You can picture how your big idea could take off, and the dreaming helps you grind day after day. Most the time, you fail. It happens to almost everyone. Fail once. Fail twice. Succeed.

This brings me to the story of Jeremy Lin. If you haven’t heard about Lin yet, you are either 1.) Not Asian; 2.) Hate sports; or 3.) Hate the news. Lin is an amazing story on so many levels. If Disney had made a movie based on his story before it happened, I would have made fun of the most unrealistic plot ever written.

What’s even more amazing than the fact that Jeremy Lin is an Asian-American who went to Harvard and is now starring in the NBA, is he failed. Not once. But twice. Twice Lin was cut from NBA teams, and the Knicks probably would have cut him eventually if a bunch of injuries had not forced them to give the kid a chance.

Now, Lin is Google. At least, in the next year, he’ll probably have as much money. Lin is the entrepreneur that failed, failed again and succeeded. Giving us all a little hope.

Some linkage to get you to the weekend:  

• Need help communicating? The Bureau of Communication is here to help. They had me sold at the Airing of Grievances. What will really come in hand is the formal apology. I’m going to need a lot of copies. I’ll start with a note to my girlfriend apologizing for my devotion to Valentine’s Day. Apparently, getting a card about loving every minute with her, even “the dumb-ass” activities; then when she asked what dumb-ass activities we do, me saying “celebrate Valentine’s Day,” was not what she had in mind for Valentine’s Day! I’ll also be sending an Airing of the Grievances to Hallmark. 
• Remember when I linked to that weird KickStarter project for a running from Zombies app? Well, they are about to launch, and my coworker Nadine informs me that she will be giving a full report on how it feels to run from zombies.
• Advice for do's and don’ts on social media, and this isn’t the typical, “Don’t post scandalous photos of yourself or use profane language.”
• Cool way to simplify search in Google Chrome.
• This video reminds me that I need to find all of the family videos from my childhood and destroy them immediately.

• Oh Parrot, you dog you.

• Scratch “stocking over my head” from the list of new looks I was going to try.

• From Chris Klein, compliments of Reddit: Remember that "amazing instrument" video done in CGI? (I don’t.) Yeah, well Intel actually built it!

• Yes, I’m a Jayhawk, but this is a pretty cool story about a little girl who is now a hero to K-State fans.
• To balance the K-State love, the only thing close to the out-of-nowhere story of Jeremy Lin is the emergence of KU 7-footer Jeff Withey. My story over at Basketball Prospectus.
• Sony Music increased the price of a Whitney Houston album on iTunes after the singer died on Sunday. You stay classy, Sony.
• How the Blackberry became irrelevant.
• Big brother (ahem, I mean Google) is watching you.
• Apple about to hit 25 billion app downloads.  
• The Double Dream Hands guy has made another video. Enjoy your weekend. I’m off to hit up the club to try out these moves. Ladies beware.

Before you know it, a second level of complexity can muck things up: How far do you take your mobile experience? Do you focus strictly on mobile devices, or do you also offer a completely unique experience for tablets like the iPad or the Kindle Fire? If you do decide to go with a Web App or a Mobile Website, how much legacy support does your product need to offer? Can you get away with only supporting the latest and greatest devices (thus going full HTML5 and CSS3 support)? For now, it's best to put off these extra questions and focus on the core issue: How will you build your new mobile offering?

Let's take a closer look at each of these options in greater detail.

Native App

Building a native app means utilizing the Software Development Kit (SDK) that powers all of the applications that come with your phone. This is by far the most powerful of the three choices, as it has full access to all of the tools the original developers had (or most of them, anyway). The slickest applications you've played with to date are almost always built as native apps.

Take Clear, for example, a to-do list application that just launched on the iPhone this week. While it does not do anything that your standard fare to-do list applications already do (in fact, it does less than most), it excels at what it does by adding some extra "wow" factor to its user interface. By supporting true multitouch gestures and doing some pretty clever animation tricks, Clear takes full advantage of the iPhone's SDK in ways that would not work very well (if at all) as a web app.

Another app that has an especially over-the-top user interface is Path. Although it has been getting some hot press lately about storing a user's contacts without first asking permission, this social networking app is a definite standout for its clean but sophisticated UI. While a lot of what Path does well can be emulated as either a web app or even a mobile website, its "flair" features simply wouldn't be possible with strictly web-oriented toolsets. Take a look at the video below: the little animations the app performs between interactions with buttons like the "+" which results in a swivel rotation effect are what take it to the next level.

Okay, so if building a native app results in so much power, why doesn't everyone simply go that route? Time and money. Building a native app is considerably more difficult than building a web app or mobile website. Moreover, native apps are native to the device they were built to support. In other words, creating an app for Android means it only works on Android; the vast majority of the code and UI work you do for Android is not compatible with the iOS SDK, nevermind the Windows Phone 7 SDK.

Here's a short list of the pro's and con's to choosing a native app over its web-based counterparts:

Pro's

• Extremely powerful, can do just about anything the device is capable of
• Best performance, user inputs generate real-time responses
• App's feel natural, as if intended for the device family they are being used on (because they are!)
• Can be used if the user is online/offline
• Can charge money for the app (one-time purchase, in-app purchase for new features, subscription model)

Con's

• By far the most expensive option, in terms of both cost and time to build
• Native only to the device family you build for (iOS, Android or WP7) – supporting more than one family requires nearly 2x, 3x the work
• Need to be updated fairly frequently whenever a new build of the operating system is released to ensure no new bugs surface
• At Apple/Google/Microsoft's mercy – if they don't like your app or find a problem with it, it doesn't go online or can be pulled at any time

Web App

First of all, what is a web app? There are technically two meanings to the term: one is a website that behaves more like an app (think Gmail.com or Twitter.com), while the other is closer to a native app in that it is downloaded from the App Store (or similar) and installed on the device, despite being powered by web technologies. For the purposes of this article, I'm considering the former to be a mobile website, while the latter is a true web app.

Web app's beat native apps in one key area: they are predominantly compatible with just about every major smartphone or tablet on the market today. Using what I call "mobile bridge" kits like PhoneGap, Rhomobile, Sencha Touch, and many others, you utilize HTML5, Javascript and CSS3 to build your application and deploy a product that works very similarly on all major devices. I say "very similarly," because like building websites, you still have to deal with slight (sometimes not-so-slight) differences in how HTML objects are rendered via CSS. It's like optimizing a website for Mozilla Firefox, then also having to optimize it to look the same in Internet Explorer 7: hopefully it looks similar, but oftentimes you have to refactor your HTML or CSS to make it work properly in both browsers.

Additionally, because building websites has been around for so much longer than a lot of these mobile SDK's, and because the languages used are simpler and easier to learn, it is generally easier and cheaper to find or build your own development team for web apps than it is native apps. Likewise, updating a web app is substantially simpler than a native app, as a lot of these mobile bridge kits serve as an intermediary API: they go out of their way to ensure that new operating system updates don't break old application code. Thus, you should theoretically not have to keep as sharp an eye on your older web apps that have been available for awhile as you would for native apps.

Here's a couple example web app's. The first, Diary Mobile, was built using PhoneGap, while the second, SugarCRM's web app, was built using Rhomobile.

It's important to note that there are some companies out there with new solutions to this entire debate. Appcelerator, for example, has a product called Titanium Mobile which is supposed to take the compatibility features that a web app platform provides and bundles it with the power that a native SDK provides. If you'd like to learn more about it, you can visit their website.

Let's take a quick look again at what separates a web app from the group:

Pro's

• Highly compatible with all popular smartphone and tablet devices
• Fast and relatively inexpensive to build – learning curve is less than native development
• With HTML5 and CSS3 coupled with Javascript, provides a lot of the functionality a native app can provide
• Can be used if the user is online/offline
• Can charge money for the app (one-time purchase, in-app purchase for new features, subscription model)

Con's

• Not quite as robust (feature-wise) as a native app
• Cannot currently do some of the higher end UI tricks
• Oftentimes feels like you're using a website, instead of a true, native app
• At Apple/Google/Microsoft's mercy – if they don't like your app or find a problem with it, it doesn't go online or can be pulled at any time

Mobile Website

Arguably a totally different type of mobile offering altogether, mobile websites are typically extensions of your current desktop-designed website. In many cases, these are just stripped down versions of your regular website, oftentimes with some cut features and a layout that is optimized for a smaller screen. Visiting ESPN.com on your mobile browser, for example, presents you with a mobile website.

Because the same technology (for the most part) is used to create web apps and mobile websites, a lot of the same arguments can be made for going this route over a native app. The big defining difference between building a mobile website vs a web app is your user's access point: Does a user interested in your product/brand going to think, "Hey, let's open my mobile web browser and go to their website!" or "Hmm, let me go check the app store and see if there's an app for that!" If it's the former, then your decision is easy: go with a mobile website. This is good news for you: you get to avoid all of the App Store (and Android Marketplace, etc.) hullaballoo with getting your app submitted and approved: just throw up a web server and call it a day!

You'll find that the pro's and con's are similar to that of a web app:

Pro's

• Highly compatible with all popular smartphone and tablet devices
• Fast and relatively inexpensive to build – learning curve is less than native development
• With HTML5 and CSS3 coupled with Javascript, provides a lot of the functionality a native app can provide
• No need to deal with the App Store and its counterparts
• Fast turnaround for site updates – just code the changes and deploy, no need to wait for your changes to be approved by a third party

Con's

• Not quite as robust (feature-wise) as a native app or web app – does not have access to all of the API features a native or web app does
• Cannot currently do some of the higher end UI tricks
• Users will have a slow experience with new page loads (worse depending on their current Internet speed)
• Can only be used and accessed if the user is online (through a cell or WIFI signal)
• No built-in way to monetize

Great. Now what?

For most, choosing the right way to go at this point is fairly straightforward: if you have the resources and time available to build a robust, native app – go for it! Provided you design a compelling user experience that takes advantage of the power each device has, you are setting yourself up for the best current technology can offer. If the user experience isn't as important, but reaching the entire mobile market immediately while maintaining an App Store presence matters, then a web app is the best choice. Perhaps you aren't interested in building an app at all, though. In this case, just extend your current website to be better suited for mobile devices. Remember, you can have two websites at the same address that are viewed entirely differently: ESPN.com looks great on a desktop browser, and it works equally well on a mobile browser thanks to the magic of CSS. Also keep in mind that building a Native or web app and a mobile website are not necessarily mutually exclusive options! You might decide to have a mobile website for accessibility, while also building a Native or web app to tap an entirely unique market. Twitter.com and Gmail.com do this very well: despite both offering native applications for use, they also have full-blown HTML5 mobile websites too.

*I value my job.

The definition of a problem solver is fairly loose, and Dan understands that. He asks oddball questions like how many barbers are there in the United States. The answer is not important to him. What’s important is how someone gets to their answer.

When building a company, it’s important to find problem solvers who all come at problems from different angles. You don’t want everyone thinking the same way, because that plan of attack might not always be the best way to answer a question.

As silly as this sounds, I started thinking about this when listening to some friends debate sports this week. The debate was whether a KU basketball player who is making a poor percentage of his 3-pointers, should stop shooting 3-pointers. One group argued the numbers, and they believed you couldn’t argue with the numbers. He should stop shooting.

The other group argued that by telling the player in question, Elijah Johnson, to stop shooting, that would kill his confidence. And their eyes tell them that Johnson shoots more 3s than anyone else on the team because he has the best shot on the team. The only way to get back on track was to keep shooting. To tell him to stop shooting would also change roles that were established for a reason.

Many logical arguments were made on both sides, and both groups made a lot of sense. I fell somewhere in the middle. I’m sure similar debates go on inside the walls of Allen Fieldhouse, and it’s important to have those arguments. It’s important to have both sides and important to be able to use all the numbers/visual evidence and come to a decision.

In a startup, you want people who come at a problem or a debate from multiple angles. Yes, there will be disagreements, but eventually if you have problem solvers, everyone will be able to come together and make the best decision for the company. The formula for failure is to make a decision without even thinking about it. Just like the wrong answer to Dan’s question, in my opinion, is to shoot out a guess without thinking it through.

This life lesson has been brought to you by the Sweet Linkage, now let’s get to the links…

• If content is not part of your marketing plan, you should probably take a look at this graphic.
• If I could have done science experiments like this video below in school instead of dissecting rodents, I might have liked science.

• Our sales guy Bobby called this and this “the sweetest linkage yet.” Little on the nerdy side for me, but I’ll include them – if only because Bobby walks a lot on his hands and sometimes I’m afraid he might kick me in the face.
• Pretty cool music video (if you’re into Bobby music).

• From the nerdy to the really good reads… I was embarrassed to admit that I had never heard of John McLendon, Jr. until I read this story. If you like basketball, KU or appreciate history, this is a must-read. McLendon, as the author was told by his biographer, is “the forgotten Jayhawk.”
• And if you appreciate great writing, this Super Bowl column on Tom Brady from Dan Wetzel is well worth your time. Enjoy. 

• What brands mean to a 5-year-old. 

• As you watch the Super Bowl on Sunday, you might notice that, typically, Eli Manning is confused.
• Props to Honda for its Ferris Bueller commercial. 

• This can-say-anything-backwards girl is pretty entertaining, but my favorite part of the video is when the kid says “crappers” at the end. 

• Using news logic for design. I’m going to start telling our designers to run things past me since my Editor skills obviously make me a design expert.
• What’s freedom? Sometimes it’s watching porn in a library. U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! (Editor’s note: I do not support watching porn in a library. I think it’s disgusting… and sort of funny.)
• This is what it’s like when I play basketball against half our sales team. 

• They say this product is for taking naps at work; I want it for when one of our sales guys decides to make a call near my desk.
• Ants: nature’s architects.
• Funny Super Bowl commercials from the past. I say nothing beats Terry Tate.
• Something about Mozilla hiding URLs with a project they call Pancake. I’m not sure about this, as I feel like the URL is like the syrup to my web browser. (nerd jokes)
• Another one for the nerds that’s actually pretty cool. 

• Explaining what is an IPO (initial public offering) with the story of the “Three Little Pigs.” That’s pretty good, but if you want a good Three Little Pigs story, ask me sometime about the Three Little Bachelor Pigs.
• Like I said before, the final three videos are in honor of my coworker Tim Banks, the lone graduate in the office from the University of Missourah. 

• Here come the best and the brightest.

• The actual best and brightest.

• Be sure to watch this right before tip-off.

Three programmers and a search engine specialist join the fast-growing team

Westwood, Kan. — Red Nova Labs is always on the lookout for programming talent in the Kansas City area, so CTO Bob Zhou put a feather in his cap when he found and hired two new web developers recently.

A few years ago, Zhou created an assessment for programmers that tests applicants’ knowledge. Passing the assessment is not the only qualification to code at Red Nova Labs, but Zhou says it helps him hone in on top prospects. After new developers Eric Hankins and Tim Banks performed well, Zhou could not hire the two fast enough.

“Our goal isn’t just to expand our talent pool to cover capacity; we want to increase our ability to tackle new challenges,” Zhou said. “Eric and Tim stand to make a big impact. They scored higher than any other applicants, and they have great energy. They’ll improve our team across the board.”

Hankins and Banks are just two of the four new technology-focused employees who have joined the expanding startup in Westwood in the last few months. Andrew Heuback joined the engineering team as a Quality Assurance Tester (QA), and Ashley Burgener joined the operations side as a Local Search Administrator.

Each new hire has a distinct role that filled a need within the company. Hankins, Senior Software Engineer, will help the company streamline maintenance and upgrades to its web platforms through his expertise in server automation. Banks, a Front-End Developer specializing in Javascript and HTML5, will improve user interaction with Red Nova Labs’ platforms for self storage and local commerce.

With the increasing number of web platforms that Red Nova Labs builds and manages, Heuback’s position in QA was a top hiring priority. Heuback stood out from other applicants because of his coding experience, which is an asset in website QA.

“Andrew has a mixed role here,” Zhou said. “He veers into front-end website development as well as QA, which makes him proactive toward issues as well as reactive to problems. That’s a big deal.”

Burgener will embrace the ever-changing discipline of Search Engine Optimization. Her skills from her previous career in accounts receivable made her a good fit for handling clients’ Google listings, which requires a lot of attention to detail.

Red Nova Labs, which has tripled in size in the last year, plans to continue to grow in 2012. In the next quarter, they will look to add additional developers, marketing resources and sales reps.

“Our abilities as a web development and marketing company continue to grow,” CEO Dan Miller said. “Every piece of every project we work on, we handle in-house. It is extremely important that we cover our bases, that we have the best people to do it, and that we work ahead of mainstream technology.”

About Red Nova Labs
Red Nova Labs was founded and self-funded in 2009 as a web development and marketing agency as well as a technology think-tank, creating original, cutting-edge systems for web and mobile. On the service side, the company supports interface design, backend programming and online marketing. On the product side Red Nova Labs invents, builds and launches its own web-based platforms for various applications and vertical markets. To support both business models, its growing team of development engineers conceives resourceful code generators which add practical ease to complex programming—enabling unprecedented speed in creating vibrant, multidimensional environments and utilities. Once a product is launched, each business operates autonomously as an independent unit, with full engineering and marketing support from Red Nova Labs on the back end. The company is open to collaborative opportunities.

It’s worth remembering that to some extent, these accusations of laziness and narcissism in “kids these days” are nothing new — they’ve been levied against Generation X, Baby Boomers and many generations before them. Even Aristotle and Plato were said to have expressed similar feelings about the slacker youth of their times.

My take: every generation has bums. Every generation has hard workers. Quit generalizing and find the hard workers. They’re out there.

On to the linkage…

• Spending money at local business. What a novel idea! I like this.  
• Entrepreneurs fail. A lot. What we learn from those failures can help us down the road. This is a great read from former TechCrunch writer Mark Hendrickson examing why his startup, Plancast, never took off.
• Cool story from National Geographic about identical twins and how sometimes technology can’t even tell them apart.
• Really, really old stuff.
• The guy who sent this to me conceded that these are the types of things that he does that make him a real dick.
• A look at the best Super Bowl ads from the past.
• Speaking of really cool commercials…

• Google is penalizing sites with too many ads at the top of pages. Uber like.
• From Senior Marketing Manager of Klout: How to build a community around your startup. 

My favorite ones of the recent past have included VW’s Darth Vader commercial, Coca-Cola’s reincarnation of its classic Mean Joe Green spot, and the wise-cracking Doritos kid commercial, all of which you can see below.

Likewise, it’s interesting to see the themes expressed over the years. We’ve gone from traditional marketing, philosophical campaigns, and expressing grief after 9/11 to crowd-sourced solutions, imaginative worlds, and resurrections of once-great cities.

The recession has turned the marketing world on its head. Companies and brands don’t want to come off as glamorous, rich, and popular. They want to connect to the families of America who are looking within themselves and their communities for a secure, financially stable future. In 2008, when the current financial crisis was salt to a fresh wound, Marc E. Babej and Tim Pollack for Forbes wrote ::

One marketing consultant has been admonishing companies to "be respectful in giving people a sense of control and empowerment." The partner at a brand consultancy discovered that "in a recession, when there's a lot of doom and gloom in the air, it is precisely the time when [consumers] need to have a laugh about it." Lest this discovery appear intuitive, he qualified: "But it has to be carefully done, or you could look like a fool who couldn't understand."

How will these brands do this? Can they follow in Apple’s footsteps and accurately connect to their broad audience on Super Bowl night?

I personally believe the only way to pull off a successful Super Bowl ad is to garner some sort of empathy, to reach out to the masses through nostalgia, hope, and giving power to the people as Doritos does.

I have no idea who will be playing on February 5, but I do know that I’ll be joining millions of Americans to take part in a tradition of great food, heart-stopping football, and millions of dollars spent on thirty seconds' worth of advertising.

What strikes me as amazing – like communicating across the world through tiny little devices kind of amazing – is that all of these jumbled letters and symbols create what looks to be simple websites on our end. And at some point in time, someone (probably a nerd, or a nerd and Al Gore) sat down and said, OK, this is going to make this do this and this is going to make that do that and on and on and on, and it made enough sense that other like-minded people figured out the system. And then we got the Internet.

I bring this up because my favorite link of the week is this story from Frank Chimero, who is becoming a favorite of the Sweet Linkage. Chimero’s story is about a tiny horse at the Apple Store that no one seems to notice. No one!

I think in the same sort of way a lot of us don’t realize how amazing the Internet and webpages really are. The code is the tiny horse in the room.

After my coding lessons, I already have a greater appreciation for all the developers in my office. I see you tiny horse, and I think you’re incredible.

Now, on to something equally incredible, this week’s linkage…

• Saturday Night Live poking fun at Millennials. You think we’re bad? Wait until the next generation. They get trophies for showing up.

• Google and Kansas City’s marriage is off to a rocky start. Story this week from the KC Star.
• A good breakdown of what has made Pinterest successful.
• Robots building houses. It’s coming.
• An understandable explanation of SOPA. And the video below is an even better and more understandable explanation for why SOPA sucks.

• Sweet tagline.
• First, your mom starts tweeting, then your grandma. Next thing you know your plants are going to be tweeting at you. Wait, that’s already happening?! Oh technology, you fancy Dame you.
• My dog can climb a ladder and go down a water slide. Not many can beat that. Watch the video below. This dog wins.

• Next up: three beers in 37 seconds with no hands (by a human, not a dog)… Again, I’m impressed.

The Sweet Linkage is almost over, but before I go, I’ve got one thing to say:

It’s like a swear jar, but meant to eliminate douchebaggery. This is a pursuit in life that I’m quite passionate about. I try to stay away from douchebags (why I rarely visit Kansas City’s Power and Light), and I’m sure to let my friends or coworkers know if they’re being a douchebag, which is costly (for them) now that I’ve got the douchebag jar.

Work hard. Play hard.

I’ve never liked clichés, but I like that one. At Red Nova Labs, I think we have a similar mantra: Play hard while you work hard. Not as catchy, I know.

I am waaaaaay more creative when I’m laughing, and that’s probably why my boss gave me a douchebag jar for Christmas. It makes me smile.

This brings me to the first link of the week. We love us some MailChimp. This presentation from CEO Ben Chestnut explains why they’re pretty awesome. Hint: it has a lot to do with the culture*. Their mantra: Love what you do.

*They would totally approve of the douchebag jar. 

2011/12 Creative Mornings with Ben Chestnut from CreativeMornings/Atlanta on Vimeo.

The rest of the linkage (a video-heavy edition)…

• Sh*t nobody says. I think we need to make a Red Nova Labs version of this. I’ll start: Hey Marc, could you turn that up?

• Sometimes I throw my trash in the trash can behind the back. I felt pretty fancy until I saw this video. 

• This almost makes me miss getting lots of snow. Almost. 

• This almost makes me want to go watch some bowling. Almost. 

• Warning: the next video is sort of gross. Compliments of Chris Klein. (Starting to make sense why he’s always jumping in the air and spinning around.)

• Crows just want to have fun. 

• This made Mia Iverson sad. Dublin Dr. Pepper, which makes Dr. Pepper made from pure cane sugar and sells in a glass bottle, is shutting down. Essentially, Dr. Pepper is a bunch of a-holes.
• Since we’re heavy in the videos this week, we might as well include Ad Age’s latest viral video chart.
• Cool infographic on the best airports for business travelers. This will come in handy when you’re a big city businessman like myself.
• Some handy lessons on how to run a startup from a crime boss. Preaching ethics, of course.
• Apparently it pays to be QB Jesus. If hating the Denver Donkeys is anti-religion, then I guess I’m going atheist.
• Another Mia Iverson submission. Apparently she loves Super Bowl ad season almost as much as she loves Oscar season.
• Oh technology. Check out this water-powered smartphone charger. 

Over the past few weeks, articles and blog posts about Pinterest are popping up everywhere. A local ad rag just ran a pretty bland story that took the sentiments in my first paragraph and extrapolated a feature from them. ("I like Pinterest and so do some other local people!" took up 6 pages … I'm sort of impressed.)

Blogs and online magazines are glomming onto the trend, too. Some stories cover Pinterest from interesting angles, like whether retailers benefit from pins and should be paying attention to the site. Others, like Mashable's "13 tips and tricks for cutting-edge users" are incredibly silly.

"For instance, a user who is planning to remodel a house may Pin interior decorating ideas to a Design Board. Or a bride-to-be can post wedding dress inspirations to a Wedding Board." Really. So what you're saying is that I should create Pinboards around my interests? I hadn't thought of that!

Install the bookmarklet? Connect to your social accounts? Pretty sure you do that as soon as you open an account.

Social networks and other services online are becoming more and more intuitive, and selling "tips and tricks" for them is becoming more and more ridiculous. I loved this tweet from Ian Schafer:

How many minutes until someone comes out with the "Marketing Secrets for Pinterest" book?

The reason Pinterest is big is because it's intuitive and, as Tim Jahn pointed out on Entrepreneurs Unpluggd, real people use it. Once the waters are muddied by less-than-straightforward users and interactions, Pinterest loses value. I'm not saying that marketers and retailers shouldn't use Pinterest. They should. People want to interact with brands, and they're already pinning products and sharing prices. But there aren't Tips and Tricks that will help you get more followers or drum up numbers to brag about (at least not yet – maybe Pinterest has bigger plans).

Right now, "success" on Pinterest is organic. It relies on your ability to share something interesting with your target audience. They have to find you, repin your products and follow your boards, and that's the beauty of the system: there's not much predictability on Pinterest. In fact, one of my most-repinned images is one that I posted over a year ago. It suddenly gained traction this month and has been repinned by 62 people. Pinterest still has the organic sharing innocence that many social networks lose once Tips and Tricks are applicable.

P.S. Follow my boards!! …what?