Pining for Pinning - Winter Author Blog Challenge #5

I am up before dawn, this 5th day of the 15 Day Winter Author Blog Challenge.  Instead of heading to Pinterest, I am blogging about it today.  Our prompt is:

One of the newest and fastest growing social media platforms is Pinterest? Have you jumped onboard? What kinds of images do (or could) you post that are related to your book or the topic of your book? What other kinds of images do you post? Are you linking each post back to your blog, website, or Amazon page? IF YOU’RE NOT USING Pinterest, what’s holding you back? Take a look at book marketer extraordinaire John Kremer’s Pinterest Boards. After perusing them, how MIGHT you use Pinterest to brand yourself and your book? Is it something you’re considering?

I love Pinterest. Why?

I am a visual person.  Photography is an important part of my telling of the story of my life.  So, when Pinterest came along, it was a natural for me to join. (Here is my Pinterest home page).  Pinterest is where my blogging and my "me" intersect.

First, some quick terminology for Pinterest newbies.  "Boards" are the places where you put visual images.  You can organize them however you want. I have boards for gardening, the United States Civil War, crocheting, wildflowers, birds, autism, sunsets, books I feel are worth reading, and favorite recipes.

"Pinning" is the art of capturing a visual image with a Pinterest tool, and placing it on one of your boards.

You can search, and can follow one board, or all boards, of a given person whose pins you like. You can put up your own pins, repin, like a pin, and comment on someone's pin.

Pinterest is ideal for planning weddings (visual!), planning dinner (visual!), selling crafts (visual!) and yes, branding your books (visual! Why else would books have cover art?).  But, so far, I have not used the power of Pinterest to promote my blog the way I should.

I pin photos from my blog, but they are not organized in one area. My photos are all original work: flowers, other nature photos, gardening, Civil War related, farmers market related. Photos here and there of my crochet projects.  And, when I travel, sunsets.

 I have a "Blogging" board but I do not have pinning buttons on my blog, because (as of now) my blogging platform and Pinterest do not seem to "play together well". When I see Pin share buttons on Wordpress, I get frustrated that I can't have those, too.  Meantime, my blog does not have a clear pinning policy posted.  Oops! (I will need to change that).

I can easily get lost on Pinterest, which is another problem for me. I try to verify images I use, and that is time consuming.  Many people will pin photos from Google or Bing searches, for example, which I refuse to do.  If an image comes from a blog, I check the blog to make sure the blogger is allowing pinning.   Authors should be concerned that images that belong to them might be pinned without permission or full credit.  Photographers already have that problem, big time.

Not much content?  Don't pin regularly?  Don't bother.  Truthfully, I don't tend to follow people that just have 5 or 6 scattered pins on their entire account.  Pinning is something you either love or don't love.  There is no in between. It sounds harsh, but on Pinterest, you MUST be authentic.  You don't have to pin daily, but you do need to provide fresh content to your fans.

And please, don't spam! Spamming is ruining Pinterest, the same as it has ruined some other forms of social media.  Sad.

I also feel if an author doesn't share a bit of his or her interests on a board, people will lose interest right away.  Author A promoting books? Meh. (sorry.) Author A promoting book, posting favorite recipes, or showing us his/her hometown, or his/her hobbies?  A winner.  Guess whose boards I will be following?

Do you use Pinterest?  I look forward to exploring some of your boards.

Pinterest, Spam and a Dash of Porn?

I joined Pinterest about 3 months ago.  I've had a really good time pinning, making sure I check out pictures before I pin them.   I won't pin anything originating from Google or Etsy, for example. (the latter is a site where crafts people market their goods), or if, for any reason, I feel there may be a copyright problem.  I try to be respectful.

Other users of Pinterest can take your "pins" and "repin" them onto their own "boards". They can repin, and/or "like", and/or add a comment.  The ability to add comments is a double edged sword but I rarely have had problems.

The problem is, spammers can add comments to your pin and then your picture is out there (let's say, a picture you posted from your blog - which many bloggers, including me, do) with a spam comment.

Pinterest will email you when someone repins, likes, or comments on one of your pins.  If you do a lot of pinning, you just don't have time to read those emails.  But, I strongly suggest you do.

A spammer got hold of one of my pins and added spam about a weight loss site. 

The email from Pinterest (the usual "so and so has repinned your pin (name of pin) "has a link to report the pinner.  I tried clicking on the link and the link did not work.

I went to Pinterest to see how I could report this.  It doesn't seem to be a very easy process (if someone can explain this to me, I would really appreciate it.) but I got the idea that I had to go to the board where my pin (with the spam) had been repinned, and right click the pin.  I would then get a menu and could choose a function that would report the pin.

When I went to the board- I sure got an eyeful.

Let's put it delicately.  A lot of the pictures (all of which had this weight loss spam attached to it, it appeared) had pictures of women in bikinis.  But not all of them did.  Some of the pictures I would consider soft core porn.  As in, a man and a woman, without clothes from the waist up, with two bars across the woman's, uh, well, this is a family type blog and I will not explain the pictures further.

I can assure you my picture had nothing to do with women in bikinis or the other thing.  And I wasn't going to wade through all those pins to find it. 

OK.  I don't consider myself a prude, but I don't want my pin posted on some board with that type of material (or any type of material!) with spam relating to weight loss.

Moral of story:  The Internet is what it is.  Like in real life, there are decent people, and there are those who will take advantage.

So what can I do about it?  I would surely love to know.

And, have you (if you are a user of Pinterest, that is) had a similar experience?

Two Years Late and a Pin Short

OK, I finally did it.  I'm pinning away.

I joined Pinterest yesterday.  After wondering why friends on Facebook had posts telling the world they just "pinned" something, I checked Pinterest out, took the plunge (well, I did that earlier in the week because you need to get an "invite" and it doesn't come right away), and then stayed up late (for me) last night looking at stuff.  And figuring out how to get the pin button on my Firebox "bookmark" bar, which I never figured out.

Now I have to figure out exactly how Pinterest works, how I should interact with people without making a fool of myself, and all that newbie stuff.  So don't expect a primer quite yet on how to use Pinterest.  I'm too new at it.  But, I'm psyched.

I enjoy photography, so a visual social networking site is a natural to me.  Now I just have to fight the urge to spend my entire day on that site.  Some things in my favor:
1.  I work full time
2.  I have to eat
3.  I play FarmVille (the time-suck champion of all time)
4.  There is this blog, called Ramblinwitham.......

As far as Pinterest itself:  Looks like the site actually started (although maybe not with public access) about 2 years ago.  So, as usual, I'm behind the curve.

Are any of you, my readers, on Pinterest?  Any suggestions or information you can provide?  I'd love to interact with you, too.