Not being familiar with Pinterest (and I guess that I was the only one in the room that wasn't), I was surprised by the split in the responses of men and women.
Women were really enthusiastic - saying it was interesting, worth looking at, a great way for sharing ideas, to identify new things.
The men? Crickets chirp!
I've never seen a split, on gender lines, that was quit so stark around a website. Not even when I was suckered into pulling up Chatroulette during class ... Here's where it gets interesting?
I asked - who has a Pinterest account?
Nearly every hand in the room went up. Some slower. Some faster. Some macho guys almost blushing. Others pausing to make sure the guy next to them raises his hand.
One of the back row cloud blurted out - "We have accounts so that we know what they [the women] are looking at!" Among the men, this unleashed a flood of murmurs, nods, and affirmations ... with some of the more liberal men saying that wasn't the whole truth of it ...
I made a note to self, looked it up on Wikipedia, requested a Pinterest invitation ... and found an engaging, yet puzzling, experience ... It reminded me an awful lot of my one of sisters' bulletin board ... and of another sister's scrapbooking ...
So, as I mused about how to incorporate this new piece of the Social Web into my class... Pinterest is picked up by Mashable ... suddenly, the web is buzzing with questions ... folks are asking what is the business value of Pinterest? The technorati from the offline to the online discussed Pinterest, either stereotyping it as for women or bristling that it is stereotyped as "for women'?
Hm. In the coming week, I found myself describing & talking about Pinterest with my merry band of MBA students (many of whom are only marginally younger than me :-) ), discussing it with visitors to the SMLC, at lunch over a quesadilla, and being asked - why, why - should firms care if only appeals to women?
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So, we go full circle.
I return to class on Monday and I suggest that Athletics (which yielded zero hits) needed to leverage the power of Pinterest to promote sports @ Clemson. The crickets stop chirping, the back row cloud thunders - why? what value is there in Pinterest? Would it turn off football recruits? If coaches, players, and fans posted to Pinterest? We never did reach a satisfactory resolution.
So, this week, my students get a new emerging technologies assignment about the Social Web - they're going to post on Pinterest and see who can generate the most * MALE * traffic @ Clemson athletics ...
Stay tuned for an update!
Pinterest is building a lot of interest among the male tech community as well. I've seen a ton of IT related jokes, musings, and "in-the-trenches" pins from near-celebrity IT professionals on Twitter lately, so it must be catching on among that demographic. Companies/brands/shops are starting to leverage Pinterest for marketing as well - I always see Etsy shops and other small clothing shops featuring their brand or product, which is really smart imo.
ReplyDeletePinterest strikes me as tumblr with structure (and that's a good thing).
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