So, today it finally happened. I received the email I had been DREADING for weeks. “You’ve been invited to join Pinterest.” Crap! Talk of this new social media platform has been circling around the office for weeks, but I was trying to avoid it at all costs. When I first heard people talking about Pinterest, I thought to myself, great; one more Internet site that I will be on during all hours of the night because I have no self control. It’s just another way my ‘friends’ from high school can find out what I’m up to. I wanted no parts of it. But, when a co-worker told me you could look up almost anything (hint, hint, radio) I thought I might want to give it a chance.

It turns out many of my co-workers have heard of Pinterest, but don’t exactly understand how it works. Neither did I and I love being the guinea pig, so here we are. The way I like to explain the site is that it’s basically a super organized version of your bookmarked pages (if you have them). If you’re not a crazy bookmark lady (like me) you can simply look up something on the net (recipes, hairstyles, online radio stations) and ‘pin-it’ to your board that you created when you signed up. Now, what is a board, you ask? It’s basically the hub for everything you pin. You create and name your boards when you sign up and you can create a new board at any time. People have all different categories or names for their boards, based on what they look up. I have noticed that I am constantly looking up food recipes so; obviously one of my boards is called OMG FOOD. You get the picture. Now, one vital piece of information that I forgot to mention is that in order to be able to pin pictures of things you like, you must add the ‘pin it’ button to your bookmarks bar. Make sure in your ‘tools’ section you have ‘always show bookmarks bar’ checked off and then you can drag the ‘pin-it’ button onto your bookmarks bar. The site explains this in detail, don’t worry. You can also re-pin your friend’s pins as well. It’s not complicated, I swear. If I can do it, anyone can do it.

So, how does radio fit in? Well, after simply searching ‘radio’ on Pinterest, I came across a bevy of things. Pinterest is all about posting your favorite things and sharing them with your friends. In turn, you end up getting all kinds of ideas from the site; such as what kind of online radio options are out there. As I said, after I searched radio; Pandora and Grooveshark popped up immediately. People had posted them on their boards. They posted how each station works and what they like about the station.  People were also posting about their favorite hometown radio stations and how much they love listening to them online, wherever they are in the country. The point is that everyone is online, 24/7, listening to radio and pinning on Pinterest, I assume (I know I am). Social media and online radio go hand in hand. They are both places we want to be and I think they will continue to take the future by storm.

Mallorie McRea is Traffic Manager at The Radio Agency. Please follow The Radio Agency’s Blog “Sounding Board” by subscribing to the RSS link above. Visit our website TheRadioAgency.com