Countless articles have been written on the importance of sites like Twitter and Facebook to bring customers to your business, but one of the most often neglected is also one of the highest trafficked website on the Internet. Pinterest is growing by the day and drives more traffic than staples like Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Reddit manage combined. With numbers that top many of the traditional social media sites, if your company doesn’t have a Pinterest page, you are missing out on a massive opportunity.

Unlike Twitter or even Facebook and Google+, Pinterest is driven by pictures. People will share the content you create if it is visually interesting, and that also means making your pictures large and high quality. Small icons will not cut it on Pinterest. The more attention your images receive, the more likely they will be shared by others.

The first few years of this decade have proven to be a bullish time for those who are able to combine technical expertise with business acumen and successfully build a start-up from the ground up (ideally in Silicon Valley). However, this gold rush has not been isolated to the first few companies who had access to the Valley’s network of investors.

Rather, the market has become incredibly attractive to a wide variety of entrepreneurs, all desperately working to bring their business to the next level. In such a competitive environment of PR for start-ups, a compelling story can be the difference between a start-up surviving into the future or crumbling before it gains its first customer.

The food and beverage PR industry is quite unique in the ways that it doles out its accolades. All industries have their taste makers to be sure, but food and beverage companies more or less rely on the tongues of known experts to sell their wares to the general public.

Perhaps because food is so essential to the day to day lives of all people, they prefer to have someone else take the heat for any bad decisions. In any case, here are the reasons that food and beverage companies, especially new food and beverage companies, must appeal to taste makers in the industry.

As any true child of the 80s knows, Gargamel is far from a friendly face. Bent on capturing Smurfs to turn them into gold, eat them for lunch, or just destroy them, Gargamel is enough to terrify any Smurf… and likely the 80’s child that still lives within many of us.

It thus goes without saying that, as a marketer, you don’t want to scare your audience away like Gargamel. Papa Smurf is a preferable role model (if you’re set on an 80s cartoon star as your social media analogy, like we are here).

The technology revolution has turned the marketing and public relations world upside-down. In today’s world, traditional PR strategies and models no longer gain the traction they once did. However, this is not a bad thing for those businesses and PR firms that are able to think laterally and re-adjust their approach. When you consider the fact that many of the more modern approaches, such as social media, blogger influence and PPC campaigns, are efficient and cost-effective tactics, it is easy to understand why so many companies are integrating these services into their approach to PR.

The rapid advance in communications technology has created a situation in which news travels at nearly the speed of light. Where once there was a time in which the traditional media was able to control what went out on the wire and when, today’s news often reaches the public at the same time, or sooner, than it reaches mainstream media. This creates the opportunity for “real-time” engagement. Meaning that, during or within minutes of an event occurring, a company can literally engage their customer base or target audience on the subject. By adding modern PR tactics like social media to their communications strategy, a business can send out a relevant and responsive tweet in a matter of seconds after a relevant event has taken place.

In an unprecedented move, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has recently released almost 400,000 iconic works, in the form of high-resolution computer images, to the general public – and in turn – created a great opportunity to increase the Museum’s Brand PR. These images are available on their website for free download. The website designers have cataloged and sorted the pieces for easy retrieval by the public. They can be used for free, so long as you are not being used for commercial use. However, you can download a beautiful Van Gogh, print it out, and put it on the wall of your home. The images that are available are that high of a quality, and large enough to make a decent sized print for personal use.

The pieces are sorted and can easily be located utilizing several methods of searching. You can look for a specific artist, or look for a culture and the art that they produced, or perhaps you are interested in a specific era in art history, or even if you have a desire to see art only produced in a certain medium, all of these categories and more, will help you to find exactly what you are looking to see.