Get Students Pinterested in Marketing and Advertising

AbstractMarketing and advertising educators continue to incorporate social network activities into their classroom and out-of-class assignments. The newest social network on the Internet, Pinterest, has two features that make it particularly useful in the classroom: 1) it is very easy to understand and use, and 2) it is visually, rather than textually, oriented. An ancillary attraction is that Pinterest has a large audience of female users, which should appeal to the female members of the class. This paper presents ideas for using Pinterest to help students learn many topics in marketing, business communication and advertising. Student reactions to work assigned in Pinterest by the author and their opinions of Pinterest are included.This paper presents a number of discussion topics and exercises with which Pinterest can be used in courses to demonstrate selected principles and raise student interest. These topics can be adapted to in-class discussion, particularly when students have access to the Internet, and thus Pinterest, in the classroom. Written comments from students assigned Pinterest topics by this author are included where appropriate.Pinterest is a social network where users organize and share online images and videos. Pinterest describes itself as a content sharing service that allows members to "pin" images, videos and other objects to their "pinboard" (one can have multiple, themed pinboards). One can think of Pinterest as an electronic corkboard or refrigerator door. Pinterest provides a "pinmarklet" to download onto a browser's Bookmarks bar; a user can then dogear any liked image on any visited Web site by simply clicking the corresponding icon. Web site owners can add a "pin it" button to their sites to encourage visitors to do so.Pinterest is a social network, not just a place to store images. Users can "repin" a picture they see on someone else's pinboard to their own board. They can also "follow" another user, in which case all of the images that user puts on her site appear on the follower's site. Users can also choose to follow only certain boards of another user, rather than all of them. A user can "like" an image; Pinterest keeps track of, and posts to each image, the likes and repins. As pictures are shared on Pinterest, the hyperlink is retained to the original source. Thus, it is possible for a picture to "go viral" on Pinterest.At the end of 2012, Pinterest had become the third most popular social network in the U.S. in terms of unique visitor counts, behind Facebook and Twitter, and edging ahead of Linkedln (see Table 1). A large percentage of the users are women: in spring 2012, females comprised about 80% of the site's members, compared to Facebook's 57% and Twitter's 59% (Skelton, 2012). Users spend more time on Pinterest than on Twitter, Linkedln and Google combined, and this social medium is now outperforming both Twitter and Facebook for click-through revenues (Bennett, 2012a)1.A search of the extensive EBSCOhost Academic Search Premier database in January 2013 found only seven documents about Pinterest, none of which was in the business literature (undoubtedly, they will soon appear). But reports are beginning to appear in blogs and other online sources, and researchers have investigated the pedagogical uses of similar networks (Brown, 2012; Scovotti & Jones, 2011). It has been reported that Pinterest is being used in a media graphics course at the University of Minnesota and in a journalism course at Minnesota State University (Holt, 2012). Payne, Campbell, Bal and Piercy (201 1) note that a variety of tools, including social media, have been integrated into coursework and have shown that the inclusion of an experiential project in viral communication promotes the learning of technical and theoretical knowledge related to consumer-generated advertisements.Pinterest recently has become more receptive to businesses and nonprofit organizations, requiring separate business accounts and making it easy for entrepreneurs to convert their previous, personal accounts to business ones. …