Although the legal questions that dogged Pinterest earlier this year appear to have died down to some degree, the company has hired away one of Google's attorneys to start its own legal department. Michael Yang will begin as Pinterest's General Counsel on June 18, a company spokesperson tells us. He's their first internal attorney; Pinterest has been working with outside counsel to date. Business Insider reported the hiring earlier, saying that today is Yang's last day at Google. While at Google, Yang's duties included counseling product teams on privacy, copyright and other issues durin [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Pinterest | Pinterest: Business Issues | Pinterest: Legal | Top News

Pinterest, the visual-focused social sharing startup, has taken the online world by storm over the last year. According to the latest referral traffic and active user statistics as reported by Media Bistro, Pinterest has surpassed LinkedIn as the third most-popular social network in the world with a 145% increase in daily users since January 2012. What makes the story of Pinterest so unique is that accompanying its stratospheric growth are revenue and engagement metrics that have turned the social network into one of the few sources in the space that are actually delivering traffic and sign [...]

Related Topics: Analytics & Marketing Column | Channel: Analytics | Columns | Pinterest | Pinterest: Analytics

Later today, Facebook Camera will be available as a standalone app for the iPhone. That's probably great news for a lot of Facebook users, but on a bigger scale, Google+ and Flickr probably have good reason to be worried. As shown in Facebook's announcement, the new Camera app will allow both photo sharing and consumption. Users can publish multiple photos at once, rather than posting one photo at a time. They can tag friends, add a location and/or include a description. There's also a few photo editing tools -- cropping, rotating and so forth. Or, they can use the app to browse through and [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Facebook | Facebook: Apps & App Center | Facebook: Mobile | Google: Google+ | Pinterest | Top News | Yahoo: Flickr

The 3rd largest social networking site, Pinterest, has pinned down a lead investor in their highly contested round of funding according to AllThingsD.  The Japansese e-commerce company, Rakuten, will invest "upwards of $50 million in a $100 million round."  This total investment round will place the valuation of Pinterest at $1.5 billion dollars. The partnership makes sense from an offerings and from a global expansion standpoint.  Pinterest has stopped leveraging affiliate links for revenue and moving forward with commerce on the site is a logical next step.  With the global expansion, [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Pinterest | Pinterest: Business Issues | Top News

Pinterest became the social media’s new golden child earlier this year when marketers learned that it drives more web traffic than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn combined. Yet despite recent studies showing that referral traffic from the channel is decreasing, it’s still a big hitter in the social space. As B2B publishers we haven’t seen the same surge in traffic as others have, but for many others the impact is very real. Now marketers, publishers and community managers are asking, how do we track our content? How do we measure up to other sites? Are people really seeing our content if i [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Analytics | Features & Analysis | Marketing Tools: Analytics | Marketing Tools: Social Media | Pinterest | Pinterest: Business Use & Advertising | Social Media Marketing | Top News

After peaking in February, referral traffic from Pinterest has declined for two consecutive months. That's according to new data from the social sharing tool provider Shareaholic. Analyzing traffic to the 200,000 publishers that use its social sharing buttons, Shareaholic shows traffic from Pinterest representing 0.74 percent of all traffic during April, down from 0.8 percent in March and a high of 1.05 percent in February. The decline puts Pinterest back below Twitter as a referral source after surpassing it in February. This is just one source of data about which sites drive t [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Pinterest | Pinterest: Business Use & Advertising | Social Media Marketing | Statistics: Market Share | Statistics: Social Media

Ever since it's rise in popularity Pinterest has drawn a good deal of criticism around attribution (or lack thereof).  Today Flickr has announced a partnership of sorts that allow users to pin Flickr photos with proper attribution directly from Flickr.  This comes as a surprise to many as Flickr was actually the first major site to implement a "nopin" META tag to keep Pinners from sharing content. By clicking on the Pinterest button (or the share dropdown) a user can choose to share on Pinterest: Once shared on Pinterest, the photo title, user account and location (Flickr) is pu [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Pinterest | Pinterest: Legal | Top News

Despite its reputation as a female-dominated social network -- or perhaps because of that? -- every team in Major League Baseball is now actively using Pinterest. All 30 MLB teams also have official pages on Google+ and officials blogs on Tumblr. And the league itself also has an official presence on all three social networks. The league and all of its teams have already been active on Facebook and Twitter for some time now, but only recently expanded its collective social media footprint to Pinterest, Google+ and Tumblr. The league has created a "social media clubhouse" at MLB.com/co [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Content Marketing | Features & Analysis | Google: Google+ | Pinterest | Pinterest: Business Use & Advertising | Social Media Marketing | Top News | Tumblr

Ask Facebook. Ask Twitter. Ask Google+. Ask just about any social network, but especially one that's become big enough for the U.S. president to join: Building an audience and attracting media attention are great, but they also mean that trouble is on the way -- trouble in the form of spam. That's what Pinterest is facing this week, as spammers are coming out of the woodwork to tell their stories. That link points to a Daily Dot interview with "Steve," a self-admitted Pinterest spammer who has "a stockpile of accounts" and says he's "spamming the crap out of the site." "Steve" says Pinte [...]

Related Topics: Affiliate Marketing | Channel: Content Marketing | Features & Analysis | Pinterest | Pinterest: Spam | Social Media Marketing | Social Media Marketing: Spam | Top News

Who says Pinterest is a social networking site just for females? Don't tell that to President Barack Obama, who today became one of Pinterest's newest members. The Obama campaign announced the Pinterest account today via Twitter, and the followers are already flocking to see his pins -- the account had more than 1,600 followers when I made the screenshot above earlier, and now has passed the 1,800 follower mark. At the moment, Obama's Pinterest account has eight boards with 40 pins, including things like "Obama-inspired recipes" and "The First Family." But to be clear, this is go [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Pinterest

As Pinterest grows into a top 30 US website, brands are joining the image-sharing social network by the boatload. But not all Pinterest strategies are created equal. A new medium requires some creativity, so I set out to find some of the most creative uses of Pinterest out there today. If you're planning your own Pinterest strategy, use these 21 examples to help get you going. Celebrate The Iconic Oberlin College does a ton of things well on Pinterest. By looking at their boards, it's really easy to get an idea of the college, its students, its city and what makes it unique, like the neat [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Pinterest | Pinterest: Business Use & Advertising | Social Media Marketing Column

Pinterest's terms of service are changing, and changing for the better. A very straightforward email was sent out to Pinterest users today notifying them of upcoming changes to the terms that will become effective on April 6th.  Some of the language changes were implemented due to two big feature changes, private pinboards and a Pinterest API. The notice had 4 main sections that were changing: Our original Terms stated that by posting content to Pinterest you grant Pinterest the right for to sell your content. Selling content was never our intention and we removed this from our updat [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Pinterest | Pinterest: Legal | Pinterest: User Interface | Social Media Marketing | Top News

Pinterest was again one of the fastest-growing websites in February, and its U.S. userbase is up 237 percent so far in 2012. That's according to comScore's monthly accounting of the Top 50 web properties in the U.S. ComScore estimates that Pinterest reached 17.8 million unique users in February, making it the third biggest gainer in monthly users for the month (behind Healthline and IRS.gov). That figure is a 237 percent jump over the 7.5 million uniques that comScore estimated for Pinterest at the end of December. It also puts Pinterest in comScore's top 100 websites overall for the first [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Pinterest | Pinterest: Statistics | Social Media Marketing | Statistics: Popularity & Usage

We recently launched our Marketing Land and Search Engine Land accounts on Tumblr. We've been quietly developing them this month, familiarizing ourselves with the platform in terms of how to post, what to post, who to follow and ultimately defining why we should be there in the first place. If you've been thinking the same, perhaps our story will be of interest. Why Tumblr? Here's a response to launching our accounts after we announced them on Facebook: If we attract 12 year-olds to the world of search or internet marketing, that's not a bad thing. But no, that's not why. So what is o [...]

Related Topics: Blogging | Channel: Content Marketing | Features & Analysis | Pinterest | Social Media Marketing | Top News | Tumblr

Earlier this week I moderated a panel at the SXSW conference entitled: "Social Commerce: Not Yet Taking Off Like Farmville." The session explored the nature of "social commerce" and why companies were having trouble selling on Facebook, among other things. One of the basic ideas expressed was that people aren't looking to "shop" on Facebook; they're sharing with friends, having fun and so on. Those sentiments appear to be widespread and confirmed by a new survey from BlogHer, the women-centric blog network. The online survey was conducted last month among readers of the blog network and ge [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Facebook: Advertising | Facebook: Business Issues | Facebook: Statistics | Pinterest | Statistics: Online Behavior | Statistics: Social Media

The hits keep on coming for social image sharing website Pinterest and, yes, I actually mean that in the analytics/visits/pageviews sense of the word "hits." The folks at Experian Hitwise say that Pinterest is now one of the top 30 US websites based on total pageviews. In the course of two tweets this afternoon, Hitwise offered the following stats about Pinterest's explosive growth: Pinterest received more than 103 million total US visits in February. That traffic was a 36 percent increase over January visits. Total US pageviews were up 21 percent between January and February. [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Pinterest | Pinterest: Statistics | Social Media Marketing | Statistics: Popularity & Usage | Statistics: Social Media

You need to be where your consumers, fans and prospects are, but, with so many social platforms, it can be difficult to keep up and make sure everything works together. Ensuring the marketing, strategy, and consumer journey is consistent, fits together, and tells a story that ladders up to your objectives and goals is easier said than done. It’s safe to bet that Facebook has evolved into the hub of your social media marketing, and the announcement of Timeline for Pages may make it even more central. It is the place where your content, stories, and communication live as well as thrive. B [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Facebook Marketing Column | Facebook: Marketing | Facebook: Pages | Pinterest | Social Media Marketing

Flickr appears to be the first of what you'd call a "major" website to employ a meta tag that keeps copyright-protected images from being pinned on Pinterest. As VentureBeat first reported, Flickr is using the "nopin" meta tag that Pinterest just introduced earlier this week. When Pinterest sees the tag on a web page, none of the photos can be pinned directly from the page. Flickr is adding the "nopin" tag to photo pages that are marked as private, marked as non-safe, and -- this is the most common implementation -- on pages of Flickr users whose privacy settings don't allow photos to be [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Legal: Copyright & Trademark | Pinterest | Pinterest: Legal | Social Media Marketing | Top News | Yahoo: Flickr

As the noise continues to grow surrounding Pinterest and its potential legal headaches, the image-based social network has taken a small step toward placating website owners concerned with potential copyright violations. As LL Social pointed out yesterday, Pinterest is supporting a "nopin" meta tag that will prevent users from pinning images directly from the site where the code is installed. The meta tag can be found at the bottom of Pinterest's Help page, under a heading that says "What if I don't want images from my site to be pinned?" It's a simple piece of code: meta name="pinterest [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Legal: Copyright & Trademark | Pinterest | Pinterest: Legal | Top News

Pinterest has stopped using Skimlinks to monetize some of the "pins" that its users were publishing on the site and, in other news, the company also says that copyright issues haven't been a "significent issue" to date. Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann has been making the rounds a bit this week ("finally," some would say) and discussing some of the issues that have come up in light of the site's stunning recent growth. Silbermann contacted Josh Davis of LL Social, the site that helped spread the news about Pinterest adding affiliate links (via Skimlinks) to some of the content that users po [...]

Related Topics: Affiliate Marketing | Channel: Content Marketing | Legal: Copyright & Trademark | Pinterest | Pinterest: Business Issues | Pinterest: Legal | Social Media Marketing | Top News