If you haven't heard of Pinterest, you likely will soon.

Recently, Facebook acquired Instagram, a mobile photo-sharing platform with over 30 million users, for $1 billion. Palo Alto, CA-based Pinterest is one such company, which some believe has many potential suitors or a possible IPO in the waiting. If you haven't heard of Pinterest, you likely will soon.

Pinterest’s Financials :

There is one problem: The 16-person Palo Alto, Calif., start-up isn't sure how it is going to make money. Pinterest is a scrap-book like social networking site that lets users create pinboards around events and themes to share photos among their friends. Development on Pinterest began in 2008 through co-founders Ben Silbermann and Paul Sciarra. The Pinterest closed BETA was launched in March 2010 and post launch, the service amassed over 10,000 users within the first nine months. According to more recent data, the number of daily unique visitors to Pinterest grew from 2 million users in January to 4 million by March 2012. As of January 2012, the service had over 11 million users who can share their pinboards over other social networking sites including Facebook and Twitter.

"Pinterest's monetization strategy isn't in the oven and it's not even off the baking table," said Jeremy Levine, a board member of Pinterest and a venture capitalist at Bessemer Venture Partners. "We have one hundred ideas but no execution as of yet." {via WSJ article}

Mr. Silbermann co-founded Cold Brew Labs Inc. in 2008 and launched Pinterest, the company's only product, the following year. It has raised $37.5 million from Silicon Valley angel investors including Yelp Inc. Chief Executive Jeremy Stoppelman and top venture firms such as Bessemer and Andreessen Horowitz.

The closely held company wouldn't disclose financial figures, but isn't yet making much revenue and is unprofitable. Pinterest is currently valued at around $200 million, according to a person familiar with the matter.

How traffic from Pinterest converts to revenues ?? 

Pinterest claims to be still searching for the right monetization model. For now, though, the company is generating revenues through successful implementation of an affiliate marketing model. Pinterest uses SkimLink services to identify if a photograph posted on the site can be linked to an affiliate program. Once a user clicks through the link and buys a product from the affiliated retailer’s site, Pinterest gets a share of the sale. While statistics are not available, analysts believe that Pinterest is driving plenty of traffic to retailers, especially the smaller ones.

PINTEREST: GOOGLE TAKES AN INTEREST(via Forbes)

Pinterest became the third most visited social network in the US in March 2012. Facebook is the leading player with seven billion total visits, followed at a distant second by Twitter’s 182 million visits. But, Pinterest is catching up with 104 million visits, already having surpassed Google+’s 61 million visits.

David Lawee of Google is taking a look at Pinterest. He says - ‘Pinterest is a phenomenon that’s extraordinary.’ Suggesting an acquisition price of around $2 bn, simply because Google can afford it and needs to make a move in the social space, but I still can’t get my head there.

Pinterest’s Video Move 

Recently, Pinterest extended its photo sharing capabilities by adding video sharing as well. The company enabled the addition of Vimeo videos on to its virtual pinboard. In 2011, Pinterest had introduced video sharing by letting users add YouTube videos on their boards. As a video service, Vimeo is preferred.

Google has been trying to grow within social networking through Google+ which will benefit from an efficient photo sharing tool. Instagram attracted a $1 billion valuation even when they did not have a revenue model in place. Considering that Pinterest has figured out a steady source of revenues through affiliate marketing, they should be able to command a respectable valuation.

//The contents of this blog has been able to put up data with a co-operation from Sramana Mitra and One Million by One Million//

Damaged Online Reputation Recovery

Now that is not what a real estate marketing company would like to recover being an Ostrich after reputation damage. Trying to stop a competitor from using trade dress similar to there trademarked theme brand these companies have got an up-close and unwelcome look at the dark side of the internet specially for the clients.

Blogger pals of their well-connected adversary, including one at a major industry website, blasts for being a bully and filing a frivolous lawsuit, often misrepresenting the circumstances. Some posts generated hundreds of angry responses, and anonymous callers began phoning office, leaving scathing messages. At the low point, one person even decided to inject some personal terror into their life by claiming their relatives had been in a serious car accident. Now to recover form such issues is a tough nut to crack. So here it goes this way :-

When misinformation and rumors circulate about your business, it can dominate your company's search engine results and potentially damage your business, says Michael Fertik, founder and CEO of Reputation.com, an online reputation management firm in Redwood City, Calif.

Such companies must advice his clients to grab as much of their "Google Real Estate" as possible. That means reserving the .com, .net and .org versions of URLs and claiming identities on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and local review sites including Yelp, Google Places, Citysearch and Yahoo Local. You might also want to reserve URLs that pair the name of your business with pejoratives like "sucks,". Businesses can use such vehicles to distribute positive, search-engine-optimized information about their companies, which can push down negative information in search results. In such cases, Global Computer Technologies  also creates several new websites optimized with various descriptions of the company, with links back to the main site to further drive down negative results.

But some rumors keep bubbling back to the top always. Since 2005, members of the Social Network family have been battling a persistent falsehood of their image so as the companies with web based networking. The stick rule is that "The nature of our background makes it believable, but it never happened," company president Elwood Martin says. Global Computer Technologies always extend their hands to the benefits of their customers in all possible ways.

Browse: Home / Socialnomics / Optimizing Your Social Marketing Program – A Practical Way to Social Media Optimization (SMO) Optimizing Your Social Marketing Program – A Practical Way to Social Media Optimization (SMO)

http://about.me/rajdeep.ramsay

If you are serious about your social marketing program, you are likely focused on executing across a number of social platforms.  I am of the mind that ideas are a dime a dozen and execution is key to success – that is, if our ideas are right to begin with. This is why I always advise our clients to take a breather and check in on their progress in the social realm at least twice every year.  Social media platforms change at an unprecedented rate and programs and plan we put in place just a few months can quickly grow outdated.  To add to that, we are often biased by our choices, and sometimes are too close to our programs to know if we are doing the best we can.  This is why we create How to Objectively Audit Your Social Marketing Efforts on white paper. I hope you will use suggested objective methodology to assess your progress and identify new ways to optimize your social marketing efforts.

An objective audit of your social marketing program will help you answer these key questions:

• How well are we doing with social marketing?
• How do we compare to our competition?
• What can our social marketing teams do better?

Start with some objective analysis of your Social Reach along with an analysis of the likelihood that your products or brands are or will be discussed in the social realm in the future.  You will learn that Social Reach is the estimated number of potential and existing customers you can reach via your presence on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.  Your reach is an important first baseline – you are as big as the number of people you can reach and touch (for a deeper conversation on how to grow your Social Reach.

Proceed by analyzing the volume and types of digital conversations surrounding your category and products.  You will likely find that new entrants are vying for your customers’ and prospects’ attention.  Understand who they are, where they are investing and what they are talking about.  This will help you assess if you have sufficient resources and focus to participate and dominate these conversations.

Remember – keywords are the new digital currency.  Create a list of top strategic keywords you want to own and see how well you rank for them with the top search engines.  You have to be good at connecting with your prospects and customers – wherever they are, however they search for your solutions. The SEO , helps you better understand your rankings and keyword authority. I learnt that to succeed with search engines, you need to use landing pages – research shows that best-in-class companies across all sectors are using landing pages to get to the users who have a clear idea of what they need.

Equipped with this data, you can build your own Social Marketing Effectiveness Dashboard.  This dashboard becomes your benchmark against your peers and against your own progress.  Updating it at least twice a year will help you stay focused, nimble and relevant.  It will also help you identify untapped opportunities for traction and growth. To bring this objective assessment to life, we connected with our friends at Social Media networks, who kindly agreed to be our featured company example. It provides Web Content Management (WCM) software that helps businesses increase traffic, drive conversion and improve social interaction. Recently invested in a new marketing team, who will use the provided objective assessment as a baseline to measure their improvements and create a targeted approach to social media and SEO practices. Special thanks to our social marketing agency WEB VELOCITY who helped with the analysis for this paper.

If you would like to review other resources on the same subject, I recommend WEB VELOCITY. You will learn the difference between social media optimization (SMO) and engagement. I also recommend the Social Media Explorer .

Curious to hear from my peers. How do you keep your social marketing program focused? Do you run health checks of your social and SEO programs and how often?  What methods and tools do you use? Let’s continue the discussion on this blog, Twitter, Facebook http://about.me/rajdeep.ramsay and in our Google + https://plus.google.com/110074757401718973167/posts?hl=en Group.