Confessions of an IT Girl

Are you on Pinterest?  I signed up for an account about a year ago.   Maybe more, who knows.  I remember I got an invite from a friend when they were highly coveted jewels in the crown of social media.  I set up my account and then…nothing.  I didn’t really get what the point of the site was, since there wasn’t a huge amount of activity there.  I watched what seemed like hundreds of notification emails come in about how “so and so” was now following my pins on Pinterest while I refused to even sorta log in.  I felt like a failure, letting down all these folks who were clamoring for more pins from me – whatever that meant.

It wasn’t until the Type A Mom herself, Kelby Carr, announced that she had been signed to write Pinterest For Dummies that I figured the jig was up.  A Dummies book on the topic meant it was validated.  Real.  Something I could ignore.

So I went back on the site.  I started searching for pictures of The Cure.  I found a few.  Then, I set up a board for Kit Kats – more on that obsession in a later post.  I took pictures of a bunch of candy bars I received from some wonderful co-workers in Singapore via Japan.  Searching the site, I also found some more pictures that I repined. Or is is repinned?  Who knows.

Soon after, I read Deb Ng’s great post on 5 Ways to Use Pinterest as a Community Building Tool.  That Deb.  Always thinking.  Great stuff in there.  I put up a Dummies board just to see what one would look like on the site and within minutes saw several editors I work with ordering me to add them to the board so they could pin too.  Someone else on the team quickly set up a For Dummies account…bless her!  I won’t say we’re “there” yet, but we’re having a lot of fun sharing the Dummies experience and learning as we go.

Am I a Pinterest addict yet?  No, hardly.  It’s an interesting site and I certainly see the potential, but I’m hardly crafty or design-oriented enough to use it the way it should be.  If you want to see someone who’s really got it down, check out my friend, local artist Patricia van Essche – she’s all over this, as she should be, and appears to be doing it right.  As for me, I’ll keep taking baby steps and see where it takes me.