Klout says I am not an expert on headphones. I think I am. But, my social media activity around the topic has not been sufficient to warrant notice by Klout or any other influence service. So here I sit, bereft, betrayed, bewailing and bemoaning — in short, a beloser.
So what’s a poor boy to do? Surely I don’t want to turn my tweets into a withering torrent of headphone-related detritus, in a futile effort to show on the big Klout board. No, that would decrease my influence, if anything, if my social media output turns into a one-note joke. My tweet stream is about me, not an arbitrary list of topics. I’m a person, after all, not a dictionary (unlike my sesquipedalian-word-loving uncle Noah).
This is where I think Pinterest could come in. In a sense, it’s like a combination of Instagram and Squidoo – combining the content curation of the latter with the social aspects and personality of the former. Of course, there is a lot of duplication between Squidoo and Pinterest, but where Squidoo is organized around topics, Pinterest is organized around people. Setting aside the “social shopping” implications for brands, Pinterest is also a great place to curate pretty much anything you consume, including media and, of course, headphones. But for brands, the relative popularity of relevant pages might just be a better way for them to curate people.
If Pinterest takes off, brands combing through their server data might just find that the initial interest in their product early in the clickstream funnel might have come from someone’s Pinterest board. And if the makers of some of the headphone-related products on my “Audiophilia” pinboard happen to see a lot of clicks coming through that particular page, well – guess what? I’m an influencer about headphones, regardless of what an algorithm says, based upon an actual relevant behavior. After all, the best predictive measure of whether or not I might be influential about headphones in the future, is if I have, in fact, influenced people about headphones in the past.
