The Secret to Pinterest Success: Marketing Update 10/26/12

  

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Episode #222 - October 26, 2012

The Secret to Pintrests Success

• http://allthingsd.com/20121020/the-secret-behind-pinterests-growth-was-marketing-not-engineering-says-ceo-ben-silbermann/
• Pinterest, which CEO Ben Silbermann describes as a tool that helps people find inspiration, is now the third-largest source of referral traffic on the Internet.
• In 2010, three months after Pinterest launched, the site had only 3,000 users. But some of them were active users, and those people loved the site
• Pinterest started to have meet-ups at local boutiques, and to take fun pictures of people who attended them, and to engage with bloggers to do invitation campaigns like “Pin It Forward,” where bloggers got more invites to the site by spreading the world.
• “A lot of people in Silicon Valley didn’t get, and I don’t know if they still get, Pinterest,” Silbermann said. “The fact that it made sense to someone is what really mattered to me.”
• But ultimately, Pinterest didn’t need better engineering, said Silbermann. It needed better distribution.
• Marketing Update:
  

Nutella Stops the Nutella Shake

• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/2012/10/18/nutella-boloco_n_1981925.html
• Ferrero, which owns Nutella, recently sent a cease and desist order to Boston-basedBoloco, which sold a "Nutella Milkshake" made with Nutella, skim milk, and frozen yogurt for 14 years without incident.
• Pepper told the Boston Herald that Nutella's legal team is fine with him selling the product, but doesn't "endorse the use of Nutella or the Nutella brand in frozen beverages."
• It's possible the cease-and-desist letter was partially motivated by broader concerns of Ferraro's. Earlier this year, the company paid $3 million to settle a class-action lawsuit that alleged that Ferraro overstated the health benefits Nutella in its advertisements.
• Marketing Takeaway: 
  

The Cost of Data 

• http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/facebook-permissions/
• Facebook Permissions are a Facebook feature that allows the social network and businesses that use Facebook for marketing purposes to collect information about users.
• When a user agrees to “allow” Facebook, or a business, to broadcast a user’s Likes or other information, the user has granted Facebook permission to do so.
• Facebook Permissions are not only on custom apps. Any time that you connect to Facebook from an outside website, you’re giving that website permission to access your basic information on Facebook.
• With each data field a business asks for online, the opt-in rate drops by 10% (I heard this from a Facebook product engineer).
• That means if gaining access to your app requires customers to tell you anything at all, you could lose 10% of your potential users right off the bat.
• Marketing Takeaway: 

When the Internet Breaks

• http://www.getthefive.com/articles/the-boardroom/when-the-internet-breaks/
• Amazon Web Services, which is the major cloud host for web-based businesses large and small, experienced an outage and brought down a sizable chunk of the Web as a result.
• Pintrest, Foursquare, Airbnb, Reddit, Github, Flipboard
• From AirBNB to Foursquare to Reddit to Coursera to Flipboard, big chunks of the Web were down for much of the day while Amazon scrambled to get its servers back online. Think about that: everything from room rentals to news sites to education providers was out of commission for most of the day. No transactions. No eyeballs. No revenue. Nothing.
• While the services that were out don’t represent particularly vital businesses – no lives were lost because they were down (so far!) – it does illustrate the degree to which our everyday lives are increasingly tethered to cloud-based services.
• One way to mitigate the chances of a company being brought to its knees due to a single outage at a place like Amazon is to spread the risk.
• What else can Marketers do to help prepare for situations like this? 
• Marketing Takeaway: