The Sound Vs. The Echo

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As you probably already know, I’m a big fan of Pinterest… Not just because it’s become an incredibly popular marketing tool overnight, but just because I find it kinda useful.

I’ve been following Pinterest’s ridiculous growth for a while now, and so have the people in my office. My friend Kate Buck Jr. recently wrote an Amazon bestseller about it.

Here’s the thing; before you get too heavily invested in a phenom like Pinterest, it’s hugely important that you decide whether Pinterest is actually driving a trend all by itself, or riding a trend…

I’m a huge fan of the Piggyback Launch Model, but the one critical thing about that model is that it requires that you climb on the back of the thing that’s driving the trend, i.e. the sound, not the echo.

Is Pinterest really the driving force behind its sudden rise to fame? I’m having trouble buying into that one…

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Pinterest is going anywhere. What I mean is that, I almost cant believe how many startups have built their entire business model on a small, up-and-coming social network with a lot of hype… For example, I kind of cringed when I saw that VC firms are dumping $1.4M  into Pinfluencer.

To be fair, I have no idea if Pinfluencer is a good Pinterest analytics dashboard or not. All I know is that at this point, I don’t need that level of analytics data from Pinterestst — and I bet you probably don’t either.

So is Pinterest really the sound, or the echo?

That’s a totally rhetorical question, by the way, I don’t think anyone can really know the answer yet.

Pinterest came out of nowhere and immediately showed Facebook what it could be doing better (photos), and what’s going to be a major ingredient in the recipe for mobile platform success (also photos).

However, Facebook is making major strides to improve it’s photo experience (buying Instagram, for one). At the same time, I think that the things that have made Pinterest a huge success are not really unique to Pinterest.

Once again, I’m not dismissing Pinterest at all — it may very well continue to grow like crazy — but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it either.

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