Pinterest.com/ProfessionlMojo
If you haven’t yet created a Pinterest profile for your business (and it’s something you might be interested in adding to your marketing strategy), you need to do it soon.
Marketing Vox has an article today on its blog noting that “squatters are snatching up brand identities on Pinterest”. Pinterest, if you recall, is a social bookmarking site that lets users create boards about subjects and then “pin” images from the web to those boards. Since Pinterest is growing, it looks like the baddies have taken note.
The article goes on to say that Econsultancy’s Chris Lake in February browsed 50 of the Interbrand list of 100 brands to find that 45 had yet to create Pinterest accounts, but only one was still available. The remaining 44 had been taken by the brands themselves, or by squatters. Perhaps Pinterest seemed trivial to those brands. But Lake observed that as of three years ago, Coca Cola had yet to create a Twitter profile. Lucky for Coke the identity had not been squatted, and it now has about a half-million Twitter followers.
Is there a lesson in this for smaller businesses and nonprofits? You bet! We’ve long been advocates of reserving your brand name across every available platform as a way to protect it. Shoring up your online portfolio in this way ensures that others (whether maliciously or unintentionally) do not create accounts that could be misconstrued as yours. This has been a problem with domain names and Twitter profiles in particular.
Is Pinterest going anywhere soon? Eh, it’s hard to tell, but your online reputation isn’t something to leave to chance: the chance Pinterest goes away or the chance that you’re never going to utilize it. I wouldn’t bet on either of those.
