Pics and stones may break my bones
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

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As more businesses recognise the need to see and be seen on social media, tools to help them continue to appear. But are firms that have a care for their online reputation focusing far too much on the words people say and ignoring the pictures they post?

Reuters recently launched its Social Pulse news curation service – helping companies keep track of what people are saying about them and whether it’s affecting their share price (comment from LiveWire’s Penny Crossland here). Now LexisNexis is doing its bit for lawyers, helping them become more visible in the social space; its Social Media Visibility service helps them establish a blog and create appropriate content for the major social sites – Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Both services also nod in the direction of visual media. Just as well, really, because watching the words is one thing, but the signs are that picture-orientated sites like Tumblr are catching up fast.

Tumblr postings tend to include a Twitter-type microblog allied to a link to a song, a picture or a video, and PC Magazine reports that its 120 million unique users now view 15 billion pages every month. But what’s particularly spectacular about Tumblr is its rate of growth.

According to an infographic by Mashable last November, Tumblr grew by over 200% in the United States alone from June 2010 to June 2011, compared with LinkedIn’s 63%, Twitter’s 31% and Facebook’s pathetic 14%. Just under half of Tumblr’s original posts are photos – but it is having to look over its shoulder at a competitor that is almost all about pictures: Pinterest.

Pinterest is a virtual pinboard. It allows people to organise and share “all the beautiful things” they can find on the web – and already, if figures from content sharing specialist Shareaholic are to be believed, it’s driving more referral traffic than Google Plus, LinkedIn and YouTube combined. It’s still way behind Facebook in terms of total referrals, but growing much faster.

Why should business – or, for that matter, information managers – care? Perhaps a cautionary tale from customer service and contact centre software specialist Genesys might give a clue.

Genesys cites the example of Dave Carroll’s complaint about his guitar, allegedly damaged by an airline. He made it not in writing but in the form of a YouTube video, which attracted 4 million viewings in its first 10 days and is reputed to have knocked 10% off United Airlines’ share price.

Most of the pictures featured on Pinterest seem pretty saccharine-flavoured for the moment. But – bearing in mind the well known cliché about how many words a picture is worth – it can only be a question of time before things start to get nasty.

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