Marketing Roadmaps

Susan Getgood

Pinterest changes TOS, allows commercial use: What does this mean for you?

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Last Wednesday, Pinterest changed its Terms of Service (TOS) to allow commercial use.

Wait. What?

You mean commercial boards and sponsored pinning may have been in technical violation of Pinterest’s TOS all these months?

Yes indeedy. Given the importance of widespread commercial adoption of the service to its ultimate ability to monetize, it is highly unlikely that it would have cracked down on the commercial activity, but until last week, the TOS prohibited both commercial use and encouraging commercial use by others unless the activity was pre-approved by Pinterest.

So, what do you need to do if you are planning to use Pinterest for commercial purposes?

You must comply with the Pinterest Terms of Service and the FTC’s Guideline for Commercial Endorsements. Here’s how:

  1. You need to have a business account and agree to the Business Terms of Service. If you already have an account, it is easy to convert it to a business account, and if you do not, you simply open it as a business account. Both can be done at business.pinterest.com. HubSpot did a nice tutorial with screen shots if you need a little guidance. Important: ANYONE using Pinterest for commercial purposes, even an individual, needs to have a business account to be in compliance with the Pinterest TOS. The pages don’t look any different but Pinterest has released some tools for the business accounts and has promised more, which is an incentive above and beyond the simple ethical consideration of complying with the TOS!
  2. You need to develop your policy for proper disclosure of commercial activity on your Pinterest account to comply with FTC requirements for commercial endorsements. If you are a commercial brand and your account has a company name, your boards likely will be presumed to be commercial content, so you should be fine from a disclosure standpoint. However, if you are an individual, you must make sure that your affiliations are clear. I recommend:
  • As a best practice —  put a clear statement in your bio about your affiliations.
  • To comply with the FTC, label any boards and pins related to commercial activity in the description. For example, “My Golfer’s Paradise board is brought to you by GOLF BRAND” on the pinboard description, and on the pins themselves, a sponsor statement such as “Sponsored by GOLF BRAND” or “Love this putter from GOLF BRAND. #sponsored.”

Next — and this  part is optional, not a Pinterest or FTC requirement, but I personally recommend developing your own guidelines for your use of Pinterest to best leverage the platform and ensure consistency of your approach over time. Plan the work and work the plan!

If you represent a brand, you want the boards to fit the ethos of Pinterest, and help build awareness, interest, consideration and purchase. Don’t just slap up boards with pictures from your catalogs or details of the latest promotion. Think about how you can make your content valuable to the community so they will repin it and help you spread the word.

If you are an individual, you want your sponsored Pinterest content to be consistent with your non-sponsored personal pins. Your taste and interests are why people have followed your boards, and you don’t want to disappoint. Bottom line, if you have any sort of following, brands will be approaching you. Best to have your own strategy lined up so you know which opportunities are worthwhile, and which ones are not.

Lookin’ for Adventure

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For real!

I was lucky enough to be hosted, along with 11 BlogHer Network bloggers, at a 2 day event at Harley-Davidson headquarters in Milwaukee earlier this week.

Here on Marketing Roadmaps, I will be sharing some observations about the event and the impeccable execution of the Harley-Davidson team. And over on my personal blog Snapshot Chronicles, I will share my personal experiences over the 2 days as well as some amazing tidbits from Harley history. Watch for these posts over the next week or so.

Disclosure: I am a BlogHer employee and attended this event as a representative of BlogHer.

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The one in which I declare war on infographics

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GLAM-Wiki Infographic
GLAM-Wiki Infographic (Photo credit: Wikipedia

Infographics are all the rage these days. Every new media company seems to have one (or more) to visually explain their offerings, and every social consultant seems to have one to share their analyses.  The damn things are all over Pinterest and there are even entire websites devoted to infographics.

Except I find most of them are pretty useless. You can’t print them out unless you have a large format printer, and the print is so tiny you can’t read them on the screen most of the time either. Which is tragic on the rare occasions that  they actually do have useful information.

In fact, I would like to know who got the brilliant idea to jam so many charts and table onto a single poster? I’ve seen more than a few infographics that DO have useful info, but  just don’t get why it has to be served up on an illegible poster.

Once in a while, I find a useful, useable one, like this illustration of the corporate ownership of major consumer brands or this one about social media strategy. Not surprisingly, the ones I like tend to be simple, and focused on conveying a single piece of information in a graphic manner.

But more often than not, they  just seem like attempts to jump on the infographic bandwagon — Look Ma! I can make an infographic!

For example, I love the Copyblogger. In fact, I recommend the site in Professional Blogging for Dummies. But the infographic he created recently to illustrate 22 Ways to Create Compelling Content When You Don’t Have a Clue wasn’t any more useful, IMNSHO, than the original post. Sure it was pretty pictures, but there wasn’t any improvement on the information.

And that is what I want from an infographic. A useful infographic materially improves upon the source data by combining multiple sources of information to create new meaning. More than just a poster with lots of “stuff,” it should transform the data into something new.

A picture is definitely worth a thousand words, but a picture made of a thousand words is not.

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The blog contest you are so glad wasn’t yours…

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Last week, a blogging hot mess developed around a contest being run for Chrysler by Ignite Social Media. You can get the deets at this post by Avitable. Fair warning: Avitable has a definite point of view on the events in question. I don’t.  Or more accurately, I’m not picking a side because I think both “sides” could have done things differently and achieved a far different outcome.

As many on the comment thread on Avitable pointed out, this sort of contest, in which consumers are encouraged to vote for their favorite bloggers so one of the bloggers can win a tremendous prize, nearly always turns into a popularity contest, rife with accusations of gaming the system and so on. Quite simply, they bring out the worst in human nature. Even when there isn’t a “confusion” about the rules.

My advice: stay away from this sort of event. No matter how good it sounds in the brainstorming session. There is a reason why we have election law and elaborate protections to prevent voter fraud, hanging chads notwithstanding. Unless you can prevent fraud, or even the hint of it, do something else with your marketing dollars.

And the truly sad thing? For those guarding the castle gates from the social media juggernaut, the whole mess is evidence that the blogosphere is a dangerous place for brands. No matter who was or was not at fault, the Chrysler brand has been tarnished by association with the whole thing. Even if they don’t  pull back from social media now, others will, and that’s a missed opportunity all around.