Polyvore: A Social Media Partner for Creative Business And Thinkers

Polyvore is what I would call an open source social media platform for creative people. Those people could include an artsy teenage student, a seasoned professional graphic designer or a high profile fashion designer and everything in between.

The sets above are a very small variety of my work on that site and part of my creative portfolio. I find Polyvore very easy to use and it has become a great tool for exploring visual ideas that initially come to me in words and then grow into visual stories in my mind.

The important thing to understand about sites like Polyvore and others is that they are also used for developing important market research for a wide variety of professionals. The activity on them is "Open" and that means interested research and business partners can use it to study emerging trends and patterns that help them to develop marketing strategy. This is a form of 'Crowd sourcing" in a marketing sense. I'm not sure why this is not explained as such in the media write ups you will hit on the web. Perhaps Polyvore and other similar sites don't think users will care, or that the information will scare potential users away from exploring it's benefits, but I'm speculating on that.

In some ways traditional business and media formats have perfected the art of "HYPE" and can get the restless masses to move toward their ideas which makes the back story irrelevant. I DON'T SHARE THAT NOTION. In fact I believe that respecting the intelligence of your audience and teaching them about the big and small picture is imperative. We all live in a social context and have a need to understand the structures that influence it, to make good decisions. That is where the real value is and that is part of every personal and professional encounter I have. To do otherwise keeps our lives very small and focused on temporary things.

I use Polyvore to indulge my love of research, and my passion for visual serendipity. I enjoy following the work of so many creative users all over the globe who also use Polyvore, it has opened up a world of ideas that are truly inspiring.