Pinterest allows users to create ‘boards,’ where they can re-pin, comment, and ‘like’ various images, thus creating an environment where images act as doorways to the greater digital universe. This is what sets Pinterest apart from other social media platforms as a way of driving traffic to your site. As our culture becomes more and more image based, images are becoming our content.

How can businesses use this strategy to their advantage? Pinterest allows companies to brand themselves in a visual way, putting the firm’s ideology, creativity and thought leadership at the forefront. For example, your company could create a board highlighting employee’s favorite ad campaigns over the last decade, or their favorite places to eat near the office. Then, you can simultaneously present the images that make your company great, perhaps a board showing off ads from your latest campaign or the many uses for a product you’re trying to sell. The point is, the possibilities are endless — so long as you are sharing the images of others, promoting your own along the way is entirely acceptable. Pinterest allows companies to be completely subjective: here’s what we like. What you find thought provoking and worthy of sharing, others will too, thus driving traffic to the websites that matter most to you.

And if this still doesn’t convince you perhaps a stat like this will: “Pinterest is driving more traffic than YouTube, LinkedIn and Google+ combined.” It seems we can safely say that Pinterest is the next big thing in social media marketing.

Want some more inspiration? Here are a few companies that are doing a great job on Pinterest:
MarketingProfs
Mashable
Wall Street Journal

Many of the sector’s leading players provide patient assistance programs, medical access initiatives and health-related education grants to communities in need. In fact, Abbott Laboratories, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Merck and Allergan—four of the top pharma brands according to Fortune—have all been recognized for their CSR efforts, appearing on Corporate Responsibility Magazine’s annual list of “100 Best Corporate Citizens.”

There is an incredible opportunity for pharmaceutical companies to leverage the goodwill created by these CSR activities to build stronger corporate culture. As examined in our whitepaper, “The Halo Effect,” when the connection between CSR activities and a company’s core business is close—as is the case with pharma companies and their philanthropic missions—it’s entirely appropriate to link the two. Doing this will actually increase visibility for the social cause.

So, are pharma companies doing enough to showcase their goodwill and build awareness for their social causes?

Achieving the right relationship between a company’s brand and its corporate philanthropy or employee volunteerism is a delicate balancing act, but it’s well worth the effort. When a company is associated with social responsibility— and its initiatives don’t come across as self-serving— it can truly be recognized as doing well by doing good.

With a great breadth of information and knowledge comes a need for some form of organization and order. Twitter has done just this by implementing a most creative and inventive way to pick and choose which ‘twitterers’ are most appealing to you. Their “Lists” feature has simplified how we access our news, information and opinion sources. Twitter users can curate lists by categorizing them into groups such as “News” or “Entertainment.” Sometimes, these lists get creative and very specific, with names such as “Nerd Life” and “Best Mindcasters I Know.”

Anyone can access a list (which includes a feed of Tweets from users on the list) and keep tabs on the flow of information, whereas users can follow the entire list itself.

And so we bring you the “The Influencers: Tech Marketing” List: carefully aggregated accounts of people and publications that matter in the industry. Whether you’re looking to stay up to date on the latest tech news or find yourself in a circle of influencers in the field, we’ve collected all of the accounts you’ll want to follow. This is a collection of marketing strategy, business insights, and industry trends for marketers in the Technology field.

Aimed at keeping technology marketers and executives informed, current, and inspired, “The Influencers: Tech Marketing” offers a variety of thinkers and experts that matter. Marketing technology to other companies isn’t easy, requiring a well-rounded, informed and up-to-date view of the industry and target audiences. With this list, we offer access to all aspects in one place: news about the industry, insights from the experts and executives themselves, and writers in the field offering their own realizations and projections. What makes the lists most progressive is its ability to aggregate a variety of opinions in one place, easy to access and easy to digest, making staying up to date a cinch.

“The Influencers: Tech Marketing” includes writers and editors at Wired, the Atlantic, and the New York Times, and C-suite executives at companies like IBM, HP and Microsoft among many others. This list will be updated over time as the market and the industry changes and as new influencers enter the circle. This is a tool we hope you’ll find helpful in staying informed in such an ever-changing and fast-paced sphere.

We recently developed a whitepaper that examines seven “success” principles for leveraging branding and communications to enhance the long-term success and impact of an employee volunteer program.

Seven Success Principles

1. Align CSR with the corporate brand. The most effective employee volunteerism brands align closely with the company’s mission, values and/or products. Make sure the objectives of your volunteer program support, directly or indirectly, with what the company stands for, believes in or does.

2. Research. Why do employees sign up for a corporate volunteer program? Ask them. Uncover what motivates employees to participate and use this to develop the key messaging and value proposition for your recruitment campaign.

3. Don’t use stock images. A picture is worth a thousand words – let employees see themselves and their colleagues in the program.

4. Plan ahead. Use this year’s program or activities as the building blocks for next year’s employee engagement campaign. Learn from successes and failures to make the next year better.

5. Keep it fresh. While the volunteer program has a brand that aligns closely with the corporate mission, the key messaging, or theme, for each communications campaign should change from year to year. Making each campaign unique will keep employees interested and engaged over time.

6. Develop shared goals for the program. And keep employees updated on progress to build a sense of teamwork and connect the volunteer activity to the corporate culture. Communicate progress through your website, impact or corporate citizenship reports, or email updates that layout specific metrics.

7. Embrace media. Leverage the broadest possible range of media to engage employees at multiple touch points, including website, email, intranet animation, and environmental branding. Phase communications over time to build momentum.

Read our whitepaper “Branding Employee Volunteerism: Building Culture and Community” for more details on leveraging branding and communications to enhance engagement in your employee volunteer programs.

Blue: the most common color in financial services. A look at fifty top financial services brands found almost half had blue logos and another seven had blue elements in their logos. We weren’t too surprised with this result: blue is actually a great color. As we examined in our last Color Series post, blue is associated with exactly what you want in a financial services firm: stability, integrity, and trust, to name a few. Interestingly, similarities among financial services brands go beyond identity. As we explored in a recent post, many of these brands have been built around the same core attributes as well: integrity, trust, experience.

So why consider varying from the tried and true? Because it’s hard to stand out when you look and sound just like your competition. You have to put that much more effort into differentiating yourself in other ways. Even if you’re the best in the business, you’re not recognizable.

Maybe blue is the right choice for you. But that decision can only be made when you have a solid brand foundation, including a differentiated position that genuinely reflects your distinct value.

Martin Kemp, a visual historian and professor at Oxford University, has written a new book, Christ to Coke: How Image Becomes Icon, which spins an entertaining and informative narrative around the history of 11 of today’s most prevalent icons. Like iconic brands such as Nike or Starbucks, iconic images, whether Einstein’s equation E=mc², the American flag or I♥NY, hold deep-seated meanings and emotional connections for us. The stories behind them may surprise you. The book is available for purchase from Amazon.

The Changes
To begin, we can turn to an article specifically delineating “What is HTML5?” Brett McLaughlin writes three reasons why HTML5 can be considered a big deal:
“1. Web pages no longer need to look (and act) like web pages.
2. Web pages no longer need to represent one person/organization’s content.
3. Web pages can function intelligently and easily across display devices.”

Some of the implications of HTML5 are that audio and video can be directly embedded into web pages and these pages generally work in mobile: the HTML5 page you see on a computer will typically work on a phone screen. McLaughlin further writes, “What’s important is not that HTML5 works on phones [but that] that HTML5 ‘just works.’ There aren’t tons of issues when getting your site to work on a phone. … The big deal isn’t that you can do all kinds of cool things with your website for mobile phones, [but] that you can do all kinds of cool things, period; and that those cool things just happen to work on mobile phones … and tablets … and netbooks … and desktop clients. HTML5 really removes the need to think about mobile devices separately from other devices.”

HTML5 in Practice
In a recent article about HTML5, The Wall Street Journal wrote that HTML5 can “handle elements like typography, graphics and video, creating an app-like experience.” A full-fledged example of this “experience” can be found in a music video for Arcade Fire, “The Wilderness Downtown,” (though it must be viewed in Google Chrome). After typing in your hometown address and clicking submit, an interactive film plays, built from HTML5. Another example is (also if you have Google Chrome), the online version of Angry Birds. And while you might not be making music videos or games, these are just two examples of how to take advantage of HTML5’s capabilities.

We spoke to our own technical director, Dave Morreale, to discuss the changes. First of all, it’s important to note that although many are comparing HTML5 to Adobe’s Flash, this is not the main point of HTML5. Morreale says that “HTML5 is not merely a replacement for Flash, although it gives the opportunity to replace many of the actions that Flash can do. What it is doing is taking and pushing the next level of standardization for developing for the web.” That’s the most important part: standardization, or one language that can work across multiple browsers, consistently, so that “now, you can write one piece of code for all browsers.”

According to Morreale, the most important aspect of HTML5 “has nothing to do with looks or how it acts, which is what a lot of people assume. It’s about organization.” Pages written in HTML5 may create a smoother and more interactive user experience, but as the Wall Street Journal notes, “the excitement has spread despite the fact that HTML5 is missing some key features. Many users, moreover, won’t notice striking differences from websites that use Flash.”

Why it Matters for B2B Marketing
For B2B marketers, an important consideration is how HTML5 may impact online advertising: Adobe itself has admitted that Flash is not the answer for mobile when it stopped developing the mobile Flash plugin. On the other hand, Adobe is revealing a new program called Edge, which is a “design tool that allows designers to bring animated content to websites, using standards like HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3.” So if you’re running ads in Flash, perhaps switching over to HTML5 and CSS3 may be a good move: those ads will be then viewable on mobile devices (take a look here for comparisons between the same ads created with Flash and CSS3).

The finished version of HTML5 won’t be ready for a few more years, but it is a tool already available to web developers. While not a utopian language, it is the next step in creating a more organized and standardized web. As B2B marketers begin to plan their digital strategy in the coming years, HTML5 promises an opportunity to provide a more engaging digital brand experience.

Finding North is a feature-length documentary that shines a light on the history and causes of the hunger crisis in the US as well as the stories of those who go hungry.  The film asks why a nation that could provide access to inexpensive and healthful food for all has failed to do so.

At DeSantis Breindel, we’ve been honored to be involved in her filmmaking process along the way. Our Creative Director, Dru DeSantis, and our Executive Producer, Xan Parker, both consulted on the documentary and our design team contributed to the text elements in the film. Good luck at Sundance, Kristi!

It was especially exciting to see that Jill Vialet, CEO and Founder of Playworks, and Rebecca Onie, Co-Founder and CEO of Health Leads, were included in the Impact 30. We have worked with both of these amazing women as they have led their organizations to the national level. We are continually inspired by what they are accomplishing in their efforts to improve the lives of families and children across the country. This recognition is well deserved.

Playworks is a national nonprofit organization that supports learning by providing safe, healthy and inclusive play and physical activity to schools at recess and throughout the entire school day. Learn more.

Health Leads mobilizes undergraduate volunteers, in partnership with providers in urban clinics, to connect low-income patients with the basic resources — such as food, housing, and heating assistance — that they need to be healthy. Learn more.

Johnson’s book is one for all skill levels, clearly outlining stylistic tools needed to use language to your advantage. He shares ideas for utilizing elements such as metaphors and rhythm, and even suggests that sometimes it’s okay to break those hard-learned grammar rules (English class blasphemy! But even Apple does it in their tagline, “Think Different.”).

Microstyle is not a dense style guide, but an enjoyable read packed with easy to understand pointers paired with innumerable examples, from effective corporate taglines to amusing Twitter updates. No matter how comfortable you are playing with language, anyone can find a piece of advice that will help sharpen their writing and increase the strength of their message.