SandraSays

the life & times of Sandra Fernandez

Shopping

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The Pinterest Buyable Pins press kit

pinterest-512-blackHave you heard that Pinterest is rolling out”Buy It” buttons? They recently announced that they are going to enable the ability to buy items (purses, clothes, and other pretty things) directly from the pins we discover in our favorite and newly-favorite boards. You’ll be able to pay with Apple Pay or a credit card. Those of us in the U.S. will begin to see the “Buy It” button show up in our pins within the next few weeks (in iOS, Android will have to wait a while).

But that’s not the point of this post. The point of this post is to bring attention to a short sentence I saw at the end of the Pinterest announcement post:

Need the press kit?

By following the link I found a Dropbox folder that included:

  • several video files for ads announcing the new feature,
  • photos from the announcement event,
  • product demo .gif files and videos, and
  • product screens (with high-resolution images).

This is everything you would need to write a post or news article about the announcement. All with just a click. Genius. I included a few below, for your enjoyment.

As a public relations professional I know that we often err on the side of making writers ask for assets, and I understand why (we want to know who is writing about our news). But as a blogger I know that often the speed with the can get info and images fast can make the difference between writing about one topic versus another. And I seldom go back and pick up topic B (that lost out).

Searching-for-buyable-Pins

Finding-the-right-color

Placing-your-order

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NOTES

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Hispanic buying power increases to $1.5 Trillion this year

Hispanic buying power increases to $1.5 Trillion this yearThe combined buying power for U.S. Hispanics will reach $1.5 Trillion this year, reports Advertising Age (based on info from Nielsen). This buying power is an increase of 50% since 2010. Yes, a 50% increase in five years.

As you can imagine, this is making quite a few companies finally sit up and take notice of the Hispanic market. For some, this is a new thing, for others it’s just an increase on existing efforts.

I’ve never understood why it comes as a surprise to companies that the Hispanic market is the place where they can find growth. In population alone, this segment has been making history (and not just in the traditional “Hispanic” locations within the U.S.). With the growth in buying power, things will continue to shift. It should be interesting to see who ends up doing a good job of it.

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NOTES:

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Crowdsourcing a new external hard drive

I am not going to say that I didn’t shop “Black Friday;” that would be a lie. What I will say is that I don’t have the commitment (or found anything I wanted enough) to be standing in line overnight, or at midnight, or trying to compete with countless others to get.

My sister kept joking about being at JC Penney at 4am for the sale on boots. I know several coworkers who were at assorted Best Buys across the city trying to score on limited quantity items, some with success and some without. But that didn’t apply to me. In reality, there was only one thing I wanted enough to bave the shoping masses… an external hard drive for my laptop. (By the way, my sister did get her boots, and she didn’t even leave home before 9am.)

Last year I bought a 1.5TB portable hard drive for less than $100. I considered that to be a very good deal. I was looking for at least a 2TB drive for approximately $80. I did some research and found that someone had pulled together a list of the best Black Friday deals for hard drives. I took this as by “go by” of places to look. 

As you can imagine, the $99 3TB drives at Best Buy were gone by the time I got there. I really should not have had breakfast before leaving home. That may have cost me vital time. But two doors down, at Office Max, I found a 2TB drive for $75. Score! I bought it and declared my shopping done.

Next came the installation. 

I connected the drive and saw that the computer “read” it, but it wasn’t showing up in my computer. My first thought was that the drive letter was conflicting with something I already had installed (that’s happened to me before, on other computers). Unfortunately, I’m still not comfortable in Windows 7. In XP I could have found the computer management window without problems. On Windows 7 I just was lost. thankfully, I found a discussion thread on a tech board that pointed me in the right direction. (BTW, if you need this info for XP, I also found that on the Microsoft site.)

Once I opened the disk management window, what I saw was the the hard drive was “offline.” Offline? Why? I hovered my mouse over the “?” next to the disk drive and typed in the error message, word for word, into Google. The search results gave me several options, of which I chose the Microsoft board discussion that offered soooo many solutions; halfway down the page was the very pragmatic suggestion that I right -click on “offline” and get the option to place the disk “online.” (I know, so amazingly apparent!) And that worked beautifully.

I moved my files from my laptop libraries to the external hard drive using a sync utility I’ve been using for a few years. Yes, I found SyncToy via a suggestion on a Tech blog. At this point I don’t even remember which one. I just know that it’s one of those small applications I use daily.

But while in the process of creating duplicates of my files, my hard drive kept disconnecting. Very weird. Almost as if it was turning off them on again. Repeatedly. And so I found out that the hard drive has settings that default to turning off when it’s not being used. This forum suggested downloading software from the Seagate website (which is how I found out about the settings). The download wasn’t necessary; the software install comes on the hard drive itself. I just hadn’t installed it or opened it to alter the settings. Once I knew what it was for, and what I needed to look for, I installed it and altered the settings. Problem solved.

The most interesting challenge of moving files to the external hard drive came with moving my iTunes files, and database, without losing the information. I’ve done this before, following the instructions on this page. It’s a very detailed, very dry read, but incredibly effective. I followed the suggestions step by step and it worked flawlessly! I like it when that happens.

As my day ended, it occurred to me that I had a very successful day thanks to the kindness of strangers. I was able to save money, time and a lot of headaches because others had done research and shared it with me, had shared their expertise with others (and archived it online for future use), and had just generally been helpful because they could be. And I was glad I am savvy enough to know not to download unknown software from unknown websites, to look for some recognizable resources, and was able to search in such a way that I could find the information I needed.

Today my only failure on this is that I’ve been unable to figure out why when I delete a file on the external hard drive, it doesn’t go to the recycle bin. It just disappears.

Oh well… I’ll just keep looking.