• In Forbes’ Is Pinterest the New LinkedIn?: how job applicants can use their pinboards to project an image of themselves that will provide boost their credentials or further support their resumes. It also mentions using a company’s own pinboards on Pinterest to do recon on its management style, organizational values etc. to tailor a job application or to prep for an interview.
• In USA Today‘s Job Seekers Getting Asked for Facebook Passwords: how prospective employers, particularly public agencies, are going beyond merely searching for and looking at a person’s social media profile(s) before hiring, and instead are asking for credentials to log in as the user to have a look around. I find this particularly troubling not just for the privacy issues it raises, but also for a cyber security one: many users, despite advice to the contrary, use the same password for their Facebook accounts as they do for email, their online bank accounts, and everything else too. So giving up their username and password to Facebook in a job interview is indeed like “requiring someone’s house keys” as part of the job application process!
• And finally, in the LA Times‘ Is Facebook Profiling of Job Applicants Fair or Legal?: how lawyers are advising employers that using data gleaned from cybervetting candidates on social media websites is a potential legal hazard because applicants’ social media profiles likely contain details that are, by law, basically off-limits for consideration in the hiring process — things such as race, sexuality, religion, and preexisting medical conditions.

The last piece also rightfully points out that the practice of asking for your password violates the terms of service for Facebook…and is regarded by the Department of Justice as a federal crime! But in this economy, a desperate job seeker may not care…

5-part article, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Pinterest for Brands but Were Afraid to Ask

It also mentioned something that caught my eye, namely, that a few colleges and universities have dipped a toe in the Pinterest waters, such as:

• University of Virginia
• Texas A&M
• Drake University
• Oberlin College

What are they pinning? Images of their campuses and communities…visual representations of achievements by faculty and students…quotes fostering school pride in athletics, etc…inviting pictures that could attract new students, faculty, alumni…and more.

So far, it’s not clear if Pinterest is going to take off and become the next big platform for public affairs and communications officers at colleges and universities across the country…although certainly there has been a bit of a “land-grab” of vanity URLs to prevent brand hijacking on Pinterest already.

The question is, is it Time to Pin Your Brand to Pinterest yet? And my thought is, the numbers show that Pinterest is probably here to stay, so we may as well start figuring out ways to leverage it!

• In the last quarter of 2011, its estimated unique viewership rose nearly 450%.
• In fact, in Jan. 2012, Pinterest drove more traffic on the Web than LinkedIn, Google Plus, Reddit, and Youtube…combined. (Both stats from Pinterest Rivals Twitter in Referral Traffic).
• Here’s the kicker: Pinterest just crossed 10 million mark for U.S. monthly unique visitors, which is faster than any standalone site…ever.

What strikes me as especially remarkable about this site is that it’s still invitation-only. But perhaps that adds to the mystique, no?

But what is it?

The easiest way to explain Pinterest is to say it’s an online, personal virtual pinboard. So. If you have a Pinterest account, you have:

• a visually engaging place online (meaning, accessible from any computer or smartphone)…
• to store all those personal things that you come across on the Web that interest or inspire you which you want to keep track of…
• all laid out in a virtual format that re-creates the look of a real pinboard, organized by topic!

The beauty of Pinterest is that pinning online works just as simply as it does offline — akin to clipping an image from a magazine page — in fact, it’s really just the same as “bookmarking” a website in your browser…but it with an incredibly more beautiful aesthetic. It has been described, in social media terms, as “social bookmarking with visual curation.”

It’s also wildly popular with women, as explained in this Slate article by a man who doesn’t get it, Pinterest: the Visual Pinboard for People Who Like Cupcakes and Jake Gyllenhaal. The user demographic does truly skew female, though, and the pictures that greet you when you visit pinterest.com show that pretty quickly. Popular/common pinboard topics include:

• recipes to try;
• gardening tips;
• wedding planning;
• home organization ideas;
• home decor & design inspiration;
• fashion ideas (if you’re like me, your wardrobe “someday”);
• personal “wish list” for gifts, or ideas of gifts to give others when the time comes;
• images and quotes that inspire you that you want to remember;
• craft projects, pretty printouts, etc. etc. etc.

Coming soon: branding and marketing on Pinterest…and how organizations and companies are using it!

Nonprofit organizations and higher ed institutions can glean some useful tips from Buddy Media’s recent study on user engagement of retailer fan pages on Facebook. Thanks to their research, we now know:

• Wednesday is the best day for organizations and companies to post.
• Higher user engagement actually occurs overnight; posts between 8 PM and 7 AM get more user activity! (Who knew?)
• Posting more frequently and regularly over time does pay off and build engagement, without annoying your fans (up to a point): Posting 1-2 times per day produces 40% more engagement (although more than that tends to alienate fans); and posting 2-4 times per week produces 71% higher user engagement.
• And anyone who tends to be wordy, as I do – take note: Brief posts (80 characters or less) receive 66% higher engagement. Very brief posts (under 40 characters) generate even more! So, try to be more concise.
• Ask questions to spark dialogue – “question” posts generate double the comments of non-questioning posts.

More tips for organizations here: Writing Effective Facebook Posts.

Facebook unveiled (yet another) interface change this past week, and once again, it has been met with public outcry for changing its format. While that may take some getting used to, though, I would submit that a bigger concern many of us have is, how do we hide our online activity that appears in the “Sidebar.” Most of us don’t want our every move broadcast to our every friend…what is being called “forced sharing.”

(For more, I highly recommend this read: Facebook’s Risky New Approach to Forced Sharing.)

Fortunately, as with most Facebook issues related to privacy and sharing, they are very likely to “walk this back” in a new iteration in coming weeks and months. One thing you can say about FB: it’s never the same website twice!

Behind the scenes, though, “Liking” an organizational or corporate page is just the same as “Becoming a Fan” of it — it enables brands, companies, nonprofits, etc. to connect directly with their supporter base. So, once a user has “Liked” your organization, a link to your Page will appear in their profile and s/he will appear on your Page as a person who liked your Page…just as it was before, with your “Fans.”

(“Liking” a Page is different from clicking “Like” on a status update, link, or photo that a friend posts. There, you are simply letting your friend know that you like it without leaving a comment.)

Facebook is now announcing that it is also rolling out the ability to “Like” other things around the Web too — that it will offer other buttons for websites around the Internet, so, as this Mashable article explains, users can take other actions such as “Watched” or “Listened to,” or something that sounds a little more office-appropriate than “Liking,” — “Recommend.”

Interesting, huh?

I “Like” this, by the way: Other Facebook buttons possibly coming in the near future?

First, this excellent quote: “For something to gain traction these days; it must be online to matter to anyone at all.” (That was from a blog post entitled Has Social Media Become Our Number One Input Source?)

I think that’s right on the money. If something is not online, it’s not linkable, post-able, search-able, share-able, or tweet-able. With no digital record of it, it may as well have not happened at all!

And second, from the last few seconds of the popular viral video series Social Media Revolution: “The ROI of social media is your business will exist in 5 years.“

Taken together, these seem to suggest: your company, organization, school, or nonprofit must be online — or die. Certainly some food for thought!

(By the way, just in case you don’t know, it’s pronounced “Google-plus,” a name which reminds me of the Glee episode in which the school principal mistakenly pronounces the name of current music artist Ke$ha as “Key-dollar sign-ha” rather than the correct pronunciation of “Keh-sha”.)

Anyway, though I haven’t joined, I’ve been watching closely and reading up on Google+ and what it means. Here are some articles I’ve come across that may shed some light — they have for me:

• A great little comic (“You should join Google+!” “What is it?” “Not Facebook!” “What’s it like?” “Facebook!”)
• Privacy & Google+ (a nice “infographic” with 6 helpful tips)
• Another Try by Google to Take On Facebook (the New York Times article which asks if anything can unseat social media giant Facebook)
• Don’t Look Behind You, Facebook, Google+ May Be Gaining On You (which highlights that Google+ gained 25 million users faster than any other website in history…including the exponentially-growing Facebook)