Meetings + Events

The world’s hottest social media site lets you keep your design inspirations all in one tidy place—on your desktop.

By Sandra Eagle

It’s fun. It’s funky. It’s Pinterest. You never know when a spark of inspiration ignites an idea but now there’s a way to save any image you stumble across on the web and save it for future reference. Pinterest had 11.7 million unique visitors in January of this year and visitors can spend hours on the site. It’s that addictive.

Pinterest, at its most basic, is a set of virtual bulletin boards for capturing images from the web. When users begin on the site, they “follow” other people whose images they find appealing. Event planners, such as Winnipeg-based Emma Singh, president of Events by Emma, finds Pinterest useful for design inspiration and keeping track of her design ideas for future events. “I got connected with Pinterest about eight months ago. It’s a great resource to connect with clients and share ideas that they like, to help me come up with a look and feel for their events.”

Inspiration is not the only thing that Singh likes about the site. “As a business owner, my images get the buzz out about some of the work I’ve done, people talk about my events and start to follow me, it’s like a chain reaction.”

Dev Basu, president & CEO of Powered by Search, based in Toronto, says, “This site is heavily skewed to a female demographic, and has deep integration with Facebook and Twitter. You’re going to get exposure to these larger networks as users create boards and repin images.” pinterest.com

Begin to Pin
Are you Invited? You need an invite to join Pinterest. You can either go to the Pinterest website and request an invitation, or be invited by a friend who is already signed up; you’ll access the site through your Facebook or Twitter account.

Create a Board. You need to create boards to pin your images to. You can have as many as you want, but you need to name them, such as “Décor of Gala Events.” Easy instructions for creating boards are on the site.

Add the Button. In order to pin images to your board, you need to install the “pin it” button on the toolbar of your browser. Again, easy to follow instructions are on the site. When you grab an image from the web, Pinterest grabs the source link to credit the original creator.

Just Pin it. Let’s say you’ve found a site with interesting design features that might work for your next event. By clicking on the “pin it” button, all of the images on that page will appear. Just click on the image you want to capture, write a caption and select a board from the ones you’ve created to pin it to.

Pin Etiquette. Pinterest asks that you follow good “pin etiquette” by linking back to the original site by permalink. Pinners can also report a pin of objectionable content.