You already know about Facebook and Twitter, but what do you know about Pinterest?
Pinterest is a social sharing website where individuals and businesses can ‘pin’ images on ‘boards’ in order to share visual content with friends and followers. Users can not only be responsible for setting up the content on their ‘pinboard’, if they like a particular photo they see ‘pinned’ elsewhere, they can re-pin it onto their own board.
The popularity of Pinterest is already well established in the US, and has quickly moved from a site that was predominantly used by women to display arts & crafts pictures, to one that is widely used by manufacturing and retail businesses as a ‘shop window’; allowing them to show off photogenic items and drive referrals and sales. The popularity of Pinterest is spreading fast, and between September 2011 and September 2012, the number of users in the UK increased by 786% to around 8 million users, and the popularity continues to grow.
The originators of Pinterest have created a ‘Pin Etiquette’ and their website www.pinterest.com also provides a useful guide as to how to set up a ‘pin board’ and the benefits of liking and sharing photos that have been put on to other user’s boards.
For businesses, other than providing an extended sales opportunity, it is all about driving up referrals. To maximise opportunities, it is important to pin other people’s images on to your board, and like them. By commenting and sharing with others, the community of followers will grow, in the same way as other social media sites.
Businesses can opt to follow other companies in their sector that are non-competitive i.e. a jewellery business following a clothes business. To see what other businesses are doing, type a company’s domain name into the ‘Pinterest’ search box, and you will find the content already pinned to those businesses. You may wish to take a look at an example Pinboard at: https://pinterest.com/burberry/.
For even more interest – type your own company domain name into the Pinterest search box, and see what has been ‘pinned’ relating to your company! The result may not be what you are expecting.
This leads us to discuss the use of trademarks on Pinterest. The introduction of another global social media site is bringing an ever perplexing situation for brand owners.
Essentially, the same methods of policing, enforcing and defending trademark rights are to be invoked as for Facebook and Twitter, but the task of achieving this continues to grow, and become ever more time-consuming. It seems that businesses cannot afford to ignore the benefits of ‘blowing their own trumpet’ on social media sites, but control is key.
Pinterest have anticipated that there will be issues relating to the ‘unauthorised’ use of trademarks, and have set out a policy document and a complaint form. This can be seen here: https://policy.pinterest.com/en/trademark.
National and international brand owners need to be alert to the continually emerging risks posed by the internet and to the ways to protect themselves from them.
The experienced team at Albright IP are able to offer advice on all areas of trademark law and practice, including the use of trademarks in the social media.