Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

It was August of last year when my lovely introduced me to Pinterest. People who are new to it keep saying they get ‘lost’ easily in Pinterest. Ms. M described it exactly so when she told me about it.

I’ve started using it to collect infographics, and searching for phrases like “beauty” and “light.” It’s a wonderful new way to mine the collective consciousness while feeding the right side of the brain. And I’ve really enjoyed seeing more people adopt it recently.

As a result of all the new users, I’ve also been fascinated by the torrent of recent press about it. Turns out 80% Pinterest users are women. And on the other hand, 80% of Google+ users are men. (More about Google+ soon.)

This Atlantic Wire article stopped me in my tracks though. The Army as a poster Pinterest user? At the bottom of the page is a Slideshare presentation on how the US Army describes Pinterest to their communications teams.

As a big bonus, they describe very succinctly how it works.

In an article yesterday, AdAge talked about the struggle of marrying social media and Customer Relations Management (CRM) systems. There’s no doubt the technology is there, and social media feeds can easily be linked to individualrecords in CRM systems (like Salesforce.com). The marketer’s struggle is pretty much a visualization exercise, in my book. Plus, few marketers “speak IT.” But more and more, IT teams and marketers have a common language - largely linked through well-implemented CRM systems.

So, to visualize just a little: