Pinterest and Your Brand Extension

As Pinterest continues to grow in terms of its number of users, more and more brands are taking advantage of this fact by ensuring their presence in this popular social networking site.

How can a personal brand take advantage of it? I’ve read many posts about people using it to show their individual style, interest and express who they are. Those are all valid uses. The beauty of Pinterest is that it give businesses the opportunity to showcase the unique personal brands of their team members.

Delivery of your corporate brand promise

I have personally seen people struggle with how do they connect the people in their organization and show a personal side, that’s not too personal, and yet share their personal brand (like they do in real life) and how they uniquely deliver on the corporate brand promise.

Pinterest is a perfect network to do that. While Facebook and Twitter accounts are separate and in no way can a company truly control the content on those accounts, they can provide just a professional enough glimpse at the personal brands that make up and contribute to your organization.

Here’s how:

1. As a business, create a Pinterest account for your business.

2. Create a board for:

a. About your company
b. Mission or Vision
c. Products you like
d. Companies you lie
e. A board for every single team member

a. Share that board with the team member so they can showcase aspects of their personal brand that they’re willing to share with company connections and customers.
b. The company can administer that particular board because it is a part of the organization’s Pinterest account so they can delete anything that is questionably appropriate and still monitor without infringing upon someone’s personal Pinterest account.

Here are some examples of businesses using Pinterest to highlight the personal brands and personal brand contributions for their teams.

1. Curalate, http://pinterest.com/Curalate
2. buzz2bucks|word of mouth firm, http://pinterest.com/buzz2bucks
3. Avionte Software, http://pinterest.com/avionte

Just like other social media platforms, it’s all about engaging and connecting with your audience. But how exactly do you measure and track your effectiveness on Pinterest?

For business brands, measuring success may consist of knowing the analytics of what photo is driving interest to your site, which product is of most interest (repined and popular), and how many people like and comment on your pints.

Yet, for a personal brand is it enough to get people re-pinning your content? Is it enough to have people joining your contests, commenting on your pinboards, and following you on the site?

The bounty in any social network is the relationships you have the opportunity to develop. The key word in that statement is “opportunity”. Everyone who is repinning, liking and commenting is someone who might be someone that you would like to develop a more personal connection with.

Easy for other networks

While it’s easy on other networks to see who’s interacting with you, just look at your likes and followers, who’s retweeting you and who’s giving you the ‘thumbs up’ and comments – gaining insights on how people are interacting and engaging with your brand on Pinterest is not as easy due to the viral nature of repining.

Like the other networks, in order for you to create and develop relationships it’s essential for you to learn more about who is interacting with your pints. You want to learn who these people are, what makes them tick, and what their interests and problems are.

Enter Curalate

Last week a new measuring tool entered the market. Curalate, offers a monitoring and analytics platform that specially caters to socially curated sites such as Pinterest. While they are just debuting their beta area to the public, they had already worked with over 150 brands and agencies in how they can gain relationships out of their Pinterest campaign.

What exactly does Curalate do? It basically works via image recognition. It follows a pinned image’s path on Pinterest and goes a step further by also following the same pin across the web and Twitter. This helps you see who is re-pinning your content, know more about what has interested them from your Pinterest pins, gives you insights into who they are and also provides the opportunity to connect with these users even outside of Pinterest.

Building the relationship

It’s tough to develop relationships if you don’t know who someone is. Curalate provides that for the company and for the individual user.

Using Curalate, you can also see which boards have the most followers and get the most activity from people. You also gain insights regarding who your top pinners are, and even have the option of following and responding to them.

Since Pinterest continues to be a newbie among the social networking sites, it’s important for brands to really understand how they’re connecting and engaging with their audience within the platform and how their team personally connects. By learning how users are connecting with you on Pinterest, you can identify the best way to build a relationship with them as well as a deeper more helpful connection.

Maria Elena Duron, CEO (chief engagement officer), buzz2bucks | a word of mouth marketing firm, is skilled at making networks “work” and harnessing powerful online and offline buzz, she facilitates online visibility services and word of mouth coaching and workshops – taking companies and professionals from buzz-worthy to bucks-worthy.