This is the best place for user-found content: Pinterest

The ability to communicate visually, rather than just verbally or in writing is significant.

As a web-based application, Pinterest has the ability to allow individuals to share information and communicate globally. With the internet reaching countries around the world, individuals can find and form tribes based on more than their geographic location. This allows individuals to utilize internet services to engage through a platform that is about more than sharing their personal profile; individuals have a new way to share their ideas, interests, values, and likes or dislikes visually.

In essence, Pinterest is a great example of how, “the focus of social media is shifting away from user-created content to ‘user-found’ content” (Carpenter, 2013). The ability to communicate visually, rather than just verbally or in writing is significant. It means that people can communicate in a way that overcomes barriers since users do not have to create content to communicate about it.

User-Found Content and Other Social Media Sites

In other social media sites, the need to have to communicate verbally or in writing prevents individuals from being able to join or form tribes based on shared interests. The reliance on written content means that a language barrier prevents some forms of communication. This limitation also meant that user-found content was typically shared among like languages, rather than among groups with common interests.

Visual communication and sharing ideas, interests, or values through pictures, drawings, and videos means that individuals can communicate and share user-found content by relying on the visual medium, rather than on written or verbal mediums. For instance, one individual could find or develop an idea, share it on Pinterest, and another individual could expand upon that idea. This would cause a form of collaboration to occur despite speaking different languages, living in different geographic locations, or having other differences that may have prevented interaction on other social media sites.

The ability to cultivate groups or tribes based on interests and/or values is significant for society, because it provokes a different way of thinking about how online interactions could and should occur, and about the types of limitations that could be present in a social media site. Addressing challenges and successes of a social media site, like Pinterest, could provoke the formation of new types of social media sites, or it could cause society to contemplate a different way of thinking about communication, education, collaboration, and group formation.

User-Found Content Impacts Business Communication

The simple, visual layout of Pinterest and the way it’s so easy to showcase user-found content has impacted web design. It’s sparked other websites to try to replicate the look and feel of Pinterest to draw in audiences that are looking for a more visual experience. The acknowledgment that individuals want to communicate visually shows that society may be acknowledging the significance of how Pinterest has opened up a new way of thinking about what social media can accomplish.

Pinterest’s website for business owners, advising them of what the platform can provide by way of value back to the business, indicates that businesses can connect people through shared interests if they inspire Pinterest users by posting information in pins in a personal, authentic way (Pinterest, Business, 2016). Specifying that businesses need to address the way they communicate is significant, because businesses may not be aware that their usual approach to communication is inauthentic, impersonal, or lacks the ability to engage the audience. If businesses changed their approach to communicating with their audiences, it could alter the way products and services are marketed and communicated in different regions around the globe.

Pinterest is significant for businesses in being able to help pinpoint what various audiences “…aspire to do, what [they] want to do down the line…” (i.e. what they think about and what they are planning for) (Bercovici, 2014). To tap into the start of the purchasing process is significant not only for business but for society as a whole, because it opens up a new way of thinking and communicating about wants, wishes, and dissatisfactions with current product and service offerings. The ability to engage in dialogue as a result of exploring how audiences search for and communicate about specific topics and interests could spark a new way of thinking about product and service development, which has the potential to impact the way society collaborates and produces products and services. If businesses knew more about what consumers wanted, they may be open to having different discussions with other producers to collaborate as a way of providing what audiences want, which in turn could spark plentiful returns on their investments.

Legal Issues Highlighted by Social Media

Pinterest is shedding new light on the legal issues that have been created by social media. Society will need to address the issue of what constitutes copyright infringement and how trademarks are impacted by people’s ability to share information through social media and the ability to interact online.

Like other social media sites, “Pinterest’s terms of service also explicitly instruct users to not post images that would violate copyright laws and state that individual users are liable for their own posts” (Carpenter, 2013). With users liable for what they post and share online there is some concern expressed that the ease of use of social media sites and the focus on sharing content “…might be luring the users behind the user-generated content to unknowingly — but frequently — commit copyright infringement” (Carpenter, 2013). Society will have to consider existing copyright legislation and how and when to hold individuals and social media sites liable for sharing exiting content with other people visually or in written form.

Read the rest of the series here:

Part 1: How many people use Pinterest before they buy?

Part 2: What is Pinterest all about? Why should I care?

Part 3: This is the best source of user-found content: Pinterest (current post)

Part 4: Did you know complexity theory is helpful for social media?

Part 5: How To Use Tested Theories For Informative Social Media Communication

Part 6: This is huge! Pinterest impacts society in a big way

References

Bercovici, J. (2014). Social media’s new mad men. Forbes, Inc., 194, 6.

Carpenter, C. (2013). Copyright infringement and the second generation of social media: Why pinterest users should be protected from copyright infringement by the fair use defense. Journal of Internet Law, 16,7.