"I'm Excited to Announce Secret Boards" said Pinterest

"Secret boards give you a place for things you’re not quite ready to share yet, like a surprise party, special gift ideas, or even planning for a new baby."

Received this email a few hours ago that I find to keep as an example.

"Hi, Arnaud!
I had two thoughts driving home from the hospital with my wife, Divya. The first was, “I can’t believe I’m a Dad.” The second was, “I hope I can get our new baby, Max, out of that new car seat when we get home.”
During the first couple weeks, we started to figure out all the little things that are second nature for experienced parents: changing diapers, swaddling a wriggly infant, and doing every household task with one arm. As usual, Divya was a few steps ahead of me. When our doctor suggested we buy a humidifier she said, “Oh, I already have one!” When I was getting Max ready for his first bath, she pulled out a neat homemade bath kit, complete with a tiny towel, comb and toothbrush. I felt like I’d forgotten to read a secret New Baby Instruction Manual. In an exasperated moment, I remember asking Divya, “How did you figure all this stuff out already?!” She looked at me and and cheerfully replied, “I just follow other parents on Pinterest!”
Over the last year, there have been so many ways, big and small, that the Pinterest community has made my life better. I’m happy to say that I’m not alone. We’ve heard from teachers who use Pinterest to plan lessons, chefs who share recipes, and museums that pin their archives. We've also heard from millions of people who’ve been inspired to pick up an old hobby or try something new. It’s honestly more than we ever expected when we started Pinterest. We’re humbled to be part of such a positive, warm and creative community.
Today, we’re excited to continue this tradition with a new feature we hope will make Pinterest even better—secret boards. Secret boards give you a place for things you’re not quite ready to share yet, like a surprise party, special gift ideas, or even planning for a new baby. We’re testing out the feature by giving everyone 3 secret boards. You’ll find them at the bottom of your profile. We can’t wait to hear what you think!
On behalf of our team here at Pinterest, thanks so much for pinning, inviting your friends, and sending us ideas for how we can improve. Most of all, thanks for sharing your inspirations. With your help, we’ll make Pinterest a little better every day.
—Ben & the Pinterest Team
Happy pinning!"

And since it's not a secret anymore here are the few steps to follow for secret boards.


Step 1: On the top left of Pinterest

Step 2: Create the 1st out of 3 secret boards

Step 3: This secret board will be shared with Robert Vinet and Valery Levacher

Step 4: Voila! My 1st Secret Board on Pinterest.

"Happy pinning!" as they say at Pinterest and follow me on Pinterest. I have a few collaborative Pin Boards you may like or join.

Monabar Coupon Aggregator: THE Coupons toolbar you should download Now!

MonaBar today announced the launch of MonaBar, a free browser plug-in that gives shoppers cash back on purchases at over 18,800 retailers in the online marketplace and automatically notifies them on best deals and coupons without interrupting the shopping experience. To begin using, visit MonaBar.com from your Chrome, Safari or Firefox browser.

Cash Back rewards for online shopping

MonaBar leverages partnerships with the most powerful affiliate marketing programs as well as established direct relationships with retailers in order to offer shoppers cash back on their purchases. With deals for 95% of all online shopping destinations, MonaBar allows users to earn 1% to 30% cash back rewards for shopping at their favorite online stores, without doing anything differently. Additionally, MonaBar has a built in coupon aggregator that automatically brings all of the best coupons to the shopper. As the only bar available that crawls the web to search for all active coupons, MonaBar not only awards shoppers with cash back, the plug-in also helps save money right from the start.

"Online shopping is responsible for over $200 billion in sales and booming. We're dedicated to bringing added value to our users in such an exciting and growing space," said David Azar, MonaBar Co-founder and CEO. "We've created MonaBar to be the ultimate online shopping assistant by designing a tool to seamlessly integrate into the background of almost any shopping experience, giving users cash back for items they already intend to buy from retailers they love and trust."

Online shoppers can benefit from MonaBar's automatic cash back capabilities by simply shopping as usual. The plug-in does not require shoppers to go out of their way with extra clicks to purchase or to collect cash rewards. The plug-in allows them to collect their cash once they have accumulated $5 in cash back offers via PayPal or once a quarter via check. With a simple one-time e-mail sign in, shoppers can take advantage of deals on goods they planned to buy without being redirected away from the current website. Additionally, MonaBar's referral policy enables shoppers to get an additional 10% cash back when someone they've referred to MonaBar signs up and makes a purchase on a participating retail site. In celebration of the launch, new users will automatically receive $1 welcome bonus just for signing up.

Visit MonaBar.com to begin collecting cash back while you shop today.

About MonaBar
Miami-based MonaBar is dedicated to offering online shoppers the best cash back and couponing program available for free. The MonaBar flagship product automatically provides cash back rewards and surfaces coupons without requiring users to alter their shopping routines. For more information, visit MonaBar.com.


The Team

Lifelong friends David and Kouros left their promising jobs at Amadeus North America and Deutsche Bank, respectively, to join forces and sayisfy their entrepreneurial drives.




Kouros and David are both avid online shoppers because of its convenience and their ability to compare prices on the products they want. They were frustrated by existing "cash back" offers, and saw an opportunity to improve the concept and save more money. This led to successfully founding MonaBar with the help of a friend and famed technology entrepreneur Tyler Mclntyre. The future is bright for this young and innovative company, and the MonaBar team is looking forward to launching in October 2012.

How to use Social Media for Business when "Going to a trade show"

This is a nice very nice illustration by SocialMedia Visual Lab for Advences Technology for Travel on how to use Social Media for Business when going to a trade show and focusing on World Travel Market London 2012.

And this is what it says:

Linkedin: This is where I invite business relations to plan a meeting at WTM London
Trip It: Upcoming Trips - London, United Kingdom Nov 5 - 8, 2012 WTM World Travel Market 2012
Twitter: Flights booked for #WTM2012 London  http://bit.ly/X0VDor
Google+: Hope to see you all at #WTM2012 London
Pinterest: This is where I pin this Visual content for others
Facebook: I LIKE WTM 2012 London Travel Market
Instagram: A vintage picture of my E-Ticket for #WTM2012 London
Foursquare: I just check-in Charles-de-Gaulle CDG Airport with 23 others.
Youtube: Shared a video of WTM2011

Enjoy and give me your feedback.

Hurricane Sandy drives social media traffic. Yes for @Twitter, but! #Pinterest #Fails

I just happen to have one of my best friends and famous musician  Pierre Sibille in NY and my nieces so I was looking for informations on Hurricane Sandy that brought me to write this post so to keep in mind where is real time information coming from, Now.

After a quick look on the way Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Goolge, Tumblr and Youtube are giving us the information we are looking for on Hurricane Sandy here are the results :

#1 Twitter for real time... who knows who is saying so but 19 seconds ago #curationneeded

 #2 Youtube for real time videos for Youtube

#3 Google search

#4 What my relations and friends say on Facebook

#5 Bloggers hummmmm on Famous Tumblr

#6 And the looser is Pinterest :( !

Twiter! In you we trust for real time but give us a bit more "visibility" on info. #certifiedindividuals #pictures

Frontier Airlines zooming for Social@Sclae with SPRINKLR: “the most capable” Social Media Management System

Sprinklr, the leading enabler of scalable social media management for enterprises, today announced the addition of Frontier Airlines to its client roster. Frontier Airlines will use Sprinklr’s multi-channel, multi-division platform to connect with its global audience.

For Frontier Airlines, Sprinklr’s mobile access and support, as well as robust reporting and analytics that can be automated and shared, were standouts from the other SMMS providers. Frontier Airlines chose Sprinklr because it is an Enterprise class solution that can scale with its growing business and measure engagement with the goal of achieving enterprise-wide Social@Scale.

“When we say we’re a whole different animal, it represents our commitment to do the little things that make a big difference to our customers,” said Justin Macauley, Program Manager, Social Media for Frontier Airlines. “We are thrilled to be partnering with Sprinklr to enable us to continue to interact quickly and efficiently with our customers via social."

Recognized as “the most capable” Social Media Management System to serve the needs of large organizations by Altimeter Group, Sprinklr has more than 100 enterprise level brands such as Dell, Virgin America, Cisco Systems, Samsung, Hearst and Newell Rubbermaid. Mirroring its growing client roster, Sprinklr recently announced it tripled its employee base over the last 10 months.

“We are thrilled to add an innovator such as Frontier Airlines to our growing list of enterprise customers in the travel and hospitality business,” said Ragy Thomas, CEO of Sprinklr. “Social is such an important customer service channel and one that needs constant, consistent care. Sprinklr will enable Frontier to do just that.”

Read more on Yahoo Finance

About Airlines on Twitter

You may also be interested by past Consumer Satisfaction Scores pulled from Airline's Monthly Twitter Report that was focusing in October 2011 on which Airlines satisfy various categories of interest for their Consumers or Passengers.

Can hotels live without SEO and TripAdvisor?

Back in 2010, Google launched a service called Google Search Stories  that most of us have forgotten about apart from being touched at that time by the teaser called Parisian Love. A Google story of an American that finds love in Paris.
What Google Search Stories allows you to do is to create a video - complete with a music track - about Google's search results for various searches you perform on Web, Maps, Blogs,... about yourself or your company.

The whole process just takes a few minutes. Once you approve your video it's uploaded to YouTube for the world to access. Additionally, like most other YouTube videos, you can embed the code for your own YouTube video on your website or blog.
I love it. But let’s come back to SEO and TripAdvisor!
As I was benchmarking keywords for a study on the Mauritian Market it just appeared so evident that SEO and TripAdvisor were dominating results that I tried it on Google Search Stories and ended up creating this short video that is quite relevant.

35 seconds is a bit short to focus on numbers but this is what we learn from the story based on 5 results for the following keywords:
1. 5 stars resort Mauritius with WEB
2. Boutique hotel Mauritius with WEB
3. Pictures Paradise Cove Mauritius with IMAGES
4. Paradise Cove Mauritius reviews with WEB
5. Paradise Cove Mauritius location with MAPS
6. Book best price for Paradise Cove Mauritius with WEB

At search #2. Paradise Cove Resort in Mauritius appears in 1st natural results and catches the eye.
Then as a user would do, I searched for pictures, reviews, location and tried to book at the best rate.
TripAdvisor appears on Top 3 positions for each web result and also note that the hotel was also very well rated and placed on Google Map.

I think these 6 results answer to the question on SEO and TripAdvisor but you may also give it a try.

No pictures for Pinterest

Bad point though: Impossible to pin pictures on Pinterest!





If you have your own Google Search Story related to travel, feel free to post it just down here as a comment or create your own  and share it with us.

Could M-Commerce kill E-Commerce with growing Mobile shoppers around the world? [Infographic]

BigCommerce, founded by Eddie Machaalani & Mitchell Harper, makes it easy to setup your own professional online store - no coding or design experience required. Using built-in marketing tools, you can also drive lots of traffic to your new online store from places like Facebook, Google, Yahoo, eBay, Shopzilla, iPhones, iPads and more.

In an effort to understand the changing landscape of e-commerce, BigCommerce examined analyst and trend-watching data from several sources to build some context around the emergence of m-commerce (mobile commerce) in retail and then created the infographic below.

In-store mobile trends expected to grow.

Highlights about today's mobile shopper:
• About 1 in 5 smartphone users in America scanned a QR code in-store last year. People typically scanned fo 73% product info, 32% for Coupons and 25% for Event info.
• 42% of all US mobile subscribers have smartphones; 51% of all UK subscribers have smartphones; and 44% of EU5 subscribers do.
• Smartphone users spend more time on mobile apps than on mobile sites.
• Women (77%) prefer tablets for shopping as men (59%) prefer to purchases on their phones;

Click on the Infographic below to read all about it on BigCommerce: