Piggy backing off the recent post I had written two weeks ago about Pinterest, I wanted to add a few tips and ideas I've run across that will help you to better use the service.

I think it's important to stress that Pinterest focuses on compelling visual content, which sets it apart from similar sites and has nurtured such an ardent following.  As I've mentioned previously, the more people that use Pinterest, the more the culture of it will change.  I still think there's plenty of room for experimentation and storytelling but keeping the visual aspect in mind is key.

• Check out their Goodies section for a link to the iPhone app, their sharing bookmarklet and page widgets. To see their site widget in action, look at the footer of a Tumblr post.

• Are you influential on Pinterest? PinReach will break down your stats and rank your clout.

• You can search for sites by source on Pinterest, here's an example of pinned images and videos from the Sunlight Foundation.

• You can create an rss feed for any person by adding feed.rss at the end of the url, like this - pinterest.com/sunfoundation/feed.rss or board by adding rss, like this - pinterest.com/sunfoundation/2012-political-campaign-ads/rss

• Unfortunately Pinterest doesn't provide rss support for source content, making it difficult to monitor pinned content from your site.  But, luckily for us, Mashable has figured out a workaround for turning source pages into rss feeds.

• To stay on top of your content being pinned, add the rss feed you just created for source pins (in the link above) to IFTTT.  You can have IMs or emails sent to you every time you're content has been pinned, add a note of each pin to Evernote, have them tweeted, send it to Google Reader or bookmark it for later.

• Take a look at The Next Web's post on 20 Awesome Pinterest Tools.

• For more on Pinterest, both Reddit and Quora have growing communities, check them out.

I'm interested in hearing about your uses and examples from Pinterest.  Do you have anything to share?

Pinterest is a relatively new social networking service that is similar to more traditional bookmarking and news aggregation sites, but with a focus on the visual.  Pinterest allows you to bookmark (or "pin") both static images and videos.

While sites like Reddit, StumbleUpon and Delicious focus on the title and content of a linked page, Pinterest values aesthetics. Clip art and the uninspiring don't fare well on this site.

Early on, the service was considered very popular with fashionistas and the bridal set, with many boards boasting curated collections of wedding accoutrements and the latest fashions. But as its popularity has risen, so to has the range of what people choose to pin.

What I find compelling about this service, beyond the use of visual media, is that the culture of the site hasn't yet been set. You're limited on how to use Pinterest only by what you can imagine. It's easy to see how the platform will provide new avenues for storytelling, fundraising, organizing, teaching, and on and on.

Right now, we're experimenting with the site in a number of ways, but we're keeping an eye on what's the visually pleasing.  We've integrated the Pinterest share button into the footer of our infographics Tumblr, which aggregates interesting data visualizations and now allows users to easily pin Sunlight posts to their boards.

We've also set up our own account with boards on 2012 Political Campaign Ads, infographics, innovative user interfaces and -- because we have so many wonderful chefs on staff -- a board for some of the more interesting dishes that make their way into the office.

To get a glimpse of how other organizations are approaching Pinterest, here's a link to KPCC Radio of southern California's board where they've captured a day at their offices, offering a glimpse into life at their studio.

To set up an account, you'll need an invite, which will prompt you to sign up through either your Twitter or Facebook accounts. (If you want to be invited, just write us at media(AT)sunlightfoundation(DOT)com and we'll hook you up.)

What are your experiences with Pinterest? What uses can you imagine?

Over a year ago we got the idea to internally send social media alerts for important Sunlight news and project launches. These email alerts consist of a collection of links to sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn that help our staff promote important news with just a couple clicks of the mouse.

It's quite simple: depending on the service, the link will populate a message that Sunlighter can share making it easy to post important information quickly.

Here's what those links might look like if I wanted to promote this blog post:

• Share on Twitter
• Post to Facebook
• Share on LinkedIn
• Like on StumbleUpon
• Bookmark on Delicious

The url is populate with the required parameters and a link to the actual post, take a look:

• Share on Twitter - https://twitter.com/intent
  /tweet?text=RT+%40sunfoundation+Tools+for+Transparency%3A
  +Social+Media+Alerts+https%3A%2F%2Fbitly.com%2FpLPJQh+%23gov20+%23opengov
• Post to Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fsunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/07/14/tools-for-transparency-social-media-alerts
• Share on LinkedIn - http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=http%3A//sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/07/14/tools-for-transparency-social-media-alerts
• Like on StumbleUpon - http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/8AKY4R/sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/07/14/tools-for-transparency-social-media-alerts
• Bookmark on Delicious - http://delicious.com/save?url=http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/07/14/tools-for-transparency-social-media-alerts

This is by no means a comprehensive list of social media services and we often add other services, like Reddit or YouTube, while removing others. While participation is opt-in, it still helps us effectively promote Sunlight events.  What do you think? Do you have any ideas or tweaks we might use?

Over the past two months we've had a series of guest bloggers offering insight to the work they're doing, the tools they're using and important trends they've identified in the transparency movement.

12/2 - Tools for Transparency: GovSM by Josh Shpayher

Josh Shpayher talks about the importance of social media in transparency and it's use by our government and elected officials. GovSM.com, which he founded, is one of the best tools for keeping track of government and political social media use.

12/15 - Tools for Transparency...Are Delicious by Jed Sundwall

Jed Sunwall highlights the power of social bookmarking service Delicious.com and its uses for the transparency movement.

12/23 - Tools for Transparency: Open Atrium by Joshua Gay

Joshua Gay talks about Open Atrium's feature set and how the powerful tool could help the Sunlight Foundation and the fight for transparency.

1/6 - Tools for Transparency: Google Refine by Rebekah Heacock

Rebekah Heacock describes how Google Refine works and aids in cleaning up data sets, which is incredibly helpful for curating clean and presentable data.

1/14 - Tools for Transparency: A Look from Abroad - Transparency Tools in Latin America by Mario Roset and Rosario Gonzalez Morón

Mario Roset and Rosario Gonzalez Morón describe transparency and open government initiatives happening around Latin America.

1/27 - Tools for Transparency: Super PAC Sleuthing with Reddit by Erik Martin

Erik Martin describes the partnership between Reddit and the Sunlight Foundation for the Super PAC Sleuth project and crowdsourcing investigative work.

Today, our guest post is written by Erik Martin (a.k.a. @hueypriest), Community Manager at reddit.com. Reddit.com is a community for finding what's new and interesting on the web, provided and decided by its users.

The community at reddit.com has pulled off some incredible examples crowdsourced altruism and research. From helping to enhance the surveillance tape of a murder to helping reunite a mother and son to finding the occasional fill-in sushi chef, redditors enjoy helping each other, and perhaps more importantly, they enjoy the actual hunt for information itself. Redditors have also been known to occasionally come together to address certain political issuies, most notably with reddit's PAC, now know as the Open Source Democracy Foundation. There are also plenty of examples of intrepid citizen reporters or semi-organized groups uncovering fraud and corruption with some clever sleuthing, including this recent one about two Floridians who brought foreclosure problems to light.

So, we at reddit are very excited by the potential of the new Super PAC Sleuth Project launched by The Sunlight Foundation and LittleSis. They have created a project where redditors and other internet sleuths can focus their powers on improving government transparency and accountability. The key to any crowdsourced project like this is for the process of collective sleuthing to be fun in and of itself. Of course, participants ultimately want to make a difference by increasing transparency, but if the project can tap into the challenge and fun of tracking down specific information online, truly amazing things are possible.

It's often easy to fall into the trap of relying solely on social media as a means of promotion: Most folks just aren't comfortable with the thought of formally advertising a project or event, and from cost to complexity, it's easier to stick with what we already know, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, and email.

At the same time, self-serve advertising -- which lends itself towards ease of use and affordability -- has caught on amongst many advertisers, Google AdWords being among the largest. This type of advertising also makes it dead simple to experiment and limit your spending as you become more comfortable with the idea of online advertising.

Since Sunlight already advertises with Facebook and Google, we thought we'd try out other services in the hopes of reaching new demographics. Reddit, which I've written about in the past, launched a self-serve sponsored links beta program in January of 2009 and officially launched at the end of that year, giving us to the opportunity to market to a new audience.

Reddit's platform is unique in that it functions much like a regular Reddit submission. Users can vote, leave comments, share or hide the advertisement as they wish. Plus, it's also quite inexpensive, cheaper than many other comparable services, and it reaches a very nuanced audience.

We ran our first sponsored link in August, promoting Poligraft and since that time have run three additional campaigns, with a fourth campaign in the works. Our click-through rates (CTR) have been as high as 1.08% and as low as .03% (our last campaign), while we've also seen cost-per-clicks (CPC) as low as .88¢ and as high as 2.90$.

While both the CPC and the CTR for each campaign have varied, in general what we are seeing is consistent engagement on the Sunlight side. Traffic coming from Reddit-sponsored links tend to stay for at least half a minute to almost 45 seconds, viewing three and a half to four pages per visit with a bounce rate under 85%.

Ultimately, engagement is the point of advertising: we want to bring people to our sites and have them use our products, and we're not the only ones who have gotten this experience from Reddit's service. Gabriel Weinberg, who runs the search engine Duck Duck Go, has a great write-up on his experience advertising with Reddit and the high ROI he had after running his ad for for 13 days. A few points Weinberg notes -- and that we've definitely seen -- are that Redditors are an active audience: they actually try out your site, actually comment on your content, and that engaging with the community helps with other Reddit submissions. Sure, the CPM and CPC varies widely by day, but folks still mention the ads Weinberg long after he posted them.

Protip: You need to become a Reddit member in order to advertise, but this is a great opportunity for you: take the time to check out some of the more popular posts and advertisements on the site, how they are written and how people respond to them in the comments before you start your campaign.

Though we've added Reddit sponsored links to the stable of platforms we use to advertise Sunlight properties, we'll continue to use Google and Facebook ads, as well as social media endorsements. For those of us puzzling how to share the great projects, interesting blogs and events we're holding related to transparency, remember that though social media is great, good old fashion advertising works well, too...and Reddit is a great platform for running an effective, inexpensive campaign.

News aggregation services that use the vote-to-promote model like Reddit and Digg, and Delicious and StumbleUpon to a degree, are potentially very useful tools for finding and promoting fresh content in the fight for open government.  These tools are simple to use, easy to navigate and great for finding and adding further context.

Going one step further, promoting content on these services is almost a necessity. According to SEOMoz, Google considers positioning on sites like Digg, Delicious and Topsy as one of the many ranking signals used to determine the weight of search results.

The biggest challenge at the moment is getting users to actively populate these sites with transparency news and stories while also voting for and commenting on the content that they find.

There are a few ways we can begin fixing this problem; you can add a bookmarklet to your browser, like the ones from ShareThis or AddThis, to start submitting news items and adding share buttons to content, like we do at the bottom of our blog posts which allow you to share posts.

While Digg doesn't have a transparency category, though you can submit to Political News & Opinion, Reddit does.  I created a transparency category called Sunlight (/Transparency was taken but not in use) to begin aggregating open government news on Reddit.

You can also tag Delicious submissions with keywords like transparency and opengov or Twitter posts with related hashtags using # in front of the keyword.  Adding the appropriate tag to a post makes it easier to find related stories and services like Topsy use those tags and keywords to identify trending topics on Twitter.

These tools, when combined with the passionate people of the open government community, have the potential to be a powerful approach to moving the conversation forward.