‘total impressions’ and how the company got that number.
Note: Although the Israeli company claimed to have done the FIRST Pinterest social media campaign, they are definitely NOT the first as there are other social media campaigns on Pinterest before theirs.
Pinterest Lottery – British Midland International
BMI (British Midland International) launched what I think is the first lottery campaign on Pinterest. All users have to do is Pin up to six images from seven destinations on their Pinterest boards. All the photos are given a number from one to 63. Each week, BMI will choose a photo at random. If the number on the photo belongs to a user and gets ‘pinned,’ the users will win a free BMI flight to the selected destination.
Go Red For Women – American Heart Association
Each year, the major cause of death for women is from heart disease. To put that numbe in perspective; the number of deaths caused by heart disease is more than death caused by any form of cancer combined. To raise awareness, the American Heart Association launched a ‘Go Red For Women’ campaign throughout all social media networks including Pinterest.
The campaign centers around the theme of the colour red. Users can share or pin anything that has the colour red such as red dresses, red photos, or anything red that catches their attention. An awareness campaign like this could be big in Pinterest as the campaign itself is easy to digest, yet it could still send a powerful message. This is an excellent example of how collective images with a theme in mind could bring out a powerful message.
So after hearing about these campaigns, what is the Pinterest takeaway?
Well to me, although this site is still in its early stages and has a long way to go, the popularity of the site and hype shouldn’t be ignored. These companies above are proof that sometimes ‘The Hype’ could be used as a business tool, and will help Pinterest to grow as well.
What do you think? Love to hear your thoughts on this.
This article was also published on iStrategy Conference blog where I contribute weekly. Check their blog for more social media related blog articles.
Thanks for the post. Always interested to see how businesses are leveraging social media and Pinterest in particular.
My pleasure Jon.
Hope you got inspired.
Hi Aaron. Great read here. We reported just this morning that Pinterest is now the third most visited social site in the US. I totally agree with the “hype” that Pinterest is the next best thing on the social scene. Especially if your organisation largely targets women, since 60% of “pinners” are female.
I’m not happy about the “buzz” about marketing campaigns on Pinterest. It’s breaking Pinterest for users because every 2nd follow is now some fake account that steal images from others to be “clickable” and uses url shorteners to mask their affiliate marketing links.
Pinterest needs to step it up to get rid of these FALSE accounts who’s “pins” all link to only one site. There are no recipes, DIYs, interesting articles, etc, just crap.
Pinterest needs to ban url shorteners as the average users does not need them. Also the reporting utility NEEDS to be expanded. Additionally they need to become more transparent with community forums and contact info – both are completely missing.
Checking the report now. How did you get it?
I don’t mind being the only male in that strong group of female. 😀
Agree on a couple of points especially fake users who leads links to one site. Usually for SEO and fake traffic purposes.
For sure Pinterest isnt perfect yet as its still new but i am sure they will get there.
I do not know if you know, I’ve done the Pinterest Contest for Spain and alreadyhas over 800 pins, is more than 200 boards and post has moved more than 80repins the post http://blog.universalplaces.com/universalplaces-organiza-el-primer-concurso-en-pinterest-gratisalaplaya/
Pinterest is an amazing SN media. I personally love it, it is so creative and allows not only static images to be pinned but videos too, although I’ve yet to cross that exciting bridge! I wonder how Pinterest will evolve and what changes they will make next to the platform? Thanks for the informative post!
Checking it out now Javier, thanks for sharing.