Mercedes Benz Sponsored Pin?

Check this out! The smart marketer(s) over at the P.S. I Made This blog have a Mercedes Benz Fashion Week activity going, (which we must assume is a paid placement), and the special activities are created as images, with Mercedes Benz logos embedded, and then, (of course), the images have been pinned, and repinned in Pinterest. The effect? A Mercedes Benz “Sponsored” Pin. Wow! Actually thousands of Mercedes Benz Sponsored Pins as these images have been pinned & repinned a huge number of times.

P.S. I Made This Pinterest

Also, check out the virality. The first image is the one directly pinned onto the P.S. I Made This Pinterest Board. The P.S. I Made This Pinterest Profile has a healthy 6,000+ followers, but it was only repinned 133 times, (as of just right now of course). But look, it got repinned by Sara Brown,  and BAM, somehow that resulted in it being repinned 3494 times. That is worth investigating further, but not tonight.

How Would You Do This Type Of Marketing? “

You would work with a blogger to do a blog post, with a collage, or tutorial that includes your logo. Then just let that blogger’s fans do the rest of the work – by pinning & repinning the images. Your logo & product gets shared all over Pinterest.

The only technical issues we can think of have to do with reporting back to the paid sponsor.

Unless you have special software, or a method I’m not aware of, you would have a hard time reporting back on any specific metrics on the Pinterest portion of this campaign. Maybe they’re just treating it as ‘gravy’? You can, in Google Analytics, see referral traffic from Pinterest to your blog, but I don’t know of a way to ‘parse out’ any specific images, because each time their are pinned they are given a unique pin i.d.

(Sorry, I realize this is fairly techie). Anyway, if any of you know of a way to track the referral traffic from a specific image (not the the single instance of it being pinned and therefore referring traffic, but all pins / all traffic), let me know.

Regardless of any of the technical issues related to reporting results, that’s smart marketing.

Have you seen other ‘sponsored’ pins?

Published by Jason Miles

Jason Miles is the CEO of of OmniRocket, a Seattle based ecommerce consulting and SAAS company, and the author of the Bestselling Pinterest Power. He regularly partners with leading online groups and sites including, the American Marketing Association, IBM's Connectchat, Social Media Examiner, Profnet, Marketingprofs, and similar groups.

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