House Beautiful Lets Readers Post to Pinterest From Print

House Beautiful is letting users post photos from its print edition directly to Pinterest using smartphone apps, the latest effort by a magazine to make print more interactive. Only photos from the "Kitchen of the Month" article are pinnable using the new system in the June issue, but House Beautiful expects to expand the Pinterest capability throughout its issues soon. "People are going to expect that the entire magazine is pinnable," said Newell Turner, editor in chief of House Beautiful, which is part of Hearst. "I know it's going to happen, and I know it's going to have to happen quickly if we want to stay in the front of things," Mr. Turner added. Magazines increasingly include 2-D barcodes and watermarks that deliver special offers or extra content like video to smartphones. Almost every major magazine included at least one mobile code or watermark in the first quarter of this year, a new high, according to research released last week by Nellymoser, a mobile marketing services provider. But publishers might be even more excited right now about Pinterest, the social site that lets users post images from the web to their personal "pinboards." Time Inc.'s Real Simple magazine, which has accumulated more than 100,000 followers on the platform, says its website gets twice as much referral traffic from Pinterest as it does from Facebook and Twitter combined. Readers ought to be able to post images on Pinterest even if they're not near a computer, said Ed Knudson, exec VP for sales and marketing at Digimarc, which provides the Pinterest-enabled watermarks that House Beautiful is using. "Since Pinterest is such an image-oriented site, we thought why can't the Pinterest enthusiasts pin things from physical media like retail outlets or magazines?" Mr. Knudson said. "We know that Pinterest users are very emphatic about the service and they're not always inspired while they're sitting at the computer," he added. House Beautiful readers can post its photos to Pinterest with either the House Beautiful Connect app for iPhones or the Digimarc Discover app for iPhones and Android devices. Images they add to their pinboards will link back to House Beautiful's own site. "The magazine experience is still very real, loved and important, but you can't ignore everything else that you can now do," Mr. Turner said. Food Network Magazine is also introducing print-to-Pinterest capabilities starting with its June issue, using the Digimarc system and Nellymoser services.

House Beautiful Lets Readers Post to Pinterest From Print

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