Are you a Pinaholic?

Posted on Feb 11, 2012 in Technology & Design | 0 comments

About a week ago I became the latest Pinaholic, I’ve been hearing about this widely growing site for months and had to see what all the hype was about.  If you’re not one of the millions of who are already addicted to the site, Pinterest allows you to share and organize just about anything you find on the web with a visually attractive and ease to use interface.  Think of Pinterest as a more evolved version of Delicious, sure both sites provide ways of saving and sharing your bookmarks but the interface of Delicious always kept me from using it, being a visual person Pinterest is more suited for how I like to browse and organize data.

So what about using Pinterest for your business?  There are a ton of articles already written on how to use Pinterest to generate leads / referrals for your company.  However with a few tweaks to the platform Pinterest could really open this to small businesses as a visual interface to their existing back office tools.  As a former small business owner we were constantly looking for a tool that could help with organizing everything from HR files to company documents.  We tried BaseCamp, Dropbox, Drop.com, Sharepoint and the common theme was that finding files once they were uploaded was time consuming and difficult.  Why? Mainly because each of these systems are no different than using Delicious for organizing your bookmarks, their primary interface is textual and quite often searching rarely returns what your looking for.

Imagine if Pinterest were to add a simple privacy flag to their “boards”.  This would allow small businesses to store visual links to all sorts of internal repositories, for example let’s say your HR team is hiring for a new position.  With a private board a recruiter could store snapshots or videos of each candidate who made the short list. Even IT managers could create visual boards for their IT inventory, with snapshots of hardware, software and the current condition of the equipment as it was assigned to each employee.

The potential for revolutionizing the enterprise space is limitless, they all struggle with locating and managing files.  I’ve personally been involved with countless CMS, DMS and ERP implementations and even with the most sophisticated enterprise solutions struggle with easily finding data.  I can’t help but think the interface is key to improving these business challenges.