Not really a new kid on the block

This is yet another article about Pinterest. Yes, a long overdue social media rant! Alarm bells ring when I read something like “By now you’ve likely heard of this social networking website called Pinterest.” My italics, and the word ‘this’ tells me right away that the article is going to be anti-Pinterest. And it was written today, not six month ago.

The writer goes on to say that he won’t be using this social media and these are his reasons. You’ll find my comments in italics:

Personal reason #1: My guy friends would make fun of me. I’m serious. You will never catch me at a dinner party commenting that, “I just pinned the most incredible thing today.”
This is just plain silly. If a marketing method works, who cares if someone ‘makes fun of you’? If you really are so sensitive, don’t mention it to you ‘guy friends’. It is true that in the USA, the majority of users are female (the opposite is true in the UK) but by a small percentage. Very small. Many Pinterest accounts are businesses or destinations. Sure, if someone is called ‘Jane’ it’s pretty reasonable to assume they are female but what if they are called ‘The Riverside Hotel’? Worried about his ‘guy friends’? Someone isn’t secure about their sexuality, I think.

Personal reason #2 – This smells like social scrapbooking. I don’t scrapbook. My mother does.
It doesn’t just ‘smell’ of social scrapbooking, it is.  That’s the whole point. And huge numbers of people are telling you exactly what they are planning in the future by doing so. You won’t find out anything about me on Facebook unless you are my ‘friend’ (oh dear) but on Pinterest you’ll find out that I motor racing, that I am a grandmother, that I don’t eat meat, that I’m editing my dad’s autobiography … you have a huge market on Pinterest telling you what they want to buy.

Personal reason #3 – It doesn’t fit an unmet need. Put plainly, I don’t know what I’d do with a Pinterest account. My digital life already seems complete through a combination of tools I use daily to keep my online universe in order. I use Google Reader, Twitter, Facebook, and StumbleUpon to stay in the know. If something catches my eye and warrants archiving for future reference, I turn to a combination of Delicious and Evernote.
That says it all – he wouldn’t know what to do with an account. And yet he says that the service is no good when he hasn’t even tried it. “I don’t like tomatoes. I’ve never tried one, but I know I don’t like them’. Yeah.  People still use Delicious and Stumbleupon?

Professional reason #1 – it encourages the clever over the strategic. Social media has always struggled with an inability to prove its worth. Pinterest is no different.
How can he say that without trying it? Social media doesn’t struggle to prove its worth. What a daft thing to say. Only an amateur marketer would say such a thing. I can tell you exactly how many emails I get saying ‘I saw your pin on Pinterest…’ Why is that so hard?

Professional reason #2 – As a social standalone, Pinterest is a fad. It’s one thing to be a part of the early-adopter crew; it’s a whole other thing to chase fads. And I think marketers are chasing fads with Pinterest.
Marketers use whatever they come across. It may be a fad for a year or so then disappear but how much promotion can be done in a year? Every time something has come along (newspapers, radio, TV, fax, email) marketers have leaped on it and used it to its best advantage, fad or not. Ads by fax was huge at one time. Who has fax machines these days?

Professional reason #3 – The real credit goes to Facebook’s social development platform.
After saying that the service is worthless, the author then says that the ‘credit’ goes to Facebook. So if it’s worthless, why give credit? That just makes no sense. And who cares who gets the credit?

Sorry matey, but all you have done with your article is shown that you have no idea what you’re doing and I feel sorry for your clients, if indeed you have any.  Oh, I so love a social media rant