You must admit: Pinterest has been pretty hard to ignore over the last few months. In December last year it became the 10^th largest social network in the world and at the beginning of this year became the first website ever to hit 10 million monthly visitors. All this – and it’s still “invite only”. These are impressive figures by anyone’s standards, and it’s easy to see why everybody is talking about it.

So how does Pinterest work?

Imagine Pinterest as a communal scrapbook of beautiful, funny, interesting or just plain weird images, all curated by its members. It’s effectively a digital pinboard in which you can bookmark – or “pin” – images that you like or find online and organize them into your own “boards”. The boards can be on any theme that you like; perhaps ‘Places‘ or ‘Art‘ or even something very specific like ‘Green Tea‘! Any images pinned from the web automatically create a link back to the original source, or if you upload your own images then you can add a link back to your site and drive more visitors to your website. Users can also “repin” interesting images that they like and pin them to their own boards; meaning that, with a bit of luck and some great images, your content could go viral.

It’s easy to see how Pinterest could become a rather dangerous procrastination tool. All of those funny or inspiring photographs that you see shared on Twitter and Facebook, all collected in one place. But it could also be a powerful tool for your business. Here at Wired Canvas we work mostly with creative industries, ethical travel companies and independent businesses who are ideally suited for Pinterest, so we have put together this guide to how your company could use Pinterest as a business tool.

Use Pinterest to promote your products

A little known feature of Pinterest is the ability to add a price tag to your pins. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) have created a board called ‘MuseumStore‘ full of pins from their online shop, and Pinterest helpfully automatically adds a little price banner in the top corner of each image that has a price in the caption, whilst the image links through to the online store where users can purchase the product.

To add a price tag to your products, just type the price with a £ or $ sign before it, and Pinterest will automatically add the price tag.

Use Pinterest to promote your exhibition, event or festival

Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery were one of the first museums in the UK to sign up for Pinterest, and have been using it as a way to both document their past exhibitions as well as promote upcoming exhibitions.

Promote upcoming events and exhibitions

Their major exhibition Children’s Lives is running from March 24^th to June 10^th and they have been building a buzz around it by pinning selected pieces from the show in their dedicated board.

Document past events and exhibitions

They have also been documenting past exhibitions with dedicated boards, allowing their previous work to be easily shared and viewed online.

If you are an arts organisation or a charity with a big archive of images, this would be a great way to continue sharing your past work with a larger audience – although don’t forget to add a link back to your own website so that it drives more visitors back to see your current work! To manually add a link to a pin that you’ve already uploaded, just click ‘Edit pin’ and add the URL:

Use Pinterest for Fundraising Ideas

If you are a charity who relies on donations, a ‘Fundraising Ideas’ board would be a great tool to inspire your supporters. There are so many simple crafty projects on Pinterest that link through to ‘how to’ guides, or recipes for cakes/biscuits that people could sell at fundraising events.

Sharon Black created this great board of fundraising ideas for Breast Cancer Awareness, full of different recipes for pink cake recipes, pink craft project how-to guides and other general fundraising ideas.

Why not start by searching for fundraising guides online (eg. how to organize a fundraising concert) and pin them on your fundraising boards with an inspiring image from your archives.

Use Pinterest to brainstorm ideas for design briefs

We are currently working with B-Side Multimedia Arts on the marketing materials for this summer’s festival. We created a board called B-Side Pinspiration and uploaded some examples of existing B-Side graphics. You can invite other contributors to your boards via email, so we invited the B-Side staff and we all started pinning other examples of design that we liked. Eventually we had a large and eclectic mood-board, which has been a great way of gathering inspiration and ideas for this years designs.

Image of the Day Pinterest Boards

charity:water are a non-profit organisation who use Pinterest to great effect. Their ‘Photo of the Day‘ board now has nearly 2000 followers, and each image links back to their original blog posts – a fantastic way to engage new visitors with their blog.

The guys at charity:water have also cleverly included the story behind the image (with names of the people in the picture, wherever possible, which adds a very personal touch) in every photo caption – meaning that all those great photos that you have sitting on your hard-drive can now become miniature blog posts in themselves. It takes 30 seconds to post a pin, so if you prepared a folder of images and captions in advance it would not be a huge undertaking to update an ‘image of the day’ board over your morning coffee each day.

Is your website optimised for Pinterest?

Ask your web developer to add ‘Pin This’ buttons to your blog and website. Also, be sure to test that your website works with the Pinterest browser plugin, so you don’t miss out on any opportunities for people to share your website with others.

A word of warning!

Pinterest actively discourages people from using their service as a self-promotional tool. The whole point of it is to contribute to a global collection of inspiring and exciting images and content, so if you just use it to purely promote yourself then you may be excluded from Pinterest – and you probably wouldn’t gain any followers anyway. Nobody likes spam; people will only follow you if you post engaging content.

To make the most of Pinterest, be sure to share the love and repin other people’s pins that you think your audience would enjoy, leave comments on pins and follow people who share similar interests.

An important word of warning though: Pinterest does not take responsibility for any copyright infringement. If you pin an image then Pinterest assumes you have gained permission from the owner to upload that work and holds you accountable. Be careful that you don’t create new pins of any artists or photographers work without permission first. Repinning existing pins seems to be an ongoing debate around the web currently, so do your research and plan your Pinterest strategy with this in mind.

Get Pinning!

Hopefully this guide will give you lots of ideas of how your arts organisation or charity business could use Pinterest to raise your profile online and increase your audience. If you want to know more, Jenni Fuchs has put together a useful guide for museums using Pinterest, and curates a regularly updated list of museums who already use Pinterest where you might find a few more ideas.

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The Bootsydillo Mug – by Rob:

Rob decided to channel the spirit of Bootsy Collins and opted for a funk-influenced avant-garde approach, even going so far as to include some Funkadelic lyrics:

Meanwhile…

The Spectacled Bear Mug – by Alice:

Alice (that would be me) opted for a somewhat ‘busier’ approach with lots of random doodlings influenced by day-to-day life at Wired Canvas. References to: the fly infestation / electric fly swats / cake / tea / Movember / books / stationery / music (the cassette is merely symbolic) / the office mouse / biscuits / jaffa cakes / brochures… to name but a few.

Here are some images of the arrival of the new mugs…

If you are one of the many many people who have literally begged us for a mug in the past few months (you know who you are!) – keep an eye out!

Or if you would like to buy your own, why not visit the shop…!

“It’s a bike race, it’s in the bush near wildlife areas, it’s wacky, kids are involved, it’s hot, very local and fun, the mountain has a very distinct shape, man-eating lions of Tsavo, warthogs…”

I replied “so a warthog riding a bicycle?” (meant as a joke) but it turned out that was exactly what he was after. So I drew one:

The temptation to add some spectacles was almost too much to bear.

UPDATE!

The race took place last week and was a huge success! Here are some photos from the day…

You can view the entire Flickr set here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/campsinternationalafrica/sets/72157628294673719/ (Thanks, Dipesh!)

First up was Bob and Roberta Smith selling their weird and wonderful signs, under the guise of “The Bob Shop”:

Who is Bob Smith? D&AD 2010. from Immprint ltd on Vimeo

There were a lot of the sort of things that you might expect from a “fair” (perhaps not a carboot), including a raffle:

…not quite falling into the “expected” category was Gavin Turk signing eggs:

…his head looks a bit like an egg. Just saying.

I particularly loved what these girls were doing (I didn’t get their names, anybody know?) – aside from the adorable letterpress stationery on sale, they were also typing Mills & Boon-inspired mini stories onto little cards, ie. “Naughty Notes”… while you wait! I like to think that they were made up on the spot but I can’t be sure:

Then quite excitingly I got to have a milk-bottle signed by Holly Freeman, who had driven her piece, ‘Afloat‘, all the way from Tooting at 15mph. This was definitely one of my favourite stalls at the sale – funny, tongue-in-cheek, affordable, personal and very friendly!

I got a neon pink milk bottle, which Holly kindly signed for me:

Cassart! and Oliver Gut Watkins were running an Art Improvement Clinic, where students from RCA or St Martins would ‘improve’ your artwork in need of love…

Penguin were running a cute stall where you could buy these amazing deck-chairs (<<< note to anybody who ever wants to buy me an amazing gift) and also some classic novels with blank covers so you could design your own, for just £1! I bought The Great Gatsby and Alice In Wonderland to decorate myself. Penguin have also got some bands to decorate the covers, with varying results…

Oh and then there were these nutters…

This was a group of artists called Bert Industries who were spanking volunteers with some terrifying looking padded arms. Needless to say, I didn’t volunteer (but I did film it for Wired Canvas blog readers’ viewing pleasure):

Spanking at the London Art Car Boot Fair from Wired Canvas on Vimeo

Finally, The Girls (Andrea Blood and Zoe Sinclair) were there with Posted – a temporary exhibition celebrating post and the dying art of letter-writing. This is something that I am personally a total geek over as a serial stationery-nerd, letter-writer and Swap-botter, so I loved this stall:

I bought myself a lovely new commemorative royal Oyster card holder (with The Girls as Bea & Eugenie / Wills & Harry):

…genius! There was loads more going on that I didn’t get round to photographing but at that point the heavens opened so we legged it to the pub. All in all, definitely worth a visit in 2012!

Luke Elwes on Turner’s ‘The Evening Star’ from Luke Elwes on Vimeo.

We built artist Luke Elwes’ website a while back, and just stumbled upon this video of his talk at the National Gallery on Turner’s painting ‘The Evening Star’.

Bow Arts Trust are shortly throwing open their doors to the public for their Open Studios programme, so nosy parkers like us can explore the artists’ studios. We’ll be there Friday night, hopefully see you there.

You can download the PDF brochure HERE!

Firstly, Dorset’s youth contemporary dance company Portrait took over Debenhams for an afternoon, after working with choreographer Carly Reader:

B-Side Encounters have also hit the streets, with some rather subversive and provocative pasted street-art, inspired by the likes of Banksy, created by young people from Littlemoor working with artist Peter Snelling. They have been tackling the subject of economic prospects for young people and plastered the streets of Weymouth with their own unique visions – including a life size human pyramid attempting to reach a ten pound note, and a million pounds being thrown in the air and vanishing into the gutter. My favourite part of this is that they pasted it to the side of a bank… pure genius.

We just launched a new website for Bow Arts Trust (and when I say “just launched”… I mean about an hour ago). We’ve done a complete rebrand for them and built them a new website; we will cover it in detail in our portfolio section but in short we are chuffed to bits and have already had some great feedback today.We created four different “brands” for the four strands of their organisation; Bow Arts as a whole, Studios, Education and their gallery, The Nunnery, which has resulted in a very colourful website!

Needless to say we are very excited to be working with Bow Arts as an organisation – partly because their practise and ethos is exactly the sort of background that Wired Canvas also comes from so we feel right at home – and partly because their initials, BAT, allow us to make lots of Batman/Batmobile/Batcave jokes.

I recently walked past this billboard street art on Cambridge Heath Road near Bethnal Green, East London. Does anybody know who made it? I’m intrigued!

Our good friend, artist Ania Bas, has been commissioned by Open Empty Spaces to create a site-specific work based at Ridley Road Market. She is based there for 26 days of research, creating an A-Z of the market that you can follow online.

Some of our favourites to date (that we hope she will explain to us in more detail) include: “flesh”, “eggs eau do toilette” (I really hope that one is all one phrase), “dandruff”, “celebrities (Alan Sugar)”, “big bargain!!!!”, and “aorta”.

If you want to find out more about Ania and her practice, she is holding an open studio day on Tuesday 19th April between 11am – 3pm at her Market Stall in Ridley Road, Dalston, E8 2NP.