Rachel brings up a topic that I admit had not occurred to me.
Raise your hand if you’ve heard of Pinterest.
Chances are, if you’re a woman, your hand is up right now.
Chances are, if you’re a man, you are either rolling your eyes because you’ve heard of it and are sick of hearing about it or you are a little confused.
Pinterest has exploded onto the scene as the new up-and-comer, particularly after it was announced that Pinterest is driving more traffic to websites than Google Plus, You Tube and LinkedIn combined. I’ve been watching the Pinterest frenzy with some interest, as it’s one of the first self-expression networks that women dominated before men even knew what was happening.
Naturally, that has caused some (male) pundits to discount Pinterest’s staying power.
Regardless of where you stand on whether or not Pinterest is the Next Big Thing, there’s no doubt that it’s A Big Thing Right Now which means it’s time for all you politicians to climb on the bandwagon, rosin up your social skills and start putting it to use. Here are a few tips to get you started.
I admit, I knew nothing about Pinterest beyond knowing that it exists and noticing that the only people I knew who seemed to be using it were women. But like Rachel, I’m intrigued by the possibilities of a platform like this for political purposes. Seems to me that in an election year that has been and will be about denying access to birth control, denying access to health care for women by de-funding Planned Parenthood, and generally treating women and their doctors as being incapable of making their own decisions, and given that the voting bloc Democrats need to be bringing to their side are “disproportionately young, female and secular”, it doesn’t take a social media guru to see the possibilities in a female-oriented community whose goal is to “connect everyone in the world through the ‘things’ they find interesting”. Annie’s List, I’m especially looking at you. Here’s one way of doing it, if you can’t think of anything offhand. You’re smart, you can figure it out from there. Everyone knows how to use the tools from the last election. The first people to figure out how to use the tools for the next election will have a huge advantage in it.
I looked at it once using my wife’s account. At the time, she had 65 friends on it. 64 of them were women and the 1 man is perhaps the most flamboyantly gay man either of us knows. Most of it included pictures of nice kitchens and such. But, there was more serious stuff too. Like for instance, a friend has been posting updates about her daughter’s battle with amnesia.
The site is currently 60% female.
If the Obama campaign isn’t leveraging it by November i’ll be surprised.
If the Republican candidate’s /is/ using it in a non-laughable way by then, i’ll be surprised as well. (And impressed).
Funny .. I also have Pinterest and I am also a woman. I agree, the site is very women oriented but there are other sites that are available for men and women to use together. My favorite (that both my fiance and I just started using ) is clipix.com. The site is a lot more organized and I’m really enjoying it so far. We both use it are are able to share things with each other very easily using these things they call syncboards. My fiance refuses to go on Pinterest because it’s so girly but he’s loving clipix and I’m glad we have a site we can use together!
I am loving Clipix as well! Pinterest is fun, but a bit too messy for me, and way too public. Many times I want to pin things that I like, but do not want others to see, so I just dont pin those. On clipix, I have several private clipboards, and it makes me very happy to clip like crazy into those… lol
Pingback: Weekend link dump for February 26 – Off the Kuff
Pingback: Presidential Pinterest – Off the Kuff