LockhartL

Source: Uploaded by user via Leah on Pinterest

It’s been called the crack cocaine of digital consumption and sharing and I’m freebasing. I put off looking into Pinterest for a long time because from what I could see it was a schmaltzy, saccharine vehicle for females to share cupcake recipes, cute animal photos and interior decorating secrets. But I was only half wrong and after being barraged by headlines about Pinterest’s effectiveness in driving retail sales and providing the ultimate platform for word of mouth recommendations I thought I would check it out. As with all social media platforms I use a part of my brain goes into gov mode when I’m in. How can government people use Pinterest?

Pinterest is almost entirely visual. Pinning a piece of web content appears in a themed board on your profile and displays an image pulled from the site you’re linking to. When I was first in I couldn’t see how it could be useful to government people and then I started creating boards, pinning and re-pinning material and I saw I was visualising aspects of my personality and tastes- things I didn’t mind announcing to the world I liked or find interesting.

This is where it clicked. Government has a great opportunity in Pinterest to showcase not only its own events, topics or campaigns but the content of other people or organisations it wants to be associated with. Just have a look at the US Army, US Navy and US National Guard Pinterest pages to see how government bodies can rock this platform (and have a look at the US Army’s Social Media Roundup Slideshare introduction to Pinterest and its related social media introduction presentations for another example of how the Army is also rocking social media guidance.) Can you see your organisation doing the same?

Well, maybe not so much with local gov in Scotland right now. I created a board on which I could pin top topics and tasks from ten randomly chosen Scottish local authority websites (random means I asked my husband to shout out ten Scottish cities or general areas.) I went to each local authority site landing page and went to the top news story, then a top task and then a top level navigation category- usually Business and Trade as set out by the Scottish Navigation List and I got a 10% return in Pinterest. So 3 out of 30 links I tested could appear in Pinterest because they had an image associated to the content. It isn’t possible to simply pin a link in Pinterest that has no image attached to the content (but you can upload an image manually) and so I can see a number of Scottish LAs would be losing out on the Pinterest game right now. You can make your site Pinterest friendly but I can already hear LA web content managers saying they don’t have time or capacity to upload images to even all their top task related web pages or even have an interest being present on Pinterest. These could be fair points but, as with all new social media platorms, this is one to keep an eye on. But for you savvy go getters I’d say get on it. Jazz up your site and create a Pinterest profile to inject some personality into government work and images. What do you have to lose?