Pinboard: communicating culture
March 28, 2012
Pinterest: huge growth among scrapbooking individuals, a big pile-on from marketers, and then even bigger interest in the Pinterest terms and conditions.
Pinterest changed their terms and conditions in the last few days, and as Knoed Creative say, there’s good news and the same news: Pinterest will not sell your content—apparently this was never the intention—but there is still a potential copyright issue over the content that you post.
There’s a fascinating post from a copyright/internet lawyer suggesting that in practice, the risk is low. (Note: Rick Sanders isn’t offering legal advice on this, and neither am I!) Of course, if you are a business, then the risk is likely to be higher than if you were pinning as an individual.
So here’s the play-it-safe suggestion:
- only pin what you have the rights to, link, and attribute correctly
- if you want people to freely pin your content, offer a Pin It button to make it clear
- if you don’t want people to pin your content, you can add code to your site to prevent it
Assuming you do, in fact, represent a business, what could you use Pinterest for?
Scrapbooking (aka Pinterest) is all about the visual, so how about video or images of your products, employees, projects, or other images that tell your corporate story? Have a look at how the Kansas City Police do it…
Expanding this to other stakeholder areas… do you think your audience might be on Pinterest? If they are—and if it is worth your while to spend time on this rather than on other social networks—how about creating:
- a Careers-oriented pinboard, with images from your careers events mixed with branding images; perhaps multiple pinboards, depending on the different groups you’re trying to attract. The US Army has some great Careers best practices on their website; they also use Pinterest to reach different stakeholders
- a CSR oriented pinboard, with images of your CSR events and activities, employee projects… if you’re following the ‘show don’t tell’ rule, then show how CSR is integral to your products/services/culture. Examples: VanillaSoft’s microloan program on Pinterest
- a press-kit style pinboard for each product launch, or for other significant news: images, video, links back to your site for more information. I don’t know whether Heineken, for example, are on Pinterest, but a search for ‘Heineken’ on Pinterest reveals a lot of interest!
Think moodboard, to get the style right – and have a look at these marketing campaigns to see what others have done on Pinterest to promote their brand.
If you’re thinking about internal comms, bear in mind that at the moment, Pinterest isn’t offering private boards, or boards for groups, so you do need to assume that anything you pin will be publicly available. How about investigating Gimmebar, Juxtapost or Clipix for an alternative?
Three core items for responsible media engagement
March 22, 2012
Often the greatest advances can be made by a single individual or by micro organisations who, while not necessarily radical, grasp the essence of an issue where larger corporations faff with trying to meet the needs of their share- and stake- holders.
This is why I spend a lot of my time looking at minor players in the CSR world. Sometimes such SMEs provide radical thinking, but more often than not they provide clear thinking, unrestrained by the social, political or economic factors which so often constrain larger corporations.
One such organisation is the Ibero-American Forum on Social Responsibility, hosted and organised by Perla Puterman. A hint of what this collective is about can be seen straightaway in the group’s name. It doesn’t limit itself to just Latin America nor does it definitively align itself with North, Central or South American countries.
Instead it looks to build bridges between Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries, whether they are in the Americas or the Iberian peninsula. When you add to the mix the rise of countries like Brazil and Venezuela in the global economy and the growing need for the improvement in responsible trading relations between European and South America, then you start to see the sense of an Ibero-American Forum. Read more
BOOK REVIEW: The Green Executive | Business leadership in a low carbon economy
March 12, 2012
Normally you would expect a book review to come at or around the time of a book’s publication. That was my most sincere intention when The Green Executive’s author, Gareth Kane of Terra Infirma, sent me a pre publication PDF back in May 2011.
Crumbs, was it really May? How time has marched on since then!
To try and make up for the terrible slip in the space-time continuum I will quite honestly put the one word out there which deserves to describe The Green Executive*: fantastic! Read more
Real CSR progress on Slavery & Human Rights
February 27, 2012
Most people know the London railway station Fenchurch Street because it was once important enough to be included on a Monopoly board. Today, and quite bizarrely, it’s the only railway terminus in Central London which isn’t directly connected to The Tube.
Fenchurch, for those who are not Douglas Adams fans, is also the name of the lady who “finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place” but was sadly blown up (along with the Earth) to make room for an interspace bypass before she could tell anyone.
I have a certain sympathy with Fenchurch the lady. I know how CSR can be used to make the world a better and happier place, but my solution has nothing to do with profits or the creation of wealth.
Thankfully I’ve not yet been blown up to make way for a bypass, but the way business continues to ignore human rights (as opposed to social engagement) is self defeating, This is why a new law in California, the eighth largest economy in the world, makes such a huge difference. Read more
Getting The Tone of Voice Right
February 16, 2012
Every site I visit has one or more of the standard set of links at the bottom. I’m sure you know the ones I mean: copyright, accessibility, legal, privacy… The difficulty with these pages is that the content is ‘off-message’. It doesn’t fit the main purpose of the site, but is essential. That’s why it’s often tucked away in the footer.
Typically, these pages are uninteresting, often written in ‘legalese’, and probably go largely unread. Except by me…
I was entertained, then, to come across Tyrrell’s Rather Dull Formalities page. Already, I’m interested: they’ve neatly captured their brand’s tone of voice in naming the link. Somehow, Rather Dull Formalities is so much more intriguing than Legal/Disclaimer.
I don’t know whether Big Fish developed the content for this site as well as the design, but whoever did has done a fab job. Look at the navigation menu for more: ‘Have a little browse’, for example, and ‘You can even win things’… Delightful.
What do I like about this? Four things:
- highly unusually, there’s an image on the page – it’s consistent with the rest of the site and the brand, and very cleverly chosen to complement the page
- the text introducing the page is unexpected—entertaining and personal—matching the tone of voice of the rest of the site
- the main body of content, which isn’t simple material to communicate, is clearly written in straightforward language, making it easy to understand
- And at the bottom of the page: social media share buttons, on one of these mandatory pages. That is unusual too.
And people have enjoyed this legal/disclaimer/privacy page enough to Like it on Facebook.
Hurrah!
It’s not a huge number of people, but it is astonishing that people have read the page at all, never mind enjoyed it enough to Like it.
After all, how many people have Liked other privacy pages?
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