Spending the Day Creating Pins and Boards on Pinterest

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After spending time learning about the relatively new social media site Pinterest (still in beta so you need an invite from a friend or the site itself) I am beginning to appreciate its attraction.

Perhaps I'm helped in this understanding because the site is apparently skewing towards women in the Midwest, and I'm a woman who grew up in the Midwest.

I do think that the sharing of photos without the need to friend people as on Facebook is a huge draw. And the site itself is very attractive without all the distracting bells and whistles of Facebook.

And, yes, I'll admit I had to first watch the video on how to install the "Pin It" bookmarklet.

Once I did install the bookmarklet, though, I "went to town," as the saying goes, creating boards and pins. (Basically, a pin is one photo with a description and a link while several pins go on one board, which has a theme, such as "My Books and Ebooks")

I can also see that pinning can become addictive. And, yet, for book authors, service professionals, and business owners, pinning can also become a strategic part of an integrated online marketing strategy.

Here are two uses of Pinterest that I tried:



1. I often write guest blog posts, although I do not link to these posts from any of my websites because I do not want to take people off my own sites. Yet I like the guest posts I have written.

With Pinterest, as long as there is at least one photo (besides my headshot) used on a guest post, I can pin the photo with its automatic link to the blog post to a board on my Pinterest account. You can see the result of this in "My Guest Blog Posts" (I only pinned my most recent guest posts that had photos accompanying the posts.)

2. I have two relatively new blogs, each of which promotes my books and ebooks. I created separate boards for these – "LT. COMMANDER MOLLIE SANDER Blog Posts" and "PZM Blog Posts" – and pinned all the posts of each blog to the blog's board.

Future efforts:

I have to decide if I want to go back and create a board for my Miller Mosaic Social Media Marketing blog posts. If I do, I will pin only the most recent blog posts.

I did, in a way, get around this by creating a board labeled "My Blogs" that board has a link to each of my major blogs but not links to individual posts.

Question of copyright:

The one area that I am pondering in connection to Pinterest is copyright protection.

I know when I pin a photo from my own blog posts that I have legally obtained the photos I use with my own blog posts. And if someone puts a guest post of mine on his/her site and adds a photo, I see no reason to worry about how that photo was obtained as the photo is not being used on one of my own sites.

But, if I create a pin from someone else's site with a photo that accompanies a guest blog post of mine, what is my responsibility to the possible copyright holder of that photo?

I am NOT a lawyer so I am only pondering the question of copyright. If anyone would like to weigh in on this question, please do so below in the comments.

© 2012 Miller Mosaic, LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter and @ZimblerMiller on Pinterest) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is the co-founder of the marketing consulting company www.MillerMosaicLLC.com, which is now WBENC certified and helps clients effectively use social media and other online marketing strategies. Check out Phyllis' books and other projects at www.PhyllisZimblerMiller.com