If paid reviews are 'bad', what's good?

The resilient meme re John Locke's now-infamous purchased Amazon reviews has stirred a big pot of author resentment. But is there another way?

The Amazon Bounce

For many (most?) indie authors, the Amazon thrill is gone. But a select few still have that spring in their step. So, what kind of Sales Viagra are these guys on?

The Interactive Author

The reading experience is no longer a one-way communication.

Why Books are Like Hamburgers

When the 'net was young – and so much smaller – a band of college students and techies hand-assembled pages of links in an attempt to map this new world.

Sticky Situation

What's America's 'stickiest' social network, and (more important) why should you care?

#Twitter 104: Building a Following, Early Stages

Here's what I've been doing to get my Twitter kite off the ground.

Serendipity

While you work hard to get the word out when you publish a book, what puts it over the top (if that's meant to happen) is serendipity. Serendipity is a funny concept, and apparently difficult to explain to some cultures.

Harry Potter? Two major counts of serendipity. The first was a publisher who had no great interest in the book being nagged by his young daughter, to whom he had given the manuscript. To appease her, he printed 250 copies and shipped them off to libraries. With no faith in the book's prospects, no marketing effort was made. The second count was that the librarians liked and recommended the book often enough that it began to gain traction, and get reviews. After that - well, you know.

The best things are usually not what you're trying to accomplish. Two months ago serendipity sent the charming and intuitive Linda Stone my way. Then a few weeks ago a serendipitous book review came to me. 

Yesterday a friend sent me a very charming and creative music video which seemed to be inexplicably gathering dust on a YouTube shelf. I decided it deserved a better fate, and began spreading the word around.

One of my Facebook friends who got the link, Walt Gilbert, loved the video and wound up giving me and The Patriots of Mars a kind and unexpected boost. (Thanks again, Walt!)

If the book does well, I expect the many hours I spend promoting it will mean much less than all the factors I can't control. Mood-swings (favorable or otherwise) of the reading public, emerging news, and the financial fortunes of Amazon are out of my hands. Serendipity is difficult to explain, impossible to manufacture, and completely critical to success. There's nothing to be done but accept it.

The book's not actually out yet, by the way. But the opening prologue is online. My Facebook friends will all get a free copy, so if you like what you see stop by my page and 'friend' me.

Meanwhile - here's that video. You won't recognize it, but that's one of ABBA's most famous songs - and their final recording ever.

#Twitter 102: The Zen of Social Media

This series is 'The Zen of Twitter'. It's not 'The Zen of Facebook' (or LinkedIn or Pinterest or Reddit, etc.), because the essence of those services at least seems straightforward to the average user. But Twitter's stark simplicity makes its purpose elusive, and its governing rules aren't self-evident.

In approaching these social platforms, I ask the same basic question you probably do: How can this help me achieve my goal?

I'm an author. The average author defines his (or her) goal as selling books. Therefore, the purpose of Twitter, to someone like me, is to sell books. Therefore, Twitter is for sending Tweet after Tweet about one's books.

Yet we can sense right away that this approach is, at best, limited. At worst, it's repellant. I've been in chat rooms full of authors who complain how sick they are of seeing endless sales Tweets, then turn around and crank out their daily quota. And when sales flag, they're likely to Tweet even harder.

Selling books - selling anything, really - is like making a butterfly land on your finger. Which is to say: You can't. You can only create an optimal situation for the butterfly to choose to land on your finger.

An artist should intuitively understand that concept, since creating worthwhile art is pretty much the same elusive process. The fact that so many fail to grasp this suggests that their work lacks this same ephemeral but vital quality.

For many users, social-media tools become a trap. The numbers these things measure can easily become the goal of using these platforms. Which, obviously, they should not be. In fact, so compelling does this stuff become that these tool providers encourage their users to broadcast these numbers, despite the fact that they are, in themselves, relatively meaningless noise. (Which many readers could merely wind up resenting.)

We've all encountered the SEO hucksters offering to 'sweeten' our Facebook 'likes', or our blog traffic, Twitter followers, etc., for a few bucks. That's very tempting to those of us who aren't celebrities (i.e., most of us) and subsist at the low end of the social totem pole.

Here's where this path leads, though. Recently I encountered a young, media-savvy author (I won't name him, no point calling him out) whose indie YA sci-fi book was selling well. He had a respectable number of Amazon reviews, plenty of 'likes' on his book's Facebook page, and tens of thousands of Twitter followers. It certainly looked as if his book was ripe to spill onto the laps of a much larger audience.

But when I checked his blog, I noticed very few comments on the posts. When I checked his Tweets, I saw that he was offering his followers rote cut-and-paste rote responses. (It was certainly not a newsfeed I'd sign up for, and the guy was no celebrity, so what was the appeal?) Also, he had no personal FB page, only a page for his book. Digging further into his website, I saw the remnants of SEO gaming (if you're savvy enough, you can spot at least some of them).

In theater parlance, this guy had 'papered the house'.

It's understandable to want to attract a crowd to one's business. But it's all-too-common to mistake a large number of 'followers' for a meaningful achievement. Twitter's not an end - it's a means to an end.

But what is that end for an author, if not to sell books? If we accept the premise that tweeting won't make that butterfly land on your finger, what is an achievable social-media goal? And if it's not earning income, why bother?

Speaking for myself: My goal is to elicit a core 'social behavior' from the social platforms I use. Achieving this goes beyond the usual rules, tricks, metrics, wiseguy-workarounds, 'helper' apps and other ephemera that are the red meat of most 'how-to' posts you'll find. To me, this is the Zen of Social Media.

Like a garden, social media must be cultivated. There is no better (i.e., faster) approach to what I, at least, consider its successful and proper implementation. In the next installment, I'll describe recent happy instances of the 'social behavior' that I've seen in my own little tended garden.

#Twitter 101: Desperately Seeking Zen

Let's start off by saying I'm no Twitter Expert. If you want advice from a Twitter Expert, there are tons of them out there. I can't vouch for their expertise one way or another, but they're out there.

Maybe you knew that before you came here, and came anyway. Maybe you just found out, and are now looking (understandably) for the exits. Maybe I'd better give you a reason to stick around!

Try this on for size: While I don't know much about Twitter, I do know something about Zen. And it is the essence of Zen to realize that one never completely knows the answer one seeks.

Yet Twitter Experts promise to completely unravel its mystery - some in just 24 hours!

So while my Twitter expertise falls well short of 'expert', on the Zen side of things I think I can hold my own. In fact, let's test that theory. Here's a search for the words 'Twitter' and 'Zen'. How many results pursue the true nature (Zen) of Twitter? Not many. Let's look at them.

Mashable offers Four Tips for Productive Tweeting: (1) Approach With a Beginner’s Mind, (2) Give What You Want to Receive, (3) Only Add Useful Content, and (4) See Differently. Good advice in general, and certainly a healthy (IMO) approach to what you send out there in that little box. But it does not try to parse the essence of Twitter.

Next: Ten Steps To Twitter Zen. Six more steps than the last post: (1) Be Yourself, Be Nice, (2) You Must Give In Order to Receive, (3) Follower Count Isn’t Everything, (4) Conversation Is Not One-Way, (5) Mix It Up A Little, (6) Know The Proper Way To DM (direct message), (7) A Non-Follow-Back Is Not Cause For Concern, (8) If You Want to Increase The Likelihood of a Follow Back… (9) You Can Always Unfollow, (10) Give Thanks. This comes a little closer to what we're after, but most of his advice is, again: 'Be courteous, interact, be generous'.

Let's lay our cards on the table: If you're an ass in real life, you'll be an ass on Twitter. And if you make a nuisance of yourself on Twitter, no advice of mine can possibly help you, aside from this: Get someone with the necessary social skills, creativity and wit to do your tweeting for you.


Back to the Ten Steps. Items (3) and (7-9) suggest what we're after, which is the nature of Twitter itself in terms of its design intent and function. We must also account, as Twitter must, for the behavior of the folks using it. As someone who once constructed messages for marketing and political campaigns, this is an area where I can claim some insight.

Next up: Free Course: A Zen Peacekeeper Guide to Twitter. This seems to be on the right track - and the price is right. In fact, it's too on-the-nose. We're immediately shown images of Buddha and a woman meditating. Not to mention links to yoga - and what's up with peacekeeping? Maybe it's just me, but I'm starting to feel a little squishy here.

Pressing on into the seldom-seen second page of Google's results, there's something called Achieving Twitter Zen. It's a list of possibly-useful software enhancements for using Twitter. Again, not what we're after.

Another post called Twitter Zen tells us: The social media microblogging site Twitter has a Zen quality. The premise of Twitter? Answer the question “what are you doing”? Each post, called a tweet is like a haiku – a fluid expression of a moment in time... unburdened by verbosity (there is a 140 character limit on Twitter posts) as our human travails and observations are expressed. Little life moments. Experienced and shared. Happening.


Another Twitter Zen post, this one by Stephen Foskett, offers a no-nonsense series of four concise lessons designed to cover the basics for the newbie. At a glance, it looks pretty thorough in that regard. Here it lays out what Twitter is, and isn't:

The most important concept to grasp is the fundamental nature of Twitter: It is an ongoing, global, democratic conversation. It is not a blog, USENET, Facebook or MySpace, or an instant message platform, though it does have certain elements of all of those.

That helps, though if you're a Twitter newbie you might also not know what a blog, USENET, Facebook or MySpace are, either. But it's a start, and this writer goes on to offer some good observations. It's worth reading.

Ask yourself: Is becoming a 'Twitter expert' your goal? Or is Twitter only a means to an end? I'm in the latter camp, and I suspect you are too. (Otherwise, you'd have left by now!)

With that in mind, I'll stick with the basic practices and tools in the posts ahead. I'll review what I'm doing and why, and what I believe the Zen of the thing is. The first practical lesson has already begun: The headline of this piece starts with a hash tag (#), which in the Twitterverse is shorthand for a searchable topic. This post appears not only on this blog, but as a Tweet that opens with a popular search term. I'll show how that works in a future installment.

Meanwhile, Mr. Foskett's piece looks like a solid Twitter primer, with some good 'Zen' points to expand on later.

What's working (and what's not) on Pinterest

It's still growing like a weed. The quality of the images found on the top pinners' sites is only improving, and expanding nicely in its variety. But Pinterest does not do nearly enough to ensure that the original posters (both those who bring the images inside Pinterest as well as the original 'outside' posters) are properly linked and credited. There is technology that could improve this, but Pinterest is not employing it, at least not yet.

More thoughts here.

Google+'s inherent - and inherited - problem

Recently, Virginia Postrel threatened to take her business elsewhere if Facebook forced Timeline on her. Though her friends voiced support, the fact is that folks resist uprooting and re-establishing themselves on another social network without 'sufficient' cause, and Timeline is almost certainly an insufficient reason.

Google+ has been attempting to establish itself as FB's main rival. This is not an incidental effort on Google's part, but critical to its future growth. Yet despite Google's institutional muscle, the effort is a relative failure.

Various explanations have been offered for this, but I have found none of them satisfactory - until today. This piece from Nick Bilton's 'Bits' column for the NY Times, IMHO, nails it.

What do Bilton's conclusions mean for the future of Google+? Can they 'fix it'? Not really - the problem is inherent within the nature of the institution that is Google. Can 'the institution' be fixed, then? Our own history insists that broken or obsolete institutions periodically need to be 'altered or abolished'. Ask Linda Stone, sometime, about her efforts to change Microsoft's culture from the inside out.

If Google can't do it, can ANYone overtake the Facebook juggernaut? History tells us that it's not only possible, but eminently likely. It was not so long ago that AOL ruled the 'social media' scene, and thereafter it was MySpace. Both have long since fallen on hard times.

Could Google simply acquire the strongest FB competitor and win the social media wars that way? Again, the historical record speaks to us. This time it tells us that the answer is yes... and no. 'Yes', Google could certainly acquire an up-and-comer, and Yahoo once did with Flickr. Yes, start-ups need sugar daddies. But no, this strategy does not win the day for Google. Yahoo's wet-blanket corporate culture killed the spirit of innovation at Flickr, which could have evolved offshoots like, for instance, Instagram. The writing was on the wall when Flickr's founders walked away in frustration.

The real solution here lies in recalling just what it is Google really needs from Google+, which is: User information. Facebook won't give it up to Google, so Google attempted to build its own social network. And it failed - at least, it failed in terms of the scale it needs to achieve going forward. But that's not to say another emerging social network might not be able to reach an innovative accommodation with Google that gives the search giant much of what it needs without surrendering to a corporate kiss of death.

This is not just a 'possible' outcome, but a 'likely' one, and as such it's well worth keeping an eye out for.

Imminent changes to design of Pinterest pages

News re changes to the layout of Pinterest's pages and some insight into the company's (brief) history, here. Worthwhile for anyone interested in this burgeoning social platform.

Free Irish ditties for St. Patrick's Day (just get Spotify)

Here, I've loaded up more Irish music than you can shake a Shillelagh at. You just need to install Spotify and click the link. (Or punch in "Irish" in the upper-left search box of the Spotify app for a tsunami of more tunes.)

I've been experimenting with Spotify, which for anyone unaware of it is a relatively new music service. Here's what I've found so far: 

(1) You can tell it's a new service - 2/3 of my [80,000+] songs they don't have licenses for, and therefore I can't post them. 

(2) Many of the songs they DID post for me now (one day later) 'cannot be found', and the service is asking me to 'try again'. Thanks a lot, boyos. 

(3) There's a world of 'net piracy trying to swoop down on these guys, and that is partly why many artists are hesitant to participate. (For example, The Beatles won't sign up.) 

(4) The main reason artists won't sign, though, is that they misunderstand the mindset of most fans. The thinking is, "Why would they buy our music if they can get it on Spotify for free?" Of course, that was once the 'music industry's' argument against radio. (Not to mention the handwringing and all-out war over recorded music in theaters! Which spelled the end of economic viability in the musical arts, exactly as forecast by music industry execs of an earlier era. Yessir.) 

What listeners today really want - and the late, great Steve Jobs got this - is to 'own' and control their music. Mainly, they want to build their own playlists, and Spotify (wisely) stops just short of allowing that. 

Despite the still-considerable issues the service has, 'social' music should take off. Whether Spotify will continue to lead the charge is unknown (remember, MySpace was once the king of social media, as was AOL before it. Today's leader is tomorrow's also-ran.). But the concept has now been demonstrated to be viable and vital. 

The great advantage of 'social music' for music lovers is the casual and immediate discoverability Spotify offers. It presents an opportunity to discover music through the ears and experience of people whose musical tastes you respect. Now - odds are, there are few people you think of that way, but with Spotify you'll find 'em, and fast.

This is what Apple wanted their 'Ping' to become, but the sticking point for them was dealing with Facebook, which is where the majority of listeners they want to reach hang out. Steve Jobs found Facebook's terms of engagement 'onerous'. Even after Ping's launch, things got even more fractious between the two companies -- Ping started out with the option to add friends using Facebook Connect, but Facebook blocked access when it discovered that Apple wasn't playing by the rules. FC is actually an open service - unless Facebook decides that it isn't -  and apparently it decided Apple's Ping network was an unwelcome guest. Apple removed the service from Ping, but you'll still see some notes around suggesting you can bring in friends from Facebook.

Facebook claimed the problem was that Apple would have simply sent them too much traffic, which seems suspicious. Some observers believe Facebook (i.e., Zuckerberg) was simply lying.

At the same time, since 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend', one can only wonder why Apple didn't turn immediately to MySpace. On the surface it would seem the two would have seen the mutual opportunities - and Apple already had a strong relationship with MySpace's owner at-the-time, Rupert Murdoch, who had recently launched a newspaper specifically for the iPad. (Murdoch, in fact, has lately admitted that on his watch 'they screwed up MySpace', and the new ownership says a vast remodeling is underway. So Apple may yet cut a deal that could torpedo the fledgling Spotify.)

Anyway, Spotify was leaner and hungrier than Apple. (Almost any company on the planet is leaner than Apple.) They agreed to whatever 'onerous' terms Zuckerberg dished out. The downside for users is that Spotify lacks Apple's clout in the music biz, and so the rollout of this service is likely to remain painfully slow. 

Despite the drawbacks and occasionally spotty service, I've downloaded about as much of my library onto the service as it will allow. Prior to this, I relied largely on the vast wealth of mostly-Blogspot blogs out there to discover new and/or forgotten music (especially 50's-era jazz). Now the opportunity looms for a broad and more-immediate wealth of experimentation. Or at least it does if Spotify gets its act together. They have a LOT of work still do do, and have barely scratched the surface of their true potential. Here's hoping. But if Apple/MySpace manage to come together and build a more compelling service, I'm there. The concept works - in theory. Now it's a question of who will MAKE the concept work, and from there become a dominant force in the music industry. My bet is it'll be the company who's there in the thick of things already, and holding more ready cash than the entire US government. 

Three guesses.

Inside Pinterest's numbers

Despite the company's reluctance to release numbers, studies of Pinterest's external and internal behavior are coming to light.

The most revealing stat was something I had anticipated, and so was gratified to see confirmed: Over 80% of all pins (images collected by users) are re-pins (images found from within Pinterest, rather than from outside sites).  This means that new content is brought into the 'Pinterest Community' by only 20% of its users. The remaining 80%, in effect, 'vote' on how popular and viral that content will become.

A small minority, then, controls what the majority sees. But the majority does decide what of that content will rise to the surface. (See related: Pinclout)

It is also being demonstrated that the Big Kahunas of the Pinterest Community are its early adopters. Newer members are not showing the same commitment. There will be exceptions to this, of course. Despite this, Pinterest users in the aggregate show a level of continued involvement well above that of the average user of other social tools (Twitter, etc.).

Another stat that stands out is the tremendous breadth of linkage that comes out of Pinterest. Esty gets the lion's share of links, and this is understandable. Many artisans and small businesses who use Esty to sell their wares are setting up shop on Pinterest. After that comes Google Image Search, which is again understandable. Google is the prime means of finding images today, though eventually I expect Pinterest to reach a point where it supplants it. After that come Flickr and Tumblr, both geared to the aggregation of visual content.

Yet none of these major, well-known sites has more than 3% of all Pinterest's links. This is truly a long-tail phenomenon that reaches deep into the web.

Source: RJ Metrics

Google+ a 'virtual ghost town'

Recently, Virginia Postrel warned her followers that, if Facebook was going to force its 'Timeline' on her, she'd take her ball and play in Google+'s playground. Well, Facebook is behind it's planned schedule to port everyone to Timeline, but it has not changed its corporate mind. But if you plan to hoof it to the Dark Side (what IS the opposite of the Dark Side in Star Wars, anyway?), these headlines tell you what you have to look forward to:

• Google's Social Network Is a Virtual Ghost Town
• The only people I know that use Google+ regularly are people who work at Google (and Robert Scoble)

Analyzing Pinterest's power

Stats:

Pinterest's traffic-driving stats, compared with more established social networks in terms of 2012 traffic (so far) compared with 2011:

According to Mashable, YouTube has had modest growth from 0.98% to 1.05%, Google+ fell from 0.24% to 0.22% and Gmail fell from 3.69% to 3.62%. Facebook, currently the top traffic-driver, went from 25.6% to 26.4%.

Last year Pinterest was responsible for generating 0.17% of traffic. In 2012, it is responsible for 3.6%, the biggest change in any network this year.

This puts it just behind the microblog giant Twitter, which drives 3.61% of referrals. For a website to emerge from nowhere to just a hundredth of a percent behind Twitter is stunning. But for a website to have reached this level in less than half the time of Twitter (the first Tweet was sent on March 21, 2006, whereas Pinterest was launched as a closed beta in March 2010) is unprecedented. Clearly, Pinterest is the Next Big Thing - and it is nowhere near its full potential.

While Pinterest may not drive the most traffic, it is experiencing huge traffic increases, and jumping aboard now could be in your best interest. For example, between September and December 2011, Pinterest experienced a 329% increase in traffic, one of the biggest booms ever experienced by any social network.

Why it works:

Pinterest is easy to learn, but why it's so popular - and how to best use it to generate useful traffic  - are complex and interesting subjects. The ease of use, of course, is a big factor in its acceptance. And because the images are curated by humans rather than either machines or business interests, the images chosen by the best curators (pinners) tend to be of better and more consistent quality than those found by other means.

The old saw has it that a picture is worth 1,000 words. We're also warned not to judge a book by its cover, yet we inevitably do. To the human mind, a picture is a far more efficient information carrier than words. A picture is generally less precise, and more open to interpretation, than 1,000 words can be. However, a picture may be interpreted, and an impression formed, far more quickly than those thousand words. In an age of information overload, this means a lot.

Because of this, there is a real and significant raw power in Pinterest's simple stacking of image thumbnails. For example, here is a list of book covers from the Philip K. Dick site, and here is my Pinterest 'board' of those covers. While one can find a cover by book title very efficiently on the PKD site, in terms of finding an intriguing cover (i.e., the way most people ultimately choose a book) Pinterest has it beat.

Another example is the very popular pop artist Shag. Here is Shag's handsome and well-organized site, where a great deal of his work resides. Here is my Pinterest board of Shag's images. Now: Which site lets you see Shag's work at a glance?

A Google Image Search resembles a Pinterest board. But the better Pintarest 'pinners' (image curators) offer better image finds, and unlike Google they link directly to the image source. (Google is no doubt aware of this rapidly-emerging competition for its service.) Note also that Pinterest makes the identification of the more-popular images easy, via 'likes' and 'repins' (the sincerest form of Pinterest flattery).

Why (smart) site owners don't object to Pinterest's pilfering:

See Stats, above. Pinterest drives traffic to these sites like nobody's business. And I suspect that this traffic is highly-motivated rather than random. These folks are seeing something that they want more of.

But what do the pinners get out of it?

For many, Pinterest appeals to the 'scrapbooking instinct'. About 80% of the site's users are women, and this demographic skews similarly to scrapbooking, which is a huge business in itself (and has been for a decade or so now). These folks want nothing more than to collect images of things or ideas that appeal to them.

But beyond that, the real secret of Pinterest is that it has found the key to enforcing link responsibility. And it has done this brilliantly, by making it painless and almost completely transparent.

In other words: The copying of images, videos and text - intellectual property - is a rampant problem on the 'net. The pressure to drive numbers and create new content quickly has had three unhealthy side-effects: (1) It has led to a great deal of rushed, throwaway content (and precious little thoughtful analysis). (2) It has led to outrageous, wholesale plagiarism often without so much as a link to the original source. (The Huffington Post, to name only one example, has become synonymous with this, and the situation is unlikely to improve since their AOL acquisition.) This is a tremendous disincentive for the creation of original content. (3) It has led directly to a Federal crackdown on file-sharing sites which has had a chilling effect on legitimate file-sharing. This effort is certain to continue, and historically likely to overstep its bounds.

By contrast, Pinterest is designed to automatically assign credit (outside links) where credit is due. These links are clearly effective in terms of Pinterest's demonstrable traffic-driving capabilities. More significant than even this, though, is the fact that Pinterest ensures link responsibility within the site as well.

This is the wellspring of Pinterest's power. The site makes it extremely easy to swipe images from other users. In fact, Pinterest downright encourages this. On its surface, this would appear to work against the interests of anyone doing the heavy lifting of mining the web for the best image content. After all, why bother doing hours of grunt work if someone can come along and swipe the fruits of your labors in minutes?

Here's why: When users acquire an image from within Pinterest, the image's finder (as well as the outside link) is linked. This means the most popular images propagate many internal links as well as outside links. This rewards both the original source of the image and the best curators ('pinners'). Users who grok this and want to move up in Pinterest's hierarchy will tend to avoid swiping images already found on Pintarest, and instead hunt down new ones.

For instance, this Batman board of mine has drawn an enormous amount of re-pinning (image swiping).  Each swipe is also a link which brings new traffic to the board. In its few days of existence, this board has attracted over 100 followers. Many of these followers also become followers of my other boards. How many followers 'Batmania' might attract, in a year when Pinterest is growing like a weed and a major Batman film is to be released, is hard to say - but this modest-sized board of 60 tattoo images has racked up over 90,000 followers so far.

Of all social sites, Pinterest is the lone pure meritocracy

This may be a hidden reason women are drawn to Pinterest: Its inherent fairness. If you've been nurturing an old-boy network since college, if you're a TV star, if you're richer than Soros or trendier than Lada Gaga or if you're on the NY Yankees, your popular standing will drive traffic to your Facebook page or your Twitter feed.

But such matters cut no ice for Pinterest users. All they want are the best images of the subjects that interest them, and frankly it seems unlikely that Derek Jeter or The Donald could be bothered to hunt for them. If you have the taste, the time, the inclination and the right subject, you could be living in a van down by the river and still rack up 100,000 or more Pinterest followers in a relatively short time.

But... why WOULD you want to be a prolific pinner?


What's the point of building a Pinterest following? Good question. The whole 'business model' of this is only now emerging. Crass commercialism is frowned upon by the Pinterest brass, but Pinterest power-users nevertheless are finding innovative ways of leveraging their investment of time and effort. This woman, for example, has so far earned nearly 120,000 followers (and a dollop of notoriety) for a board that features attractive St. Patrick's Day cards she sells online. If we live in a world where 1,000 fans can make a career (a theory admittedly in some dispute), perhaps 120,000 followers can at least earn Charmaine Zoe a little side income.

Stat source: SexySocial Media, which cited - but ironically, did not link - Mashable.

BONUS: A Pinterest board with guides for using Pinterest.