360DigitalInfluence

In case you haven’t heard, last night TechCrunch announced that Pinterest hit 11.7 million UMVs, becoming the fastest standalone site ever to surpass 10 million monthly uniques.

The #1 driver of consumer purchases is word of mouth recommendations from friends, and Pinterest holds the power to drive authentic “word of eye” recommendations in a way that is changing the landscape of social commerce.

How? The landing page for Pinterest is an endless visual stream of subtle product recommendations from the very people who influence your purchasing decisions - friends and strangers with good taste. This means that there is an endless opportunity for your brand and its products to be seen by Pinterest’s 11.7 million unique monthly users as endorsements from friends in the form of repins.

Currently availably stats show the average Pinterest user spends 98 minutes per month on the site, compared to 2.5 hours on Tumblr, and 7 hours on Facebook. Pinterest is most popular in North Eastern states, among females (estimates range from 58% to 70% female), and with people ages 25-44 (59% of visitors).

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AOL just announced it is paying $315 million to buy the liberal news commentary site The Huffington Post; a move coming not long after forking out $25 million to buy TechCrunch, a Silicon Valley technology news blog.

Founder Arianna Huffington’s decision to fold her ground breaking community-based news site into one of the web’s struggling legacy Internet companies came as a surprise to many, in the same way Michael Arrington’s Big Announcement at TechCrunch Disrupt last year managed to upstage all the start ups at the event.

Why the Huffington Post?  It has been wildly successful due to several factors, including its ability to find stories across the Web, couple them with well-created headlines and ensure a strong audience sees them. It is also popular as a progressive American news website.Yet the main factor that attracted AOL could in fact be the Huffington Post’s community.

In addition to columns by Arianna Huffington and a core group of contributors the site has over 3,000 bloggers. These range from politicians and celebrities to academics and policy experts to Digital Influence’s Kety Esquivel — all of whom contribute in real time, on a wide-range of topics.

In any vibrant community, online or off, people connect with each other because:

1. They can do so easily and confidently
2. They keep coming back because they satisfy certain needs or wants by taking part
3. They feel their contributions are valued and can identify with the wider community group and its goals

All factors which until now, have been prevalent at the Huffington Post during its five-plus years of existence, with over one million comments made on the site each month. However, it is this community management which is exactly where new owner AOL is walking a fine line.

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During the  July 4th holiday weekend, two stories about Silicon Valley’s PR industry  - one in The New York Times and one on TechCrunch – were published, causing a bit of a stir among PR and social media practitioners, VCs, founders of start-ups and those who follow the PR space.  While both pieces take different, yet cynical perspectives, neither portray the PR industry in most positive light.

The New York Times article features one PR practitioner in particular, who places her success on the sheer number of contacts she has in her rolodex.  The TechCrunch piece says it all in the title – “The Reality of PR: Smile, Dial, Name Drop, Pray.”  The comments on the TechCrunch blog following the piece were mostly cynical toward PR folks and mostly painted all of us in the industry with the same, unfavorable broad brush. continue reading