If you follow the tech blogging community at all, you’ll have heard of Pinterest. If you don’t follow that community, and you haven’t heard of it already from a friend, family member or co-worker, you will soon enough. It is officially the hot new thing.

Intended to simulate the look and feel of a corkboard (the site calls it a pinboard), Pinterest is a digital place to save and display images meaningful to you, with a link back to the source. Pictures of cute puppy dogs to make you smile, skinny people to remind you to put down the (second) cupcake, inspirational quotes, etc. The social media part of this is that you can see everyone else’s board, and can pin stuff from their boards to your own board. What an amazing way to learn more about someone; you can see everything that they find important.

And Pinterest is making headlines. Even as an invite-only website (which is a hugely clever way to ensure that people joining the site have ready-made friends on there, so there’s never that element of, “so now what do I do,” that bedevils sites like Twitter), Pinterest is driving more referral traffic than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn. COMBINED. That alone would get headlines, but there’s one more interesting part to this equation. By far, the majority of Pinterest users are women. In the U.S., some statistics have the figure at 87% of active users.

So, naturally, I wanted to know more, both for personal and professional reasons. (So I asked my wife for an invite.) What I found was that there’s really nothing girly about the site. It functions just like my magnetic whiteboard at work, with all kinds of important or interesting pictures hanging from it. Then after pinning a bunch of tattoo pictures and Star Wars stuff (or you could do like Chief Boyd and post lots of motorcycle pics and man caves and prove that you’ve got way more guy cred than I have), I started thinking about work and how we, as communicators, could use this new medium in an emergency.

And I failed.

Really smart folks like Patrice Cloutier and Karen Freberg and Gerald Baron are convinced that Pinterest can be a useful way to communicate in an emergency, but I just don’t see it yet. I think that ultimately they’ll be proven right, but that doesn’t mean that Pinterest can’t be useful for those in our field right now. But instead of after or during, before.

Take, for example, this great pinboard by the wonderful folks at APHL (the Association of Public Health Labs). They’re using it essentially as a self-directed teaching site. For those of us in specialized fields that aren’t really well understood, like public health labs, like public health, like emergency management, like fire fighting, like policing, like the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. What an amazing way to demonstrate, in those thousand-word-pictures, what we’re all about. In these times of austerity, what a better way to demonstrate why the work you do is important.

And one final note for my public health readers. It’s known that women (specifically mothers) are the chief medical decision-makers for families in the U.S. And that the percent of medical decision-makers searching online for health information continues to rise. And now you know that the largest reported age group in the U.S. on Pinterest are women aged 35 to 44. So if you wanted to influence medical decision-makers about things like, say, vaccines, where do you think might be a good place to do it?