The question of whether or not Pinterest was a tool to be used by the college or extension came up a couple weeks ago in a college social media forum. No one present had much experience with Pinterest, so not much more was said. The primary user in the college of which I am aware are Jeff Hyde for the Agricultural Entrepreneurship programs. I hadn't used it beyond viewing links others sent me so decided to explore. I am now the proud owner of a "Penn State Extension" board.
One thing I find interesting about Pinterest is their enrollment process. Unlike most social media hubs, you have to be invited to join Pinterest. You can request the invitation from their site. In my case I recieved the invitation within 24 hours of my request. The invitation included links to get me started. Unfortunately, at the time I received the invitation I did not have time to work on this so rushed through some of the information and logged out. Yesterday when I logged in I had to try to figure out some things that probably would have been evident had I spent more time with the prescribe introductory links. After a little bit of time on these I began exploring other sites. I decided I needed to give myself an assignment so set off to create a Penn State Extension board. In my research I did find a Cooperative Extension board which contains "pins" from around the country, but I wanted to make my board unique to Pennsylvania to explore how we might use it to talk about what Penn State Extension offers.
So, I began work on my board. Naming it was easy. Then I realized I still didn't know how to pin things to my board, so did a little backtracking on that. It didn't help that some of the initial pages I attempted to pin had no images sufficient for pinning. This may have implications for future web design if it is hoped that people will promote your pages through tools such as Pinterest in the future - in this case, you need images that can be utilized to make it easier for this to happen. I believe from my web travels yesterday I came across a solution for pinning items that don't contain images, but couldn't find it again when I retraced my tracks.
Eventually, I got a respectable board established with basics about what Penn State Extension is, and some program pages, newsarticles and notice of upcoming events. I like that new items are automatically shifted to the top and that I can select the cover picture. It's also nice that the URL for what you are pinning is automatically posted. I found it interesting that if I post something someone else has, even if I didn't get it off their page, they get credit for the initial "pin."
I felt that sense of accomplishment I used to enjoy when freshman would accomplish something they thought was impossible or hard as I finished, but recognized the next question is the every repeating "So what?" How do we know if this is an effective way to reach our audience? Will people use it? Is there a mechanism to evaluate success? These are all questions that have to be answered to determine whether or not this is something to encourage for programs such as this. I must admit a bit of pleasure this morning when I found that one of my items had been repinned three times already. So, did three people find this that wouldn't have otherwise known about Penn State Extension? At least I know three people looked at the page. I look forward to seeing how this develops over time. I'll keep you posted. (and if you give me material, I might even "pin" you.)
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