Drew B's take on tech PR

Pinterest UK stats

A lot of attention has been coming through in the mainstream media this week about Pinterest. The Guardian featured the hot social network on the weekend, and Metro gave Pinterest a double page spread today. Lots of user stats are being bandied about, so I thought I would share some UK stats for Pinterest that were shown to me earlier in the month by my colleague @stedavies. 

The key stat is about the user demographic. Pinterest's users are NOT 97% female as reported in the Guardian today (that's an old number). In the UK the users are 60/40 MALE and in the US it's a more skewed 80/20 FEMALE. Those are just the elevator pitch numbers... here is a full breakdown. And there will be more to come. All these stats are over two months old so expect a refresh to your planning deck soon. 

A week without Twitter: an experiment in Pinterest

Over recent years I've enjoyed testing out new social networks while they're still shiny. The last few weeks I've been looking at how to get the most out of another new thing: Pinterest.com.

For those that haven't tried it, Pinterest is a pinboard-themed image sharing social network. It is popular with forum users, more women than men, and with a pretty mainstream demographic (I know colleagues who have mentioned it to their wives only to find they have been using Pinterest for some time). Much different to Twitter for example which was very male and techy for its early years.

On Pinterest there are some users with over a quarter of a million followers. Pinboards can be collaborative. It's all very Facebook and Twitter friendly, and content is discoverable nicely as a live stream or in themes. To a digital Comms person like me, it's all very exciting.

This week I'm going to step away from Twitter, which I've been using heavily for six years now. I feel like an addict! Instead whenever I feel the urge to tweet, I will pin. I hope to find some novel uses for it.

You can find my updates and my pinboards at http://pinterest.com/drewbenvie . Feel free to comment there, or here, with any thoughts of feedback.

I will update this post with anything interesting I find along the way.

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Update #1. 24hrs in: 

• I would love to see stats on how many people view your pics / pins
• Pinning is difficult from mobiles and tablets. Some functions don't work on the ipad for example
• It would be great to click on people who follow your pinboards the same as you can with people who follow you. I can't seem to do this, but have more followers of my PR Stunts pinboard than I do for my generic profile and would like to follow them back. Any tips? 
• You can't pin content from Twitter easily! 
• I'm thinking more visually now.
• I've found there are some people on Pinterest with a LOT of followers! Maia Macdonald, below, for example, has over 700,000 followers at the time of writing this blog post

Update #2. 2 days in: 

• Pinterest is the Anti-Twitter. People I know who don't get or don't like Twitter LOVE Pinterest
• 'Recent Activity' on the right hand side of your home page is not a live ticker, like Facebook or Twitter. So make sure you refresh (see below image)
• I'm missing the way Twitter allows you to chat to friends independently from an image upload. 
• Pinterest is FUN (corny but true)

Update #3: wow that week went quick: 

• What I liked: Pinterest is a whole 'nother world of image based social sharing. It appeals to people to share what they're reading in different ways
• What I missed: I will continue to use Pinterest instead of other image sharing services, but not instead of Twitter or Facebook. Twitter is my social IM. Facebook my network of close friends
• What surprised me: our agency won some cool new client work this week. Two of these clients cited my / our work on Pinterest as a factor in that. And of course I think that's awesome. It's so exciting to be able to try out something personally / socially and then get to do it for work. Did Pinterest get me a new job this week? Yes, it kind of got me two!
• Now back to using a bit of everything, including, very much, Pinterest :)

A week of breakfasts, newbies and WIN

This week was one of the busier weeks for a while now. To kick off was the beginning of a new movement: many breakfasts. A team breakfast was organised to welcome a new member of the 33 Digital team - one of the UK's most well-respected and experienced social media practitioners in PR joined the family this week in the shape of Stephen Davies, aka PRblogger.com. Stephen is someone I had the pleasure of working with six years ago and all of Hotwire group is excited to have him on board. Fun times for all indeed!

The many breakfasts movement continued on Tuesday with Hotwire, 33 Digital and Skywrite’s third annual social media trends briefing [see coverage on Econsultancy, Corp Comms and Propel London]. A presentation of a report written by the 33 Digital team, this event saw 33 Digital clients the Financial Times and eBay co-present the 2012 trends alongside 33 Digital director Pete Sigrist and myself to a rammed Soho Hotel screening room. Almost 200 people attended and the session was without doubt the most fun I think we’ve had in running such an event. They are normally much smaller (last year it was 30 people) so you can understand why this contributed to a week we call ‘full of WIN’.

Pic: our 2012 social media trends briefing

Wednesday’s instalment of many breakfasts took a delegation of the 33 Digital and Hotwire team to The Hoxton, to help with the FT’s first Tweetup of 2011. A fantastic venue and great event which made us all want to go back to the Hoxton again for similar events but also just to work from their lovely luxurious / industrial set-up. Sadly, I couldn’t make it to any of the industry socials that were taking place Wednesday evening, which included the NMA social, PRCA drinks, and the Foursquare London Meetup. Waking up the next morning to the news of a thousand social media millionaires having been created was certainly a watershed moment. Sadly not one I was able to have been directly involved with (shame).

This brings me to Thursday which was busy and full of win in many ways, and looking forward to a more normal breakfast tomorrow and doing some typing in front of a computer screen maybe.

Here’s looking forward to what’s shaping up to be a great 2012.