https://twitter.com/drcool73/status/157964332611813376[ view original ]
I am trying to figure out why this would be bad for a merchant.
On one hand it gets them some exposure and unless they are doing their own pinning it opens up a whole new set of eyeballs for them.
On the other hand of course it could be totally abused by affiliates. I wouldn't be hard to write a script to auto-pin every product in their datafeed (well over 2,000,000). If just a couple people do that a day it would ruin Pinterest and other similar sites fairly quickly and when users saw their walls flooded with that much crap they would just attribute that to the merchant which would not endear that merchant to the users.
Overall I don't fault the merchant for doing this at all. Smart move to be proactive with something like this and not have a mess to clean up down the road.
Adding Pinterest to GiftTree's terms of service has been on my list of things to do this week. We're already pinning and just don't want to saturate the space. As a Pinterest user (lover!), I hate the thought of someone auto-pinning 2 million products. I think Pinterest has done a good job of setting it up so you can follow specific people or just certain boards and it's easy to check out what's going on with "everyone" without committing to following anyone.
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@drcool73 tweets:
Big time indeed. When the spammers and quick-buck marketers move in, you know you're doing something right.
JeremyPalmer and I were having this exact conversation over a scotch at Affiliate Summit on Monday afternoon. Plenty of social media sites are prohibited by affiliate programs for posting links, but Pinterest is special in that it is particularly well-suited for affiliate links as it is strongly geared toward the posting of products. And it is currently pretty easy to get some good visibility with re-pins.
Because it has happened so early in Pinterest's life, I expect that the spammers and marketers are hitting them by surprise. If they're not ready for this, they're going to be doing some pretty major scrambling in the next few months. If they can't get their arms around it, it could be their undoing.
To be clear, What Joe is talking about in this tweet is an affiliate manager prohibiting posting of their affiliate links on Pinterest. Pinterest hasn't taken any action at this point as far as I know, and I'm guessing they probably won't.
Squidoo didn't and look where that got them.
Good luck Pinterest. Don't underestimate this bunch.