Grab What You Like On Your Pinterest!

Hmm...what is Pinterest?

Have you ever heard of Pinterest? Pinterest is new social media tool and gaining so many users these days. Pinterest has already 10.4 million registered users all over the world. According to pinterest.com, "Pinterest is a virtual pinboard, Pinterest allows you to organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. You can browse pinboards created by other people to discover new things and get inspiration and get inspiration from people who share your interest. "

Also, according to RJMetrics,  Pinterest is retaining and engaging users as much as two to three times as efficiently as Twitter was at a similar time in history.

So basically, Pinterest is like flicker, or tumblr. For example, we can decorate fashion coordinates, or make a plan for wedding ceremony. 

"Pin It!"


Pinterest has a"Pin It" button, and you can drag or add it to the bookmark bar. It lets you collect an image from the website you are browsing and add it to one of your pinboard on Pinterest.




You can check the tutorial on YouTube. (Chrome ver.)

You can also check other browsers version, IE, Safari, and such.

Also, you can check the website on PC and your iPhone. According to Pinterest.com, we can browse pins from people and pinboards you follow. And it lets you repin, like and comment on your favorite pins. Also, you can pin with your camera and add a location so other pins can visit.

Who is Pinterest's user?

According to Ragan.com and Ignite,　97% of Pinterest users are women and especially, age 25-34 are the biggest demographic of that. Meanwhile, the majority of Pinterest is male, and the ratio is 55(male) to 45(female) in the UK.

Some companies already created an account and are trying to engage to Pinterest users. According to PR Daily, top corporate companies are Real Simple (34,517 followers), HGTV (17,824 followers), Nordstrom (9,886 followers), West Elm (11,547 followers), ModCloth (11,813 followers), Whole Foods (14,217 followers), Better Homes and Gardens (15,127 followers), Kate Spade (16,371 followers), Etsy (53,784 followers).

As you can see, the possibility of the groundswell is stronger everyday. Pinterest would be the next powerful social media even though many people tend to avoid and hesitate to be on another social media such as Google+. So let's see how Pinterest can influence people in terms of marketing. I tried to make an account for myself a week ago, but I received an email from Pinterest and it said  I am on the waiting list. I am not sure what that means but I assume that the number of users are increasing and they didn't have enough "space" to accept new users. Now it looks everyone can register and make an account with Pinterest. To my surprise, 26 of my facebook friends already on Pinterest. Now you can see how Pinterest is growing actually.

I used to collect many pictures from fashion magazines and make a scrapbook when I was in high school. Now we can do that easily on the internet and share with people all over the world. 

If you (used to) like creating scrapbooks or subscribe magazines, go check out Pinterest.

Main resource: Ragan's PR Daily

Groundswell Reading Reflection Ch. 7-10

Tapping with the groundswell Twitter






Twitter is one of the most powerful groundswell social media. It lets us listen, talk, energize, support, and embrace customers effectively. If you know how to use Twitter very well, your brand will reach to many people promptly.



Then how should we do with Twitter?

First of all, you should have a clear objective before you make an account with Twitter. Like groundswell have been telling us that we always need to know our objectives, otherwise it would end up with failing.


1. Lock up your handle


   You need to handle Twitter by yourself. Don't let another people pretend your company. You can set up a verified account on Twitter so that people can figure out if it is a real account or not.



2. Listen first


   Before you start tweeting, you should know what people are talking about your brand/ product.



3. Be ready to support people

  Your follower would be anticipating for your support. Especially, angry customers need your help. So have a technical group and be supportive for your customers.




4. Follow others


   Follow your followers. It gives you more opportunity to receive the customers voices from "direct message." Also, it might get followers excited like "Subway follows me!"





5. Be ready for a crisis


   If some accidents happen, you need to post to follow up them for your followers. They are expecting you to inform them, so you have to be responsible. Make a plan for a crisis, and also be able to link to official statements.











6. Respond, retweet, and link


   Reacting to tweets from followers. Response to what follower talk about your products, retweet if they tweet something interesting, and links to your website or videos. But avoid posting the same response because we can review all the tweets from the tweet-stream.
   


7. Staff it


    Be prepare people for Twitter as a job. As groundswell says,

"Twitter needs to be somebody's job." 

No matter they are marketers, PR practitioners, or other support people, they need to work for twitter as a job.



8. Check with legal and regulatory staff

   Groundswell says,

"Twitter is public speech."

You have to be care full if your posts would be inappropriate or not.



9. Having gathered a following, don't waste it!

   Once you have many followers for your temporary twitter account (ex. seasonal events, or products), you should lead all of them to other accounts (if you have a main account for your company/products). You might have already built their interests in your products. Do not waste them!!




This is actually one of the great examples of "Follow others."

Twitter Official Page of Chubu Int'l Airport
(Again, sorry this is written in Japanese. )

One of the Japanese airports, Chubu Int' Airport (@Centrairairport), follows all of their followers.  They actually talk and listen to them and give followers advises about shops, and restaurants in the airport when they ask (tweet) Centrair account like "what can we eat for lunch at the airport?" and then, Centrair answers the question like "we have a seafood restaurant, sushi place, and noodle booth." So they actually communicate with followers. Also, they often keep us updated about traffic and train information, so that people can make plans for a time to leave.


This is the only company that follows me on Twitter even though I followed more than a hundred companies. I realized that not many companies followed back  their follow back. So they might just  watch on Twitter and be trying to know what people talk about on Twitter.



As I already mentioned above, Twitter is the most simplest and influential social media. If you use Twitter well, you can talk, listen, energize, support, and embrace them easily. Let's try and practice on your private Twitter account. If you can satisfy your own followers, you will be able to engage to your customers.

3.11 and Social Media

On March 11, 2011. I will never ever forget what happened in Japan. A huge earthquake hit Japan and especially northeast area got damaged. At that time, tsunami washed away literary everything. Also, tsunami hit nuke plants in Fukushima, and it destroyed the plants which have caused tremendous problems.  

Social media has dedicated to Japan after the earthquake. It has helped us to get information which Japanese government, TEPCO, or even main media do not. Without social media, we might have not even known any situations of nuke plants in Fukushima.

Since Japanese government has been hiding the facts and main media have not covered the situation in Fukushima area which nuke plants are located, it is been hard for us to get the right information. The reasons are stupid, and complicated because of the money, power, and relationships among the government, TEPCO, and main media. So, instead of them which they have a huge responsibility to tell us all the fact, social media became clear its position that it is one of the tools to get the information of the reality.

Blogging is one of the popular social media in Japan. As I already mentioned on previous post, we have some blog SNS and one of them, “ameba blog” has more than 230 millions viewers per a month. So blogging is one of the influential tools in Japan. After the disaster, many free journalists and activists headed to Fukushima because no main media had covered the real situation around the area at that time. (Even now, it is rare to see those media report that.) Those journalists put the pictures and videos they took and share what they saw in the town around the nuke plants in Fukushima. One of the activists, Ken Noguchi also shared us on his blog. The pictures he put on his blog were that I did not want to believe that it is still happening in my country, Japan. If you really want to know what is going on and you are ready to look the pictures, please visit his blog. Although the content is written in Japanese, you can still check his pictures.

Also, Twitter is one of the most useful social media for us because it let us inform people if we are safe or where we are. Since it was very hard to use phones after the earthquake, people just posted on twitter to let their family or friends know about their situations.

What if social media did not exist? It must have been tough to get to know the situation of nuke plants area. The disaster proved that social media became a big tool to get information instead of TV or newspapers. Here is an interesting statistic about social media. We can see how the number of people on social media increased dramatically after the earthquake. 

月(month), 単位（unit: K）, April, 2010-March, 2011

You may think that Japan is not safe enough to visit yet. It’s hard to response to the feelings because I don’t even know the actual radiation level right now and doubt the information from government, TEPCO. How can foreign people believe information from Japanese government even many Japanese people cannot trust it? That’s why the number of foreign visitors is decreasing. But, most of the parts in Japan were not affected so I want you to visit Japan someday in the near future. Here is a really great video from ANA(All Nippon Airways). They just released an advertised video of Japan. Please check and come to Japan!!

How Do You Reach to Japanese People?

I got my computer January 1st, 2011 and I have been using it since then. I love this computer better because it has a bigger memory system and its operation is Window 7. I had never thought of any other reasons until I read Groundswell.

Groundswell suggested that Fujitsu PC owners are more active than NEC owners in chapter 3. Actually, I used to have NEC PC before I get Fujitsu one last year. I was surprised that I am using computer more often. But I am not sure the reason is that Japanese pop star, Takuya Kimura was featured as an advertisement because I did not buy Fujitsu by reason of that. I checked the reputation of every PC and heard that Fujitsu one is the best. In fact, some sells assistants told me that Fujitsu PC doesn't have problems compared to other brands'. So I decided to purchase Fujitsu one. 

As groundswell already mentioned, Fujitsu PC is stylish and easy to carry because they have produced many kinds of laptop. So maybe that's why people who want to be online and update something from anywhere choose Fujitsu one. 

On the other hand, in Japan, it's not common to have own PC among the students like the US. Instead, everybody has mobile phone and it has an internet function. Japanese people don't feel like having their own PC because they can check anything on their mobile phone even though it is not a smart phone. Most of websites are adapted to mobile website version. Some people never be on website from PC. So it makes me think of the different marketing plan between Japan and the States.

In addition, blogging is very popular in Japan too, especially, "Ameba Blog" is the most biggest Japanese blog site for both PC and mobile. Many celebrities are on and updating new post every hour. The power of influence is huge and some companies tie up with some of them and provide their products so that they recommend their fans or readers. Especially, cosmetics and clothes brads increased their sales because they are also picked up in many magazines after the blog post was read by many people. For example, "this model is using this product!"or "this skincare products are the famous actress's favorite!" Because of this, young girls and women are tempted to try the products.

Like Groundswell says, we need to know what kind of social media we can use for listening and talking. in terms of marketing. Blogging sounds like more effective than facebook so far in Japan. However, facebook users are rapidly increasing these days. I received many friends requests from my friends back home. We have to keep our eyes on the stream, just because we, Japanese, love new and popular things.

What is the difference of Facebook in Japan

Hello, there!

This is Mai's Blog for Social Media Marketing & Communication class at Clark University in Mass. I have been studying as a Master degree candidate. This is my first post for my Social Media class in Spring semester. And this is my 2nd blog in English. I made another one for my New Media Technology class last semester. On this blog, I will talk about Social Media and some media marketing technologies.

I'm on major social media such as facebook, twitter, Google+, blogger.com (of course), Linkedin, Tumbrl. Also, since I'm from Japan, I am also on Japanese social media like mixi which is the most popular SNS in Japan, and ameblo which is Japanese mass blog site. So I'm pretty much into Social Media world.

In Japan, many people have started registering facebook these days since "Social Network" came out last March (oh yes, it always takes some time to import foreign movies into Japan). Before that, Japanese people even didn't know what ffacebook is. I had some friends from different countries, I already had facebook account in 2007. One of the reasons why they didn't start facebook was that people feel like they need to know English or they need to have communication in English on facebook, so they were kind of avoiding facebook. 

Nowadays, however, while mixi is still a huge SNS in Japan, more than 10 millions Japanese people are on facebook now. 

On facebook, we can share our information like hometown, birthday, school and work. If you are in Japan, we can share some different and unique information with friends in Japan. I think IP address recognize where you are and facebook (Japanese version) let us put some more information which we cannot do if we are in the States. As far as I know, we can share our blood type and the nearest local station.

You might think why blood type is important and worthy information. In Japan, I think 90% people in Japan know what their blood type is. We require to know which one since elementary school due to the health care system. Also, many people believe that blood types are like horoscopes in Japan. We divide people into 4 different types of personality. And we can get to know which blood type people have through facebook without asking them so we can figure out what kind of personality they have. Nice.

What is creepy, we can also share our nearest local station. I would feel so scary if someone is actually waiting for me at the station or wicket. Maybe we can expect to have some conversation like "Oh you get off at Nagoya-station? So do I! We should go back from school together!"

In terms of marketing or advertising through facebook, the information about the nearest local station would be useful. But, I am not sure how many companies or local shops figure out how to  exploit facebook for their business.  

Nevertheless, facebook is definitely getting big in Japan. Some Japanese major companies started launching their own fan pages and providing their information every day. Also, those page are used for recruiting new people. To be a smart and effective Marketing practitioner, I am looking forward to studying and delving into Social Media in this class every week.