Blog 2

In order to accurately gather information through social media, you first need to make sure you are looking at the right source.  If you were looking for general information about what I like, where I am located, or even my family life, Facebook would be the best route to take.  If you are more interested in my work and how that affects my life and sways my purchasing habits, it may be better to look toward LinkedIn.  Beyond that, Pinterest, is a great place to understand what is important to me.

So say you need to know about my dreams and hobbies.  The best place to find this information would be on Pinterest.  This is the newest source of consumer data that hasn’t really been tapped into yet.  You can gather information about different hobbies, interests, and aspirations that I have.  Then from there you can see how many people like certain ideas.  It would be a great place to test out the buzz marketing concept.

If a designer baby clothes company would like to get a feel for what people like they just need to look at people who have created boards that have to do with baby stuff.  You can normally tell by the name of the pin board, whether a person really has kids or not.  Take mine for instance, it is call sweet baby, buy my friends is called baby someday.  You could normally tell from mine that I already have kids, and you could see what kinds of things I have pin to that board and get an idea of my style when it comes to my child and my parenting style. 

You could use this information to design clothing that people would actually want to buy.  The only drawback would be understanding how much someone is willing to pay.  This is where Pinterest data would be severely lacking..  Since it is a site filled with dreams and aspirations, it is hard to tell what a person could actually afford.  Since people are constantly pinning outfits that they may either want to buy, or they just want to model an ensemble after what they have seen on the site.   

So back to the baby clothing company, even though it is hard to understand the consumer aspect, they can gather data on the newest trends.  They can get a general understanding of the fashion styles that are making their way around the pinterest boards, then model their clothing to match the most popular styles.  From there they can start blogging about their new lines and get a feel for how people are going to react. 

This is where Pinterest is limited, but if you consider the use of both Pinterest and Tumblr, you could gather even more valuable information.  Tumblr is a blog site where people can subscribe to different topics, such as fashion, food, do it yourself, and technology.  This is actually where a lot of the content for Pinterest comes from. If you can start a blog about inspiration for the baby clothes design, and have a link to the store site as well as getting the blog on Pinterest.  This would be a way to reach a parent like me, someone who wants their child to look great, but also want a couple of outfits that are unique.

From these two sites you would be able to tell that I like to sew, bake, and travel.  That I am not interested in hiring people and would prefer to figure out how to do things for myself.  That I like the idea of fashion, but it is not that important to me.  From this a company could gather that I am not a big spender, but will spend on good quality things.  I don’t buy anything that looks like it would be easy to make on my own.  They would then be able to take this and have a good idea of the different kinds of baby clothes I would like to buy.

The best way to get to this kind of information about me is to follow me on pinterest.  This is much easier that following someone on Facebook since you do not have to know the person to follow his or her pins.  If you follow enough people who seem to be in your target demographic, you will be able to understand what they are interested in by their pins.  Granted you would need to be checking the site quite often, and it would take a long time to follow enough people to really get a good idea of who your target customer is.

This method of customer research does have its drawbacks, but t would be great if someone could tap into the data that is provided by Pinterest!