Careers Over Coffee talks Pinterest

by Rosemary Hook

AWC’s Careers Over Coffee north group never worries if there will be a lull in our career discussion. If anything, we have too many topics to discuss in our hour and a half breakfast exchange.

At our recent coffee gathering on Friday, April 6^th at Mimi’s Café in the Arbor Walk, the discussion began with Facebook and LinkedIn but quickly turned to Pinterest — the “content sharing service that provides a platform for members to pin images, videos and other objects to a pinboard.” The keyword here is “member” because unlike the other social media platforms, you have to be invited to participate by Pinterest or be invited by someone who is already a member on Pinterest.

Since this was a career forum, our conversation naturally led to how one might, in addition to branding themselves via other social media tools, use Pinterest to find a job. According to a Forbes article in 2012, Pinterest is an ideal platform for designer types because they can use applications like InDesign to showcase their creative works while also observing pin etiquette to credit sources or report objectionable content. The Pinterest community-at-large seems intent on keeping the site’s core purpose, to pin interests in a virtual world, its main function.

What if your interests are interwoven with your expertise as it is for AWC member and Career Over Coffee regular, Kay Bell? Kay doesn’t sell her writing services on Pinterest, instead, she uses the site as the pin board it was meant to be from sharing photos of her Baltimore Orioles collage to poking fun at made up Golf Boys. Kay brands herself using Pinterest and shares tax tips in the process—real or proposed, e.g. goofball tax breaks for the made-up Golf Boys or following Hillary Clinton’s fake tax tweets to Oprah.

Whichever social media platform(s) you use, all of them ultimately point to your overall brand. Each platform, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or any of the many other sites, have their own quasi-etiquette rules. Know what those rules are, use the tool as intended, and build a career brand for yourself in the process.

Join an AWC Careers Over Coffee forum in south Austin any fourth Thursday of the month or in north Austin any first Friday of the month. Oh, and we have our own forum etiquette: have coffee, have fun, and talk careers.

Photo uploaded to Flickr Creative Commons.