WTF is Online

Pinterest - The Pretty Twitter

Are you pinning yet?

I’m pretty sure if you are a female, daily user of the internet and have been conscious for the last 48 hours you have probably seen, heard of or spent 32 of the last 48 hours on Pinterest. The hot new social network for scrapbooking, pin boarding, image sharing or graphical self expression, whatever you want to call it.

In the news

There has been a lot of buzz about Pinterest because of it’s massive growth and viral potential. Although the site has a largely female demographic, guys are starting to see its social and visibility potential and that females hang out there, which isn’t a bad thing.

• TechCrunch – Pinterest is the fastest growing site ever (if you act like Google Plus doesn’t exist…which quite frankly, a lot of people do anyway).
• Mashable – Pinterest, it is more addictive than checking Facebook, while smoking crack as you leave a sex addicts anonymous meeting to getting it on.
• WSJ – The Wall Street Journal shows the world how ‘pop’ they are by pinning together their – aren’t we tired of them yet – instagram photos from Fashion Week.
• CNN – highlights one of the least known but most controversial aspects of Pinterest, income, which I mention in the next paragraph.

Hey, a girls got to make money

No, that isn’t a gender-bias or sexist headline.

The reality is, any business (especially online) has to make money to survive. The fact that Pinterest is injecting links into people’s Pins isn’t a bad thing, it is smart business. It is not very invasive and unless you read LLsocial.com or caught the CNN article above, probably didn’t even know that Pinterest was doing this. Much less, how they even made money, as if you even cared.

So, why are people pinning on Pinterest

I’ve heard people say it’s beautiful, simple, social, viral, fun and far easier & less expensive than the long-lost art of scrap booking. I personally, don’t get it for those reasons but after seeing all the fanfare and hearing people talk about it, I decided to give it a run. So I created a couple of Boards (virtual pin boards) and added a couple of Pins (things you find online that you want to put up or reference on your Board). Nothing happened. No spiritual enlightening, no feelings of accomplishment or strong urges of addiction. I didn’t really get it. I didn’t do anything for a day or three and then tried it again, this time with a bunch of social media-related infographics and BOOM! It happened, I got followers, re-pins and all kinds of “social love.” I still don’t have any interest in sharing my scrap book of infographics or almost anything else but I can definitely see the buzz around it.

Learning from Twitter

Pinterest is using Twitter-logic to make their network…work. When you pin, the more action your pin gets, the longer and more likely the pin is to show up on the main pinterest.com page. Anyone can see it, everyone can pin it, share it, follow it or re-share it on their other social networks. You can use #hashtags, keywords and URL keyword optimization to make your Pin stand out and “perform.” It works. Although their search indexing is not in real-time, the few minutes of latency really aren’t that bad. Indexing the titles of pins doesn’t seem to be as strong as their descriptions or links (which may be part of their revenue-generating strategy), so your descriptions matter more than your titles.

The future of Pinterest

Strategically, I don’t encourage anyone to invest in social media platforms, especially new ones, until they have reached critical mass. The female-dominate network has easily exceeded critical mass in the female demographic but has it done so for your target audience? You need to answer that.

I work at the Univesity of Louisville where we have decided to leverage the network specifically for our schools and departments that are generating event, image or photo rich content on a regular basis. For example, our admissions, student activities, fine arts and libraries are all using Pinterest to highlight the graphical greatness found at UofL.

The network is new, female-dominate and not unique but its current social status, buzz and love by its users may give it some longevity. We won’t know for six months or more if it has long-term viability. We still need to see if people will get tired of it, finish their pin boards and move on, or simply find something prettier (that will undoubtedly manifest itself, now that Pinterest is getting so much attention).

My updated list contains almost 3,300 Google Plus photographers from around the world!

 Growth

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I have spent a good amount of time looking online for an accurate and fact-based forecast on social media properties. Unfortunately, most of what I have found is conjecture, trends and/or opinion-based information with little or not historical or empirical data to back it up. So how do you forecast something that doesn’t have much of a history or hasn’t even matured enough to build a model around? You start by looking at what has gone full-circle and then step back and look at how the current properties trend against historical data.

Let me put this into context; I am not going to actually forecast specific dates, times or outcomes of companies. I will give you access to the data for your interpretation, opinion, feedback and maybe your predictions.

My numbers are based on Google Insights. I opted to use this method because using the number of subscribers, page views or unique visitors can all be misleading (yes, I know, so can Insights). But I am a member of almost every single one of these sites and I regularly visit only about five of them. I also wanted a metric that skewed away from geeks and I know we don’t type URLs, search terms or sites into Google to find something and a lot of lay-people do.  Debate-away but it is a solid trending metric, although from a single search engine.

Here is what I noticed, it’s fairly obvious, from the data; which all started when I noticed the similarity between the Technology Adoption Lifecycle (developed by Joe M. Bohlen, George M. Beal and Everett M. Rogers at Iowa State University) and companies like Digg, Meebo, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster and the once behemoth MySpace.

1.  Social networks are not the only online properties that tend to follow the Technology Adoption Lifecycle. I selected a few major properties to see if they trended similar to social networks and although most of the ones I selected did not follow the bell-curve, they did have similarities (coming up…)
2. The Technology Adoption Lifecycle, for unsustainable companies spans between 5 and 7.5 years. “Unsustainable” is a subjective term and can be debated, as can why or how they became such.
3. The Technology Adoption Lifecycle standard curve does NOT apply to those companies providing a value-added service as long as they remain competitive or host content that is of value to it’s users.
4. Sustainable companies seem to have a 30-40% drop from peak and then plateau into a sustainable, longer-term business.
5. There are a substantial number of companies continuing to climb or who are at their peak, including but not limited to:
   • Engadget.com
   • Mashable.com
   • Google News
   • Foursquare.com
   • YouTube.com
   • Yelp.com
   • Twitter.com
   • Facebook.com
   • Tumblr.com
   • Reddit.com
   • StumbleUpon.com
   • LinkedIn.com
   • MailOnline.com
   • GoWalla.com (they may be on decline but I think it’s too early)
   • MyLife.com (current business model seems to put them in decline but too early to tell)
6. A double-peak is possible (see Google Orkut, likely a result of globalization)
7. Size doesn’t matter; MySpace is the most obvious example but it isn’t the user-base that determines destiny. The product, user-base, value added offerings and demand are also large factors.
8. It’s still early. I tend to think that social networks will ebb and flow in 7-10 year cycles. No teenager wants to use or be on the same social network as their parents but everyone tends to hold on to those things that work and tend to improve to their liking.
9. Jumping the shark is bad but not devastating – sites that drop 30-40%, usually due to something they did or had done to them, either results in finding a niche or dropping off the map.
10. Google Plus is too young to start planning for its future. I love Google Plus but I also know that it’s too young to forecast it’s future at this time. Let’s talk when it turns one.

 SustainingClick to view animated image

Declining

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For those of you who enjoy doing math in your spare time, feel free to hit WolframAlpha and plug in your normal distribution forecasting estimates to predict the future or longevity of your favorite social network or sites.

I have been an internet professional for over 16 years and I have learned that the growth and maturity of the internet is cyclical, often predictable and continually becoming more refined. The longer the internet exists and is a part of our culture, workflow and method of communication, the less we tend to ebb and flow between what is new and shiny and the more we tend to attach to what works and is  ’standard’ among us.

Much like our dependence on Microsoft; online, we have come to accept some inferior solutions for our online experience simply because the masses have adopted them. Fortunately, and unlike our operating system and office productivity bond, our online bond seems to have a much looser grip and tends to be largely a generational and (content) hosting preference.

Download an excel doc. containing some of the chart data.

ComScore came out with a great study on Social Media penetration and consumer brands along with other great stats, facts and figures.

They were busy crunching numbers when Google Plus came out and didn’t have time to add it to their market growth chart so I took the liberty of adding it…

As a side note, their study is pretty tight, go register and download it.