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Pinterest

Update: Pinterest’s Acceptable Use Policy and Brand Pins/Pinboards

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Disclosure: I am Vice President, Influencer Marketing at BlogHer. Advertising and social media marketing programs are a significant source of revenue for my company and for the bloggers in our advertising network.

It’s not a secret that I am something of an ethics/best practices aficionado. As a result, I pay particular attention to the terms of service and acceptable use policies of the social platforms commonly used in sponsored programs. The good news is: I love it so you don’t have to 🙂

Recently (1/31/2014),  Pinterest changed its Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) to explicitly prohibit both compensated pins and ads that could be confused with Pinterest content.

Specifically prohibited per the AUP :

“Create or show ads that look like or could be confused with Pinterest content (for example, embedding Pinterest actions like Pin, follow or unfollow in your ads)
Directly compensate users for Pinning, following or unfollowing” 

However:

“a business can pay someone to help them put together a board that represents their brand. For example, it’s okay for a guest blogger to curate a board for a local boutique’s profile. We don’t allow that boutique to pay the blogger to Pin products to her own boards.”

How does this  impact brands that want to use Pinterest in their promotional efforts? Here’s my take.

Not Allowed:

Brands CANNOT compensate influencers to pin brand content on their own Pinterest boards. This includes asking them to curate from a pre-defined pool of content or Pinterest boards.

Allowed:

Influencers can create boards for brands on the brand Pinterest. Because the brand’s Pinterest is understood to be commercial, the board can include branded pins, and no further FTC disclosure is necessary.

Brands can license previously published blog content  to populate the brand Pinterest boards. These licensed pins can include branding. 

Finally,  influencers can create sponsored boards on their own Pinterest account using a theme that aligns with the brand messaging but does not specify content sources or include any paid branded pins. The board sponsorship would require disclosure per FTC requirements, as it is a compensated activity, but one that is more akin to an editorial sponsorship than sponsored advertorial.

Pinterest does not include an example of this type of board in the AUP update but I am confident that this is well within the policy. Here’s an example, built around the theme of beautiful things:

Sponsored Pinboard

That said, Pinterest can always change its mind about this, or any other policy in its Terms of Service or AUP, so it is wise to check the company’s blog for updates before finalizing any program.

In particular, if you want to do a contest or sweeps using Pinterest, something I generally do not recommend, the service regularly refines its policy on sweeps and contests. The current policy is much in line with the new position on compensated pinning. It states: “please don’t:

Suggest that Pinterest sponsors or endorses you or the promotion
Require people to Pin from a selection
Make people Pin your contest rules
Run a sweepstakes where each Pin, board, like or follow represents an entry
Encourage spammy behavior, such as asking participants to comment
Ask Pinners to vote with Pins, boards or likes
Require a minimum number of Pins”

 What do these changes mean for brands over the long term?  

Pinterest is still feeling its way around commercial use of the platform, and is simultaneously trying to maintain the authenticity of the experience that caused such dynamic growth while evaluating and building its own monetization models. Right now, it is being very restrictive on commercial use of the core functionality of the platform, much as Facebook did a few years ago.

Facebook has since loosened some (but not all) the restrictions it placed, particularly with regard to Pages (versus personal Profiles). I expect Pinterest will do the same: reserve some capabilities to itself while lightly loosening the restrictions in areas where it is not building its own solutions.

More to come, I am sure!

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Who “owns” social platforms?

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Who “owns” social platforms? The user or the platform? The answer is both obvious, and yet not.

Clearly the developer of the platform (and its shareholders) own the business and its intellectual property. Deciding who owns the experience is a wee bit harder. Without the engaged users, there is no experience. In that respect the users are just as invested in the platform as its nominal owners.

This tension can sometimes get ugly. Nearly every time Facebook changes its terms of service, interface or algorithms, the users get restless, threaten revolt etc.

But what happens when a change in and enforcement of the terms of service impacts the business of its users. As when Facebook restricted sweepstakes and contests a few years ago. Restrictions it has since loosened. Or when Pinterest began applying daily pin limits to minimize spam and revising and enforcing its guidelines for contests and sweepstakes that involve Pinterest.

On some level, the platforms rely on creative users to experiment with business models to surface interesting ways of leveraging the platform. Is it then fair when the platform asserts its marks (pin, pinning), chooses to limit an activity (number of pins per day) or restricts something to itself alone as Facebook did with “advertising.” Perhaps not, but no one ever promised fair.

When you build your business on the back of someone else’s platform, you run the risk — always — of the platform making changes that impact your business. For example, when Pinterest asserted its claim to the concept of digital pins and pinning and signaled intent to enforce, a number of companies building third party Pinterest tools that used Pin in the name rebranded. Pingage became Ahalogy. Pinerly morphed into Reachli.

And last month, blogger Amy Lupold Blair was requested to not enforce a trademark she had registered for “Pinning Party” and to comply with Pinterest’s terms of service guidelines for sweepstakes and contests.

I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on the Internet, and my purpose for sharing this example isn’t to overanalyze it or decide who is “right.”

Because it doesn’t matter. Pinterest has a terms of service, and reserves the right to change its TOS at any time. If you want to use the service, you have to play by its rules.

The company also has to be consistent in its enforcement of its TOS and defense of the claim to the concept of the digital pin. That means pinning only happens on Pinterest and no other business entity can own pin/pinning in a digital context. It may seem draconian when applied to a loyal user like Amy, but if Pinterest doesn’t assert its claims consistently, it sets dangerous precedent for when it tries to assert against the inevitable copycat platforms.

I’m far more interested in exploring how we can use social platforms in our marketing and business offerings without getting tripped up by the inevitable tension of who owns what. Here are a few thoughts. Your Mileage May Vary.

  1. Build your offering on something you can own independent of a platform. It can certainly leverage a platform but for maximum flexibility, the underlying concept should be portable. This is why content-based plays are so powerful. The “product” is the story. The platform is simply the conduit.
  2. If you have a great idea for technology play on top of/relying on a single platform, be honest with yourself. Are you a bleeding edge first mover? Or is your idea a breakthrough for the platform? Then it’s possibly worth trying to position you/your idea/your company as an acquisition candidate quickly. Whether the platform wants to leverage your technology, get you out of the way or both, this is a strike-fast play.
  3. An independent technology concept that might plug into multiple platforms is also a decent bet, but again first mover or breakthrough has an edge, and shopping yourself may take longer than you have funds. Your idea needs to have legs on its own. Does it really fill an unmet market need?
  4. Pick a name for your product/service/company that you can own. You can’t own another’s trade or service marks, so don’t use ’em. Very few companies will be as lenient as Twitter when it comes to use of their name in your name. As we’ve learned with Pinterest, that a term is a generic like “pin” isn’t enough to rely on if the company can prove that use of the generic term in the specific context is something it created beyond the generic meaning.

And you know that just because a domain name is available, that doesn’t mean the name is, right?

For most bloggers, the content-based play is the simpler choice. It allows you to build on your strengths as a storyteller without being married to a platform. Your power is in your story, and in who cares to read it/engage with it/converse about it. Not in how you share it.

Bottom line: don’t build your empire — however large or small –on someone else. Build it on YOU.

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The Pinterest chapter, Part Two:Engaging with Brands on Pinterest and Sponsored Pins

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Disclosure: I am Vice President, Influencer Marketing at BlogHer. Advertising and social media marketing programs are a significant source of revenue for my company and for the bloggers in our advertising network.

And, now the conclusion of my multi-part “chapter” on using Pinterest as a promotional tool.

English: Red Pinterest logo
English: Red Pinterest logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As you grow your influence within the Pinterest ecosystem, you may get offers for sponsored opportunities. I am not talking about “Pin It To Win It” sweepstakes. I covered why I don’t recommend them to influencers or brands in my previous post.

So what does make sense for influencers to engage with brands on Pinterest? I break it down into four basic opportunities:

  1. Creating a board for a brand on its Pinterest account. You are essentially acting as a freelancer, curating pins to align with a brand message or theme. Some brands may wish to leverage your reputation as the content curator, and others may just want your expertise. You might be curating from deep archives of brand content to create a compelling re-pinworthy board or sourcing material from the Internet, always taking care to respect copyrights. With regard to FTC disclosure, it is a board on the brand account so it is assumed to be commercial activity. The brand will likely have a branding message it wants included on or in each pin.
  2. If you are writing a sponsored post for a brand, including compelling and pinworthy images to encourage readers to pin.  These can be branded or unbranded. If you do sponsored posts, you are likely already asked to include compelling and pinworthy images to encourage readers to pin. And if you haven’t been, you will be, as it is becoming a standard ask. When your users pin images from your sponsored posts, they are not required to disclose, as they are not compensated for their action. If you pin images from your sponsored posts, you should include a disclosure statement on the pin.
  3. Creating a board for a brand on YOUR Pinterest account. If you are approached to create a board for a brand on your account, carefully evaluate the ask. Will the resulting board be interesting to your followers?  Is the brand asking you to pin all branded content or is the assignment broader, curating a board aligned with the brand message but not necessarily brand content? Both of these scenarios can be effective but it depends on the brand. The board and all the sponsored pins must include a disclosure statement, such as “Sponsored by”  on the board description and #sponsored on the pins.
  4. Pinning brand content to your boards, but not to a specific board. This is a very effective way to distribute brand content without fatiguing your Pinterest followers. It works best when the brand has a deep archive of branded content from which you can curate. A good rule of thumb: the pool of content you are curating from should be between 2 to 4 times larger than the total number of pins you have been asked to add to your Pinterest boards. In other words, if you are asked to curate 10 pins, an ideal pool should be between 20-40 pieces of content. All the pins must include a disclosure such as #sponsored. Including just the hashtag of the brand is NOT sufficient.

Some things to keep in mind:

  • Pins are entities in and of themselves, and are most often viewed independently from the boards of which they are a part. Boards are useful organizing constructs but pins are the principal discovery mechanism. Make sure each and every pin is a useful piece of discrete content, with proper attribution and disclosure.
  • Your followers do not have to retain the disclosure if they repin a sponsored pin. You were compensated and must disclose. They were not.
  • Follow the 80/20 rule here as well: 80% non promotional pins, 20% promotional, whether for your own content or sponsored.

And there you have it, in two-and-a-half parts, the Pinterest chapter that would have been. What are your tips and thoughts on the best ways to use this platform?

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The Pinterest Chapter: A Sidebar on Pin It To Win It

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Disclosure: I am Vice President, Influencer Marketing at BlogHer. Advertising and social media marketing programs are a significant source of revenue for my company and for the bloggers in our advertising network.

Reviewing the content for the second part of my “book chapter” on using Pinterest to promote your blog, I realized there was a great deal of content about sweepstakes and contests on Pinterest as a marketing tactic that really merited its own post. So herewith the Pin It To Win It sidebar.

Straight up, I do not recommend Pin It To Win It as an engagement tactic. There are better, more authentic and far less complicated ways for brands to engage with influencers on Pinterest, which I will outline in my next post, the “official” Part Two of my Pinterest “chapter.”

With the current functionality of the Pinterest platform, Pin It To Win It sweepstakes are complicated and ugly. Entering is usually a multi-step process. Six or more seems to be the norm: follow the brand on Pinterest, register on a website or entry form that you are participating, then create the pins (however many are required) and then go back and register the pins.

They are also a big ole tease. Pinterest is not simply broadcasting, it is long term curation. As a result, users find pins sometimes weeks and months later. Pins promoting long-over sweepstakes? Yucky.

Pinterest sweeps and contests also don’t necessarily give the brand the reach it expects. If the prize is terrific, some Pinterest powerhouses will enter but for most sweeps, entrants will be folks with more modest followings. Creating my personal pet peeve: Pinterest sweeps have spawned hundreds and hundreds of abandoned pinboards created for no other reason than to enter the sweepstakes. Pin Junkyards, if you will.

If/when the Pinterest platform can support sweepstakes and contests within the ecosystem, they could be a lot of fun. Right now though, I do not recommend them as a marketing strategy. You want to take the time to enter them? Go for it. But at the current state of play, Pinterest sweeps don’t contribute to brand building the way everyone hopes.

That said, marketers: if you absolutely must do a sweeps on Pinterest, please familiarize yourself with Pinterest’s brand guidelines for the service’s excellent recommendations.

For ease of reference, the Do’s and Don’ts for sweep and contests below are reproduced in full from Pinterest’s Brand Guidelines (http://business.pinterest.com/brand-guidelines/)

Do:

  • Remember that Pinterest is all about people discovering things that inspire them. Reward quality pinning over quantity.
  • Make it easy to get involved with clear and simple instructions.
  • Read our anti-spam measures to keep your contest fun and useful.
  • Check out our branding guidelines if you’re going to reference Pinterest in any way.

Don’t:

  • Suggest that Pinterest sponsors or endorses you or the contest.
  • Require people to pin from a selection—let them pin their own stuff.
  • Make people pin or repin your contest rules. This is a biggie.
  • Run a sweepstakes where each pin, repin, board, like or follow represents an entry.
  • Encourage spammy behavior, such as asking participants to comment.
  • Ask pinners to vote with pins, repins, boards, or likes.
  • Overdo it: contests can get old fast.
  • Require a minimum number of pins. One is plenty.

The Pinterest Chapter, Part One: Using Pinterest To Promote Your Blog

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Disclosure: I am Vice President, Influencer Marketing at BlogHer. Advertising and social media marketing programs are a significant source of revenue for my company and for the bloggers in our advertising network.

When I wrote Professional Blogging For Dummies in 2010, I tried to make the advice as evergreen as possible. This was challenging at times, as the For Dummies style is very example driven; in tech, this is the very definition of an “annual plant.” Where possible though  I gave guidelines that could be applied to new tools based on the simple premise that regardless of how we communicate and share with others, we are still communicating and sharing. The why and what of that doesn’t change all that much, even if the how does.

So, if you pick up a copy of my book and read the chapter on social promotion of your blog, much of the advice I give for Facebook and Twitter could very easily be extended to Pinterest. But I thought it might be helpful if I delved a bit deeper. So here is the chapter on Pinterest that I might have written if Pinterest had existed in 2010. Except not completely in For Dummies style. That’s the publisher’s IP.

English: Red Pinterest logo
English: Red Pinterest logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Let’s start with a baseline. My lens is that of a professional blogger. This has a few ramifications for the discussion.

First and foremost, the professional blogger has an objective for her blog. It is story telling  with a purpose.

Second, this purpose is often to monetize. Even when the surface intent is to convince, as with political, charity and cause related blogs, there is almost always a fundraising component.

So I am not looking at the social graph as a way to connect with family and friends or create a personal scrapbook. It is sharing with intent to promote your blog, grow your overall influence and achieve your professional objectives.

Initially the ethos of Pinterest was to share others’ content, not your own, and in fact, commercial (ie promotional) activity was prohibited. This changed in November 2012 when it launched business accounts so there is no reason to not use the platform to promote your own content.

You just want to do it in the “right” way — welcomed by your followers and effective for the promoted brand, whether it is you, your blog or a product.

If this were a true “For Dummies” chapter, I would have to carefully explain what Pinterest is, how it works and how to use it. But it’s not, so I am going to assume that readers are familiar with Pinterest and understand three basic things about the platform —

  • Pinterest is visual. Images are everything.
  • It’s curation of content, not broadcasting a message.
  • It’s a long-term play. Something pinned today might not get traction for days, weeks or even months.

So let’s dive right into how Pinterest can support your promotional strategy with some suggestions for maximizing your Pinterest promotion.

  1. Convert your personal Pinterest account to a business account. Per the Pinterest Terms Of Service, you MUST do this if you are planning to use your Pinterest account for commercial purposes.
  2. Make sure your blog/website images are gorgeous, high quality and tell a story visually. If an image needs a caption or title, keep it short and incorporate it in the image so it stays with the pin as it is repinned. But subtly. If your caption is larger than the image, it won’t be pinned/repinned.
  3. Use (at a minimum) the tools Pinterest provides business accounts:
    • Make it easy for people to pin your content using the Pin It button.
    • Pinterest’s analytics are pretty basic, but a little information is better than none, so use them to understand the content that people like on your site. So you can create more of it!
  4. Give your boards names that clearly identify what sort of content folks will find if they visit the board.  Most folks engage pin by pin, not by checking out boards to see what’s new, but a clear name improves your chances that someone seeing a pin might check out and follow the related pinboard. And thus see subsequent pins. Maybe even dig around in the old ones; see above, Pinterest is a long term play.
  5. Pin when your audience is online and engaging with Pinterest. A recent survey of the BlogHer community suggests weekday evenings are when our audience of digitally savvy women is most likely to be engaging with Pinterest.
  6. Follow the 80/20 rule — 80% of your pins should be promoting other people’s content, and no more than 20% promoting your own. This is a best practice for any social platform, but it also has a benefit beyond simply NOT being a shill. Fully engaging with the platform shows that you are a knowledgeable and reliable source of relevant content, and helps build your influence. Brands are increasingly looking at influence across the social graph, and not just blog readership, to determine who they want to work with for sponsored opportunities.
  7. If your blog content fits one of the new rich pin categories – recipes, products or movie reviews (as of May 2013), I’d go ahead and set it up. While it is still too early to predict the long-term impact of rich pins, it is safe to say that:
    • they clearly make it easier for Pinterest users to access some of your content without visiting your blog, but
    • they will increase the value of pins from your blog/site within the Pinterest ecosystem, which should positively impact repins, your overall influence and traffic to your blog from folks seeking out additional content like the pin they found.
  8. Experiment with third party tools that offer additional metrics and support for your pins. Right now, I am experimenting with Pingage.

Next week, Part Two: Engaging with Brands on Pinterest and Sponsored Pins

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