About a year ago, I got a text from my old friend Susan. She wrote, “I just followed you on Pinterest.” A few moments later, she followed up with, “I just checked. You’re literally the only man I know who has a Pinterest account.”
Whats the True Potential with Pinterest for Marketing?Â
Why did I despise Pinterest so intensely? Maybe I wasn’t born with the tools required to comprehend its complexities. I had known, of course, that Pinterest is dominated by women across all age groups, with something like a 70/30 gender split. But I never considered that my simple lack of estrogen would keep me from being able to navigate an app.
Bad enough I’ve never been able to figure out women, but now I can’t even understand their social media sites. Perfect!Â
I originally joined because I wanted an organized place to save online content to revisit later. What I found was a hoarding app and a social-media site rolled into one platform, without being really great at either. One of Pinterest’s many unforgivable flaws is that after pinning something, I would come back later to find that just a thumbnail of the webpage’s main image had been pinned instead of all the content that I actually cared about.
A few weeks after I began my experiment with the image-based social bookmarking site, I closed my account in frustration and Susan again went back to following exactly zero men on Pinterest.
Evernote is Safe for Now – paired with Google Keep – it’s a plus for Men.
Pinterest is wildly popular and growing quickly. But it is flawed as a hoarding app (especially when it comes to saving text-based content) and it doesn’t have the reach of the top-tier social media networks.
Google Keep, is the first platform to bridge the gap between note-taking apps and social media.
As a note-taking app, it enables users to create, collect and save notes, audio, web content images and more, just like Pinterest. It comes with a menu of cool organizational features, which give the impression that Google is attempting to muscle in on Evernote’s turf as the top dog of hoarding apps. But part of Keep’s lure is that it actually works remarkably well in conjunction with Evernote, instead of attempting to replace it. As Lifehacker pointed out, the two were never meant to be in competition, although early comparisons stoked that discussion. The real magic is in Keep’s ability to seamlessly sync with Google Drive.
Google+ and Keep: The Beginning of Social Note Taking ?
As TechCrunch noted shortly after the launch of Keep, Pinterest has more consumer appeal than any social bookmarking site in the world. But since Keep is not social, it poses no immediate threat to Pinterest.
All that could change, however, if Google merged the “social plumbing” it has built with Google+ into the foundation of Keep, which it easily could. More than 10 million people have downloaded Keep, and the more content they collect, they more likely they are to want to share it. If Google merges Plus with Keep, Pinterest will be squared off against a sleeker, simpler version of itself — one that is backed by the Google brand and gazillions of Google loyalists.
Then, I’ll finally have an easy, time-saving place to store the recipes I’m never going to cook and the workouts I’m never going to do. Just think of all the spare time that will leave me with to try to figure out women.
