Pinterest Goes Global

It was confirmed yesterday that Pinterest has raised over $100 million in investments by Rakuten (a Japanese e-commerce giant) to expand their company internationally. Rakuten hopes to make Pinterest a leading channel for e-commerce for its Japanese markets, and in turn bring legacy and credibility to the company. Recently, it has been posted on Pinterest’s blog that they are seeking translation for the site’s international presence in the following languages: Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Italian, Russian, and more. With this large investment, Pinterest is now valued at $1.5 billion, and this financial boost gives the social media company the ability to ease into new markets with great potential.

With the insane attention Pinterest has received since its start in 2010, it was inevitable that it would seek growth in international social spheres. The image-based social media site has grown exponentially compared to its competitors, and it is projected to account for 40% of all social media-driven purchases*. I looked deeply into the effect Pinterest has on e-commerce for my #NewhouseSM4 course, and I’ve come to find that Pinterest has made a bigger splash that it ever intended to. It has become the central digital hub for curation, commerce, and communication, and their large investments will hopefully bring about a strong business model and larger (and effective) growth.

This infographic shows the impact Pinterst has made on social commerce, and how it is predicted to grow (source: Mashable)

As someone who uses Pinterest (frequently), studied social commerce, and follows the social media industry, I hope to see growth from Pinterest. The two-year blow up hasn’t gone to Ben Silbermann’s head for personal or business matters (unlike other social media giants in the past), and the fact that Pinterest has still maintained a start-up environment and a lack of business model is refreshing. Let’s see how this one plays out.

Source: Techcrunch

#SMEcom Presentation Recap

 

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For my Social Media Theory and course with @DR4WARD, three classmates and I came together to teach our class about social media e-commerce (#SMEcom). My #NewhouseSM4  social commerce team finished our presentation this past week and is retiring the #SMEcom hashtag, and I have learned A LOT about the awesome technology

we have available and the social commerce industry. Our presentation made over 119,000 impressions with an audience of over 28,000 the moment it ended, and the hashtracking report grew more hours later. It was pretty cool to see how much of an impact our little class presentation made in the Twitter-sphere.

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Throughout the #SMEcom curation, preparation, and presentation, I’ve learned so much about new social commerce technology and trends. Keeping up to date on social commerce news with my Google Reader was incredibly effective, and I feel that I’ve taken away a great deal of knowledge about an influential and significant industry in today’s society. It was extremely helpful to have a Pearltree for curating news articles, interesting blog posts, and worthy visuals for our presentation [the Pearltree for #SMEcom can be found clicking the pearl below].

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Beyond Pearltrees, my team used a handful of social media tools to keep connected, work from home, and continue the process of preparing our work. Google Docs was used to create slides with real-time editing and communication; Google Hangout was used on more than one occasion to review Keynote slides and share our progress with Dr. Ward; Hootsuite made it easy to follow our hashtag before, during, and after the presentation; and Twitter made it amazingly convenient to contact industry professionals and reach out to them for insight. In addition, Storify was used after the presentation to recap the live-tweeting done by @izzo_michael and the rest of the #NewhouseSM4 class [here's the Storify for our presenation].

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I can guarantee that I’ll be using these social media tools for future projects. Out of them all, I found Google Hangouts to be particularly fun; we were able to pull up our Google Docs, insert apps to collaborate, and we had to option to record the whole thing to upload to YouTube (or our blogs, if we so did desire). Through #SMEcom I’ve made some new connections, learned a great deal about social commerce, and implemented some really cool technology into my productivity and teamwork. Below is the slideshare presentation for #SMEcom- enjoy!