The Studio Source.com

Carmelita Caruana on Pinterest

The latest craze in social media
There was this little site that started in January 2011 called Pinterest. Called a virtual pinboard by its creators, it can be likened to an online scrapbook on steroids. It’s all about curating and collecting images and videos from every corner of the web. Pin an image to your virtual board, and whoever sees it can trace it back to its source.

That, in a nutshell, is the power of the site: potential customers can find you through collections of bright shiny things your admirers can’t resist.

The growth has been explosive: 389% from July to December 2011. Retailers and single users are reporting significant traffic spikes to their websites.

How it works
You can get an invitation from a Pinterest user, request one from the site itself via email (which may take a few days), or sign up immediately with an existing Facebook or Twitter account. From there, the instructions are easy. Create a few boards, which are simply collections of images based on a theme, and you’re off.

A quick Google search will give you some decent recon on how people are structuring their boards. You can also do a search on Pinterest without an account to see what kind of work is out there.

According to Pinterest etiquette, blatant self-promotion is against the rules. While posting some of your own work is fine, this is not a portfolio site.

It does, however, present incredible opportunities to showcase collections of work by like-minded creatives.

Who’s using it
Not surprisingly, 80% of account holders are women. The core group is between 25 and 44, and according to statistics from ecoconsultancy.com, fall into three groups: Boomers and Boomerangs, Babies and Bliss, and Families Matter Most. 25% have a Bachelor’s degree or higher.

This is where you inspect the bandwagon carefully to see if all the noise applies to you, or if this is a case of a big site that may fall into the category of There’s No Such Thing as Everybody. You can search the site without an account, and use Google to see if anyone you know is out there (provided they haven’t hidden their page from Google search).

Copyright and piracy
There’s no way around it: if your images are online, they’re prone to being swiped somewhere, sometime. Every image should be linked back to its origin, so you can consider a pin as an image in a magazine. You have to make a judgement call on the benefits and the risks.

You can hunt down your images by using this url: http://pinterest.com/source/yourwebsite and replace yourwebsite with your own URL.

So if we want to see what came from the lovely Carmelita Caruana’s Italian cooking blog, we do this: http://pinterest.com/source/blog.cookitaly.com/

To join or not to join
It looks like this juggernaut isn’t going away anytime soon. It’s big, it’s become hugely popular, and the ease of use is nearly as seductive as the images. With the growth of social commerce across the web, it’s a site, like Etsy, you shouldn’t completely ignore, even if it’s not appropriate for you right now.

Want more information? Check out the beginner’s guide on Mashable for more information (and here are some stats from leading retailers), or head on over to Pinterest.

About the author: Stacey Cornelius is a writer and professional butt-kicker who is well on her way to becoming a social  media burnout. Rather kick it old school with email? Sign up for her free, jargon-busting foundation marketing email class right here.