Yes, Pinterest is Driving Traffic to Women's Magazines. Your Org is Not a Women's Magazine.

I am trying to keep my love of Pinterest alive despite the ridiculously overwhelming influx of marketing hype about it--really, I am. But it's getting increasingly hard, as just about every other tweet, blog post, and/or email I see contains the word "Pinterest." Seriously? Just because it's driving traffic to women's magazines does not mean that it will magically drive that kind of traffic to every business's content. 

There's a reason people buy women's magazines: to look at the pictures. And, of course, to read the articles, but images are what glossy magazine pages are about. So when it comes to an IMAGE SHARING site, is it surprising that the same images that people are willing to spend several bucks a month to page through are being pinned and re-pinned? Does it mean that all you have to do is stick some stock photographs or clip art images onto your company's web content and BAM! your stuff will see the same level of pinterest? NO!

Not to be a hater but seriously people, can we stop for one minute to look beyond the hype and actually think things through before jumping on the "WE HAVE TO BE ON PINTEREST BECAUSE IT'S DRIVING SO MUCH TRAFFIC" bandwagon? I don't mean to yell, but honestly, I just feel like people are losing their heads over this whole Pinterest/web traffic craze without stopping for one second to think about WHY Pinterest is driving traffic to certain sites (cooking, fashion, home decor). Not because Pinterest is magic, but because people like to pin pictures of food, clothes and home decor. Period.

I readily admit that I, too, am being sucked into the hype; as I typed this post I was all set to go search for an image to add to it--so that it would be Pin-ready. Then I thought "Are you even listening to yourself? Will you adding some image you find in the Creative Commons part of Flickr to this post really cause people to pin it?" The answer is: probably not.