I’m sure you already know what a big fan of Pinterest I am – I pin like crazy; it’s such an addiction, once I start pinning, I can’t stop! I guess this is the case with a lot of Pinterest users, which is in my opinion the main reason for the extremely rapid growth of the platform - it is still the fastest growing social network ever and has currently 70 million users around the globe. The platform's visual appeal has also proved quite the effective marketing and promotion tool for brands.

As my colleague Patrik from Brandzeichen and I explored recently in a new blog post, the majority of Pinterest users are women. Therefore it’s no surprise that some of the most popular boards and pins are focused around the topics of fashion and beauty. Many major brands from these industries quickly recognised the potentials of Pinterest to engage with their audiences and have jumped on pinning. And they have seen some remarkable results, even such that this online activity has helped them improve their offline efforts.

A great example here that inspired this blog post is Nordstrom. Nordstrom is a fashion specialty retailer of clothing, shoes and accessories from the US and has a significant Pinterest presence with ca. 6,300 pins and more than 4.5 million followers so far.

What Nordstrom have done is taking Pinterest engagement to a whole new level. We know now for sure that Pinterest is one of the leading social networks to drive online sales, but Nordstrom is trying to prove that the platform can just as significantly drive offline sales too.

The company created a Top Pins board, which shows the most pinned items directly from the Nordstrom website, or as the company calls it the “customer-driven content & most popular pins.” Since March Nordstrom have then been showcasing these most popular items with a white tag with the Pinterest logo in their department stores in the Seattle area (now rolling out in other stores across the US) to let shop visitors know how trendy among the online community these products are.

Nordstrom even created a section on their website called Women’s Top Pinned as a sign of Pinspiration that displays the top pins each week for various categories, including accessories, clothing, shoes, beauty and at home.

By incorporating online customer feedback into the offline experience Nordstrom is testing how the online community could affect merchandising and drive in-store sales. So, it’s still in trial period, but I’ll be very interested to see the results in a few months and find out whether other retailers would follow Nordstrom’s footsteps.

In my opinion this is a brilliant example of how a brand can successfully bring the online experience offline. What this also shows is that Nordstrom really listens to its customers on social media, acknowledges their needs and makes clever use of that information – that’s something many companies are still struggling with.

The online community having the influence to determine what is displayed in physical stores is evidence of how deeply social media and new technologies have penetrated our lives and are changing the course of how business is done and run (or used to be done and run).

Images from Nordstrom’s Facebook page and Nordstrom Mission Viejo’s Facebook page