Content marketers (not an entirely pejorative term) are tripping all over each other’s tongues trying to shriek the loudest about “STORY”.

While we’ve long been vocal proponents of excellent storycraft as central to successful and authentic audience engagement efforts, we also like to give you practical info on how to do the sharing of the why.

That’s why I’m sharing about Pinterest. That’s right. You heard me. Pinterest.

Don’t laugh. So much about online marketing has gone absolutely minimalist, dumbing  – uh, simplifying  – everything down to a singularly, maniacally myopic focus, and Pinterest has absolutely mastered that: permitting you to captivate entire audiences one image and caption at a time. If you can artfully and eloquently articulate your brand message within small series of single images and captions, man, that’s hardcore storycraft excellence, right? Well, we’ll leave that open for another debate. Or feel free to flame me – er – share with me in the comments below.

OK. So is your social media marketing consultant talking about Pinterest?

Is he or she talking about Rich Pins? (probably; they’ve been around since last Spring)
What’s he/she saying about them?
What creative uses have they helped you put them to?

Wait. They talk about marketing, but don’t help you design, plan, implement, manage, measure, refine and quantify? You need a new consultant. Especially if they’re *specialized* in social marketing and they don’t actually do anything but regurgitate the stuff that’s in the FAQs and how-to blogs of the social networks they’re “specializing” in.

You and your marketing peeps will be able to tell if Rich Pins  (zero propellerhead version here) are suitable for your audience outreach and engagement efforts.

Rich pins use a variety of conventions – oEmed, Schema.or semantic markup, microformats, and OpenGraph – based on content type, to facilitate the “rich” part of their Rich Pins functionality. I give a quick overview of rich embedding here, in a post about oEmbed and why you might care: Content and Context: WTF Is oEmbed.

I wonder how many folks actually use Pinterest effectively for enriching their brand message and storycraft…

Have any examples of Rich Pins that improve the experience and move the story along?