Chris Brogan cut through all the Pinterest crap with a great reminder this morning. He said…
It’s Never the Medium. It’s the People
We seek to connect with people. We want to reach them for whatever our goal might be. It’s our effort to connect with them in a meaningful way that benefits our mutual needs that should be the goal. It’s never about the delivery mechanism.
We want what we want. Can you listen to Dr. Stephen R. Covey on cassettes? Absolutely. But if I leave those cassettes in my car (well, if my car had a tape deck), then I’m out of luck, aren’t I? With Audible.com, I can download the audio file to whatever device I want, as often as I want. It’s not the medium. It’s the information.
The People Are the Goal
Who follows whom on Twitter isn’t all that interesting. What we do with those connections is why it matters. How we take our access and make something interesting happen-that is the goal.
Again, it’s not whether I follow you or not. It’s whether something I do can improve your business or goals, and it’s whether you can share something or introduce something, or riff on something, or whatever. It’s how we use the network to build a system. It’s how we make our platform shine to help others, to grow our business, and more. That’s the magic.
Is Pinterest The New Amazing Network?
It will be, for those who use it to build a relationship that goes beyond the pins. Any network is serviceable, if you learn how to interact and help people satisfy their needs.
Now, let’s make mix-tapes together, shall we? Let’s make songs of love: a love of doing better business by building stronger human relationships over whatever medium we want.
You in?
No, I’m not into Pinterest. I’ve played with it, found a few shortcuts [like use the Pinterest extension from Shareaholic in Chrome], created a couple hundred pins. It’s fun, but it’s not as useful for me as Evernote! I thought I’d use Pinterest to share the infographics that I love [I’m a huge fan of infographics!] but I ran into a couple of shortcomings that make Pinterest less that useful for me…
Ask yourself this question: If a picture is worth a thousand words, which of the thousand words will I use to describe the picture so that it can be found by anyone, anywhere at any time. Pinterest doesn’t really give you the ability to describe or search for what you are looking for very well. Pinterest would be really cool if it had a powerful advanced search feature or better yet, visual search. As it is though, for me it’s just a cute little toy at the moment. Those words may come back to haunt me someday but for now, that’s my take…
Here’s a little riff I did comparing Pinterest and Evernote focusing on some of the features that are important to me. I’ll let you decide what works best for you…
Here are some of the best reads I’ve found on Pinterest lately:
It’s fun and cute, but not very useful to me…
http://storify.com/e1evation/am-i-the-only-one-that-doesn-t-love-pinterest
Related articles
- 6 Compelling Reasons You Should Use Pinterest for Marketing (hubspot.com)
- Pinterest for Business: 9 Tips From Superuser PediaStaff [CASE STUDY] (socialfish.org)
- Cool Pinterest Infographic (abbeydufoe.wordpress.com)
- Posting From Pinterest To Your Facebook Fan Page (marketaire.com)
- Pinterest is What YOU Want it to Be (cc-chapman.com)
- Sorry, but I’m just not that Pinterested (newhope360.com)
- 7 Examples of Brands That Pop on Pinterest (hubspot.com)
Todd Lohenry 