Fast Company recently reported that Pinterest was not only one of the most visited sites in the country, but also that purchases made through the site bring in twice the revenue per order than through Facebook or Twitter. With traffic only showing signs of increasing and the site releasing free analytics tools, there has never been a better time to start using Pinterest to your advantage.

Yet, many marketing and PR pros using the platform say that just posting a pretty photo isn’t enough. For tips on how your client can start pinning with the best of them, read How to Make Pinterest Work for Your Brand.

– Nicholas Braun

The full version of this article is exclusively available to Mediabistro AvantGuild subscribers. If you’re not a member yet, register now for as little as $55 a year for access to hundreds of articles like this one, discounts on Mediabistro seminars and workshops, and all sorts of other bonuses.

“Out of sight, out of mind” need not apply to brands that are seasonal, annual or under renovation. Multiple marketing options, beyond having a social media or mobile presence, allow for destinations, museums, hotels, TV series, film festivals and sporting events to remain relevant throughout the year.

We’ve gathered twelve methods across categories to show how selected brands remain in public view. While these are similar to initiatives that year-round brands use, they often require more resourcefulness and additional resources.

     Make your presence known

1. Events: Offering a rich history, scenic countryside and famous golf courses, Scotland is a popular destination. During off-season April, Scotland hosts Tartan Week in New York. Festivities include a parade with Scots (and Scottish terriers) in kilts, and a trendy plaid fashion show.

2. Pop-up/temporary exhibits: Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum closed temporarily for an upgrade and will re-open this spring. Meanwhile, museum-goers can view the Dutch painter’s works at Amsterdam’s Hermitage museum.

     Get the word out

3. Generate buzz: Last year when New York’s legendary Waldorf Astoria was under construction, the hotel created an amnesty program  where prior guests were encouraged to return items they’d “borrowed” during their stays to showcase in the lobby. The program was intended to feed the hotel’s social media platforms and appeal to younger guests.

4. Sharing expertise: New York’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum is currently closed during renovations. To draw designers’ notice, their acting director and curators started a blog. Called Object of the Day, it features graphic design items from the museum’s collection.

     Brand extensions

5. New location spin-offs: In 2002 Tribeca Film Festival launched to revive downtown New York after 9/11’s terrorist attack. The brand expanded its universe in 2010 by adding a Doha, Qatar location. In 2012 Sundance Film Festival introduced a London edition.

6. Counter-seasonal additions: Marketers learned about these brand extensions from the ski industry. Years ago Aspen was known just for snow sports. Ever since Aspen’s Food & Wine Classic was introduced, the town is also recognized for summertime culinary fare. Countless brands have copied this concept.

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As a sort of farewell (for now!) to our readers, I’d like to draw upon my experience editing this site over the past nine months to leave you with a list of tips for pitching to bloggers like me. I write “bloggers” because that’s the field I know, and there are some differences between pitching to a site like PRNewser and a paper like The Wall Street Journal, even though the basics are the same. Anyway, here goes:

1. Do Some Research: I don’t mean that you have to read everything the blog in question has published over the past six months. You can probably just scan the content to get a general sense of what sorts of stories interest the blog’s editors, the tone they like to use in covering them, and the sort of audience they serve. You’d be surprised how many pitches I’ve received from people who have very obviously never read PRNewser. I don’t hold that against them, but it certainly makes me less likely to consider their stuff.

2. Get Your Contacts’ Names Right: I know you’re busy and that you’re not really too concerned when an editor leaves or joins a blog. But I’ve been here nine months, and a majority of the pitches I get are still addressed to my predecessor, Tonya. That’s not all: to this day I receive an embarrassing number of emails directed to Joe and Jason, the guys who started the blog — and it’s been almost three years since either of them worked in this office. That’s bad form, guys.

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Today we’re very glad to bring you another guest post by Lindsay Goldwert, a senior program executive at Hotwire PR who jumped into the field after performing editorial duties for New York Daily News, ABCNews.com, CBSNews.com, CourtTV, Glamour and Redbook. Here’s her previous post on writing better pitches.

I won’t lie — the first two months at my new job were an adjustment.

After spending twelve years as a working journalist, I simply did not know how to operate on the other side. The PR industry’s language confused me; I felt like I was starting over, and it was a scary, unsettling feeling. Most painfully, I was mourning the loss of a career path. It hadn’t treated me all that well but, frankly, it was was all I knew.

Then again, I hadn’t been doing much real journalism lately. Wasn’t that why I quit in the first place?

I turned a corner a few weeks ago and, for the first time in many years, I’m experiencing the warm glow of possibility. It’s a good feeling to leave a shrinking, scrambling, panicking field for one that’s growing, experimenting and writing its own rules for success. Ideas are valued. Insight is appreciated. Your time is money. Industry knowledge is gold.

For others who are contemplating a career shift, I offer these reasons why you may feel extremely valued in the PR field (and not just for your media contacts):

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Hashtags aren’t just for tweeters anymore. Now that Vine and Facebook have announced “trending hashtag” features, every social media promo campaign must have a well-chosen hashtag, and yesterday an amusing story reminded us how important the strategy behind these tags can be. Basically, some wise guy tweeted #nowthatcherisdead to announce the passing of former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher and scared a bunch of Cher fans (calm down, everyone: she’ll be playing Vegas well into the 22nd century).

It all seems very simple, but the fact that Budweiser thought this billboard was OK only two months ago shows us that hashtagging is still a little too complicated for some:

The budweiser ” #taste is ” billboard-hashtag is such an amazing fail. Was someone drinking too many @blackcrown s? twitter.com/adland/status/…

— Adland (@adland) February 17, 2013

Half of the ads that aired during the last Super Bowl had hashtags, but that number should have been 100% because the strategy is no less important today than it was a year ago. And now it’s time to make some helpful suggestions!

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Our readers may be forgiven for responding to Twitter’s Vine app with a shrug and a “meh.” When we first saw it, we were very skeptical of reports that it was the hot new thing among the kids who’ve apparently grown bored with Facebook and don’t follow politics or tech news closely enough to bother with plain old Twitter.

One thing we will say: it’s somewhat difficult to create truly interesting content with Vine! There’s a real art to it, as you can see by our failure to convey the awesomeness of these massive koi pond goldfish on our first attempt:

Those are some big goldfish. vine.co/v/bdYUY0Y5MHM

— Patrick Coffee (@PatrickCoffee) March 16, 2013

At any rate, this week’s numbers should give the haters pause: Vine has achieved the #1 app spot on the iTunes store just six months after its release. In other words, get familiar with this little app as soon as you can, because your clients will start asking about it if they haven’t already.

What’s to know that we haven’t already reported?

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Today we bring you a guest post via Sheldon Levine. Levine is community manager for Marketwired/Sysomos, an innovative social intelligence company offering global news distribution and reporting services as well as state-of-the-art social media monitoring and analytics powered by Sysomos. Marketwired and Cision recently partnered to allow Cision customers to connect with media, influencers and customers through Marketwired’s distribution channels.

With thousands of news releases being distributed every day, PR pros are constantly looking for opportunities to reach a broader audience and drive more views. Incorporating multimedia is one of the most effective ways to accomplish this goal — especially when some sources credit multimedia embeds for traffic bumps of up to 77%.

Perhaps we can, armed with this knowledge, officially declare text-only press releases as a thing of the past. We know visual storytelling is a critical pillar in any effective communication strategy. Just look at how brands continue to invest in image-driven social networks like Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr. At Marketwired, we believe this best practice shouldn’t be limited to social media. Creating multimedia –photos, video, audio, or infographics, for starters – is a smart PR tactic. As an added bonus, the fresh content can be shared on blogs or across social channels, thereby spreading a release’s main messages even further.

Whether we’re considering products, food or information, we consume with our eyes. Multimedia often offers the extra “sizzle” journalists and bloggers are looking for in their content, and in some cases such releases become stories in their own right. Here are five tips to make your multimedia press releases “pop”:

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Two of social media’s leading lights have debuted new or slightly different features this week. First, via our sister site AllFacebook, Zuckerberg and company appear to be toying with new names for the “promote” button. Alternatives include “boost post”, “advertise post” and “get more reach.”

At first glance this appears to be a simple tweaking of the language, because the function of these buttons remains the same. But we appreciate the psychology behind the change: Facebook is simply adopting more appropriate marketing jargon to re-emphasize the purpose and potential benefits of these expenses in users’ minds. Will it lead more brands and PR folks to “optimize” their sponsored content (there’s another one)? Facebook certainly hopes so — and we all know how powerful a few choice words can be, don’t we?

On the other side of the social pond, LinkedIn debuted “mentions“, which are the equivalent of Facebook tags. We’re a little more interested in this development — and here’s why:

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If you have tech or startup clients, your dream score would be a feature in Fast Company, the magazine of choice for those obsessed with the tech biz. The mag’s Chris Dannen, editor of the software-focused Co.Labs, recently published a “how to pitch us” article that every tech-oriented PR pro should read, like, yesterday.

In summary, Dannen emphasizes that the magazine strongly prefers pitches framed as stories designed to help others in the field succeed — a sort of “look how we did it and how excited we are about it” model. He writes that email pitches should be extremely short and focus on enthusiasm for the lessons learned during the journey rather than the details (which can and will be fleshed out later, warts and all). He follows by elaborating on the components of a compelling story for those who love the product/initiative but aren’t as clear on the underlying narrative behind it.

In other words, you need to avoid making your story sound like another press release or dull product roll-out announcement — this is not a sales pitch.

We would go into greater detail, but all PR pros (especially those with a tech focus) should really just read the full article.

Last week brought news of disgraced general/CIA chief and potential presidential candidate David Petraeus‘s first post-scandal appearance. Petraeus used a speech before a University of Southern California dinner honoring the military to effectively begin his apology tour. We and everyone else in PR are obsessed with damage control, and we feel like Petraeus got it right. Now we’d like to take a moment to relay seven lessons from recent scandal-wracked personalities who didn’t quite get it right.

1. Make it public — but not too public: Whoever told Arnold Schwarzenegger that appearing on every interview show ever to talk about his affairs and his out-of-wedlock child while simultaneously hawking his new book was very wrong.

2. Be humble. Seriously: Jonah Lehrer didn’t get the message that being a public intellectual does not allow you to avoid taking the blame for your own failings by over-intellectualizing the whole thing and pontificating about the why and the how. “I need rules because I don’t trust myself to not be arrogant”? Come on, man.

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