Read an excerpt from our 2008 “So What Do You Do?” interview with Karp below:

Describe the ideal situation for Tumblr, five years out: What will be its key features and how many users will you have registered? How many will be on staff?

In five years, I have absolutely no clue. Hopefully we’ll have moved into the position of refining a core product. We’ll be refining whatever that product is and have shifted our focus on entirely new functionally and uses that we’ll be investing on top of. We’d love to shoot to become one of the top five Web sites. It’s a great goal to shoot for. We want it to be a business and product that people care about and which does something special for them.How many people on staff: that’s an interesting question. I really don’t know. If this thing grows like we want it to, we’d hope to be bigger than the four-man team we are now. It’s nice to think that this never gets to be a team of 100, but I don’t like the idea of being the next huge tech corporation where it’s all about where our talent is coming from and what schools we’re scouting.

That is the direction a lot of companies go and where they stay. Google is so scattered and they’re not focused. I think this is a rule for all large companies: You get to a point where you’re not nimble and you’re not focused. The people on the top are thinking about very different things, and people on the bottom and middle aren’t in the right place in the company to get anything done or to keep a team or a project focused. I can’t imagine being in that environment, where you just don’t know anyone you’re working with.

Do you aim to sell Tumblr?

I don’t think we aim to sell anything. I’m much more enchanted with the notion of something that’s employing me in 15 years rather than something that we flip in a year. And again, that’s something that we don’t think about. And that’s certainly not our goal.

Karp was right about staying employed: Mayer is keeping him on as CEO of Tumblr even after the deal goes through. Read the rest of his interview with writer Sammy Davis on Mediabistro.com.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Social media.

Founded in 2008, Brooklyn Bowl now has the most-followed Instagram profile of any venue in New York City (8,940 followers). In 2011, “Brooklyn Bowl” was the tenth most-searched Google keyword in the New York metropolitan area.

Justin Bolognino, founder and creative director of Learned Evolution, leads the social strategy for his clients at Brooklyn Bowl, who strive to provide the same experience online that they do in person. “We’re constantly reaching out to people to build a tight-knit community online,” Bolognino said.

Brooklyn Bowl advertises almost exclusively through social media. “We’re big fans of Promoted Tweets,” said Bolognino, and “as Facebook makes it more difficult to be seen, we’re exploring paid media.” But mostly, the company relies on free tools.

Brooklyn Bowl’s social strategy balances data-driven content, like providing show times and ticket information, with real-time engagement. They use use Hootsuite’s social dashboard to create and monitor content, and track analytics with tools like TweetReach and Nitrogeam (for Instagram).

“We are quite heavy on the Twitter and the Facebook,” Bolognino said, but he and his staff also use Pinterest, Foursquare, and Vine to stay touch with the bowling alley’s customers. Staff members regularly monitor the social media sites in order to respond to questions and concerns.

The social campaigns also appeal to the creativity of the bowlers. Every week, Brooklyn Bowl hosts a pictogram contest where social media followers decipher the meaning of a cartoon to win tickets to an upcoming show. These cartoons, like the one above, average 75-100 comments per post.

During a show, Brooklyn Bowl collects all the related media that the guests are sharing and puts it on the big screen through a platform called HyperPages that feeds in real-time Tweets, Instagrams, and Vines.

Does all that photography diminish the experience of sharing a bowling lane and a beer with friends? Not at all, said Bolognino. ”It adds a memory to their collective memory bank to have and share for as long as the cloud exists.”

And when the customers take the time to share a memory through a photo, video, or post from a live show, he added, “You’re a storyteller, just like the band that you’re watching.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Linda Sherman, David Reis, Darrell Miller, John Pettitt and Allie Siarto

Influencer marketing is a hot trend in social media. Read on for expert advice from the Digital Hollywood conference.

Influencer marketing campaigns in social media leverage the voices of those closest to your customers in their social graphs. Social media is filled with these webs of influence within various social graphs and niche content that can be targeted to help market your brand.

Hollywood is an important part of influencer marketing. Endorsements from famous people have always been popular in the ad world. Influencer marketing isn’t just about celebrity when used on digital platforms. Everyday influencers are huge in social. Examples: A “soccer mom” with high social engagement or a photographer whose pictures are widely shared on Facebook, Tumblr and Instagram.

So why are influencers so important, how do you find them in social media, and how to you engage with them?

Hollywood Influencers

 Linda Sherman
The Courage Group
Social Marketing Strategy Agency

“Influencers lend credibility to your brand. You have influencers and then you have super influencers: celebrities. And there is a difference between reality TV celebrities and Brad Pitt caliber celebrities. It is easier to get reality TV stars tweeting. Dana White (@DanaWhite) has done a great job popularizing the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) by being very accessible to fans, particularly on Twitter, and by insisting that his fighters do so too. Whether you are competing as an actor, musician or writer, you should start building your social media network now.”

Reality TV Star Power

Darrell Miller
Entertainment Practice Chair
Fox Rothschild

“The average celebrity I represent has 2 million followers. Ultimately the power of celebrity is a big influencer. Brands can instantly plug into communities that are very willing to listen, and in many cases make a purchase. Reality TV stars can bring authenticity to influencer marketing campaigns. Traditional actors spend 99% of their time reading scripts – so audiences don’t know them outside of their Hollywood portrayed personas. Reality TV stars are already getting themselves out there in a very real way, and generate an unparralleled level of buzz in the right influencer marketing campaign.”

Influencer Fundamentals

David Reis
CEO, DEI Worldwide
Socializing Brands

“Influencer relations is old school. Find out who is having the conversations currently that would fit well with a brand voice. Do they have a have a reasonably sized audience? Follow them. Do their tweets get retweeted? Reach out to them. Talk to them. Get them on board. Its not super complicated to find them. We don’t use software like Klout. Klout can be gamed so easily. My analytics guy ranks as an expert on ‘lamb’ on Klout. Don’t ask me how that happened.”

Influencer Analytics

Allie Siarto
Co-Founder & Director of Analytics
Loudpixel

“Everybody wishes they could just push a button and get a list of people to reach out to. Klout and Kred are tools that promise to be an easy solution. But a machine will only get you part of the way there. You still have to read through people’s social conversations and reach out to the right ones – that is the the real work of influencer campaigns. You can spend 5K to six figures on social monitoring tools – but the basics of listening to social media and seeing who is already talking about your brand stays the same.”

Viral Influencers

John Pettitt
CEO, Repost.US
Viral Content

“Influencers are ‘human editors’. They surface important content. They know the audience who they are posting for. The influencer reposting content is often much more engaging than the original source. We tracked a viral Christian Science Monitor article that got 100,000 hits and the front page of Reddit when the right blogger reposted it – but it had only gotten 5,000 page views on its original source site.”

Readers: How do you use influencers?

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“The uses are endless!” said Brianna Boedecker, who teaches 4th and 5th graders at Grattan Elementary school. Boedecker was planning her dream wedding on Pinterest when she discovered that she could get ideas for school projects there as well.

She shared her find with her colleague Cate Walter, also 4th and 5th grader teacher, who has been in the business for 10 years. After a while, said Walter, “You get stuck in your ways.” Pinterest offered a chance for her to “freshen up and get new ideas,” she said.

It was there that Walter found an idea for creating a flower with petals made of  paper thank-you notes to give to parents and guest speakers who volunteer in the classroom.

Another thing that teachers will find on Pinterest are Anchor Charts, which are visual representations of what the students should be learning in class. Teachers post them all over the classroom to reinforce what they discuss in class and to help the visual learners. “So much of school is auditory,” Walter explained. “It’s really important [to have] visual tools.”

Teachers need visual tools as much as the students do. Danielle Edgeman, a first grade teacher at Paul Revere Elementary School, said she uses Pinterest for everything anchor charts to classroom decor to classroom management techniques. “It’s really important to see what other teachers are doing,” she said. “Every time I do an art project, I search to see if someone has done it already.”

Pinterest has been keeping an eye on this growing trend. According to Pinterest’s Mithya Srinivasan, ”Teachers have found Pinterest to be a great resource. With Pinterest, teachers are able to discover new project ideas, find tips on how to decorate their classrooms, share great resources they’ve found across the web, and more,” she said. “We’ve even heard from teachers who have been able to connect with other teachers around the globe to share ideas and inspiration.”

All three elementary school educators mentioned TeachersPayTeachers, an open marketplace where teachers can sell their best lesson plans and activities to other teachers, as a source of great pins.

In recent months, Pinterest has worked to improved its search functionality to make resources like these easier to find on the network.  ”You have to be a pretty tech-savvy teacher to find what’s on there right now,” said Boedecker, “but it’s getting better and better.”

One advantage of Pinterest, however, is its bookmarking functionality. The newly updated layout highlights the collections of pins, called boards, that pinners can now flip through like a magazine.

“Pinterest also gives teachers a place to organize and collect all the interesting content they’ve found,” Srinivasan said, ”and we’re glad that there are so many boards dedicated to education on Pinterest.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Finding and sharing localized customer content is what appeals to brands the most, said Erica McClenny, senior vice president of client services at social media management software company Expion.

Instagram includes a tool for tagging photos by location and placing them on a map for other users to find.

In April, social data provider Gnip reported that between 15 and 25 percent of Instagram users were geotagging their photos. “We have consistently found that our customers are eager for more social data with geotagged content,” Gnip said at the time.

Expion, whose clients include global chains like Hilton, Applebee’s, and AMC, is one of few companies around the world that has access to a location-based moderation tool for not only finding, but also commenting on users’ Instagram photos.  An upgrade to the public Instagram API for searching images, this tool automatically surfaces the brand-related photos that lie within a certain radius of, say, a particular store location. ”Our localization of moderation on Facebook has an obvious synergy with Instagram moderation based on geo-location fields provided in the API,” McClenny said.

And many more companies are exploring Instagram — 67 percent of top brands are now using the platform, according to a study of active Interbrand 100 companies by Simply Measured. The platform reaches more than 100 million active monthly users — a 500 percent increase since it was acquired.

In fact, Instagram now has a greater reach than the visual bookmarking site Pinterest, the study found. As of May 1, the 76 Interbrand companies that have a presence on Pinterest reach a collective audience of less than 500,000, while the 67 companies that are on Instagram collectively reach more than 7 million followers.

But engagement is another story. To start a dialogue with their growing audiences, 23 percent of these companies post more than 50 times a month on Instagram — a 20-percent increase from last quarter. User engagement with these brands has likewise gone up 16 percent over last quarter, with an average of 5,600 engagements per photo.

By using Instagram for the MTV Movie Awards, for example, MTV saw a 200 percent growth in engagement, Simply Measured found. This was due in part to the use of hashtags that encouraged viewers to share and submit their own content for inclusion in the movie awards. Each nominee in the best superhero category had a tag on Instagram and Twitter so that fans could tell their friends to #VoteBilbo, #VoteBatman, #VoteIronman, or #VoteHulk.

MTV is one of the first three brands, including Starbucks and Nike, to reach 1 million followers.

“A year ago, many people were skeptical about Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and whether it would hinder the network’s growth,” said Simply Measured CEO Adam Schoenfeld. “However today it’s very clear that the synergies are not only bringing new users on board, but also creating incredible opportunities for brands to connect with consumers.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Earlier this year, British YouTuber Benjamin Cook, aka ninebrassmonkeys, explored these questions in “Girls On YouTube,” an episode of his weekly documentary-style YouTube series, ”Becoming YouTube.” The episode took an unfiltered look at what some of YouTube’s biggest names, including Hank Green, Charlie McDonnell, Carrie Hope Fletcher, Jack and Dean, Lex Croucher, and Emma Blackery, think about “girls on YouTube.”

“Becoming YouTube: Girls On YouTube” sparked some controversy–mainly because it ignored the fact that there are hugely successful female YouTubers, such as Grace Helbig, iJustine, Hannah Hart and Jenna Marbles, the second most-subscribed-to creator on YouTube with over 8 million subscribers and 1.1 billion video views.  It also left out the voices of some of YouTube’s more seasoned and successful female stars, many of whom actually feel empowered by their YouTube fans and tout the advantages of being women on the video site.

We’ll hear from a couple of these more optimistic female YouTubers shortly, but first – here’s a look at some of the biggest issues brought to light in Cook’s ‘Girls On YouTube’ video.

The demographics are in the guys’ favor.

In “Girls On YouTube,” YouTuber Lex Croucher explains, “It’s about an 80-20 split of girls to boys watching [vlogs on] YouTube and girls, especially 15 year old girls, like to watch boys.”

While YouTube’s demographic breakdown for advertisers and Quantcast demographics show a negligible difference between the number of male and female viewers on the video site, the consensus among the YouTubers in Cook’s video seems to be that a majority of viewers of their vlog-style content are female.  Thirty-year old Cook reports, “82.4 percent of my audience is female…and just over half is aged 13 to 17.”  He says, “This split is typical of a male vlogger’s audience demographic.”

YouTuber’s Jack and Dean attribute this to the fact that girls are simply more prone to the whole fan-girl lifestyle. “Girls obsess over stuff,” says Dean.  Jack adds, “It’s been proven for ages. Look at the Beatles, and now you’ve got One Direction.”  Fair or not, teen girls’ inclination toward fandom, paired with their desire to look at cute boys, is more advantageous to male YouTubers than to female YouTubers.

Emma Blackery says, “Some people just go for looks – they want to see a cute boy on the screen.” It’s different for female creators, explains Blackery. Girls aren’t just watching because you’re nice to look at. “They’re not looking at how attractive you are – they’re seeing if you make good content, if you’re relatable, if you’re funny.”

Society teaches girls that looks matter.

If you turn on your television or open a magazine, odds are you’ll be bombarded with beautiful women.  For our entire lives, we’ve been conditioned to believe that if we are thin and if we are beautiful, people will like us more and we’ll be more successful.

YouTuber Carrie Hope Fletcher says, “In the media in general, there’s definitely more pressure on girls to kind of look a certain way, whereas there’s less pressure on the boys. It’s more nerve-wracking for girls to be on camera because they might not think that they look right for it.”

It doesn’t help that many male and female YouTubers alike are bombarded with trolling comments about their looks–called fat or ugly, even if they aren’t.  Blackery says, “Girls do get judged a lot more than guys, I think,” which can be hard to overcome, but overcoming it and sticking with making videos can ultimately lead to a successful YouTube career.  ”I got really upset, my first dislike I think I cried in a corner somewhere, but now I’ll get any kind of comments that are rude and I’m just like ‘Yeah I’m used to hearing that’ and I’ll say something back to them…I stand up for myself now.”  Blackery now has over 217,000 subscribers.

The flip side.

Cook’s look at ‘Girls On YouTube’, while interesting, does shed a rather pessimistic light on the world of female YouTube creators so I decided to do a little research of my own.  I spoke with a couple of seasoned female YouTubers to get their take on what it’s like being a woman on YouTube.

Issa Rae, creator and star of comedic web series, ‘The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl’ and ‘roomieloverfriends’, who also recently joined forces with Shonda Rhimes on a new comedic television series, tells me,”I think there are way more opportunities and advantages for women on YouTube. It really provides a unique opportunity to find your own audience, big or small, for whatever it is you do.”

When asked whether she could recall any instances in which she felt she was treated unfairly or differently on YouTube because she was female, Issa Rae told me, “I can’t think of anything offhand, because I don’t like to think that way. If I’m the only minority in a situation (the only woman or the only person of color), I try to use that to my advantage as much as possible. I try to think of the advantages of being the only female in a certain situation, as opposed to the disadvantages.”

Cassandra Bankson is a model that has made a name for herself on YouTube by helping those who, like herself, suffer from cystic acne.  She has put herself out there in a big way, revealing her biggest insecurity to the world in an effort to help others, and says that, “There are certainly individuals who are a bit more open about their negative (and sometimes hurtful) opinions.”

Bankson does point out that, “Speaking personally as a woman, and just from what I have observed, it seems women are slightly more critical and ‘comparing’ than males. Occasionally I wonder if my audience was male if there would be the same competition.” But overall, she says, “I’m so thankful to have a place where I can share my experiences and still receive such amazing feedback and support.” Bankson says she doesn’t believe that being a woman has made things harder for her. She says of her channel, Diamondsandheels14, “My experience has been overwhelmingly positive. I try to focus not only on beauty, hair, acne and makeup, but on inner beauty, confidence, and self-worth.”

What do you think? Why do you think there are more popular male YouTubers than female YouTubers? Is it harder for women to succeed on YouTube? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

“One day I said, ‘If you tweet about a sponsor and it’s funny, it will always get read.’ That opened the floodgates, and I think it’s hilarious. The tweets I read are very clever, and people really earn their way onto the airwaves with them.”

Read the full interview in So What Do You Do, Jay Mohr, Comedian and Fox Sports Radio Host?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

In a recent interview, Lavrusik explained how Facebook’s search bar, Graph Search, “is an incredible tool for finding sources and discovering content for your stories.” Announced earlier this year, Graph Search allows users to find people, places, and things on Facebook by typing in simple phrases and whittling the results by demographics such as age and location as well as interests.

Finding Sources

For finding people, journalists can type in phrases like ”College students in New York, NY” and “People who work at Facebook and like the New York Times“ to target a group of people if they don’t have a specific person in mind.  From there, examining a person’s profile information such as a friends list or relationship status can be a starting point for verifying his or her identity.

In his own reporting, Lavrusik, who has written for Mashable and Poynter and worked on social media for the New York Times, has found that sending Facebook messages to sources is a good place to start. In fact, direct messages are less threatening to the recipients than cold-calling them on the phone. “As a journalist, Facebook can humanize you and make you look more relatable,” he said, explaining that when people can look at your profile and get a sense of who you are before they respond, they are more comfortable answering your questions.

Journalists should never take a profile at face value. Last month, after reddit users misidentified missing Brown University student Sunil Tripathi as suspect number two in the Boston Marathon bombing manhunt, his family had to take down his Facebook page to stop the hateful comments from users.

Discovering Content

Facebook is also a good source of eye-witness videos and photos that journalists can discover and request to use in their stories, said Lavrusik. For example, a search for “photos taken in Breezy Point” conjures more 1,000 images of the New York City neighborhood that was devastated by Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

Connecting with Readers

Because friendships on Facebook are built on personal connections with other people in the real world, journalists might not be as willing to devote their personal accounts to their jobs. In December 2012, Facebook adopted Twitter’s convention of giving users the option to let others “follow” them without sending a friend request, which keeps friends and readers on separate tracks.

Following reporters is a potential area of growth for Facebook as a news platform. In the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism’s State of the News Media 2012 report, 70 percent of respondents said they got their news links from family and friends on Facebook compared to the 13 percent that got referrals from news organizations and journalists on Facebook. That’s not to say that friend recommendations aren’t valuable. The same study revealed that digital news consumers are twice as likely to follow news recommendations from Facebook than from Twitter.

The Future of Facebook as a Storytelling Platform

With a longer character limit than Twitter (around 60,000 characters compared to Twitter’s 140), Facebook stories can unfold in real-time through text, images, and videos on the Page or serve as a preview for a longer article on a news website. Stories told on Facebook benefit also from community dialogue through comments, likes, and shares, Lavrusik said.

Facebook recently launched a media portal for journalists to aid in their storytelling, with reports on best practices for journalists and media companies, as well as a case study on how Slate magazine doubled its Facebook referrals between the second quarter of 2012 and the first quarter of 2013.

Lavrusik hopes that Facebook can help with ”the ultimate goal of journalism,” he said, which is “informing people.”

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The Benefits of YouTube Over Traditional Advertising

Lanz explains that, “Video has long been an essential part of brand building because it enables businesses to connect with consumers using the power of sight, sound, and motion.  These qualities help brands tell richer stories that can often be more dynamic than static text or images alone.”

Barrett tells me that this is one of the biggest benefits that Zoosk has seen in their use of YouTube for advertising–the opportunity to build “brand persona” in a way that just isn’t possible through text or banner ads.  The company launched their ‘Heart Friend’ campaign in December 2012 as an alternative to expensive television ads and she explains that, “with the video campaign, we wanted to portray the Zoosk grand persona.”

Video was a much better medium for for portraying the fun, personable nature of Zoosk than traditional ads.  Barret explained that “display is more about bringing people in after they’ve seen the video, while video is a much more successful platform for raising awareness and giving a brand persona.”  With video, brands can tell a story, show off their unique character, and provide a memorable experience that sticks with viewers. Zoosk found that by telling a story through their YouTube campaign, they saw a tremendous 318 percent rise in unaided awareness among those that had been exposed to the campaign.

Online video ads also have the benefit of being shareable, by nature.  Lanz explains, “With online video, you’re adding in a fourth component to video – the ability to share the experience with others.  This social aspect is hugely important. As we all know, people don’t just watch ads on YouTube, they also share them with friends, family, and others on the web.”  Zoosk sought to make the most of this by including hashtags in their Heart Friend video titles to propagate sharing and discussion on Twitter.

In addition, Lanz points out that when brands put out great video content, it results in customers actually seeking them out and engaging with them, as opposed to being forced to watch advertisements during commercial breaks or in online video pre-roll.  ”We see that the most successful ads on YouTube have a mix of paid and earned views. That is to say, not only are people watching ads because of proactive campaigns from brands – they are actively seeking them out and watching them too. These earned views are produced in a variety of ways: customers can subscribe to your channel, they can stay to watch another video after their initial view, they can like or favorite a video, and they can even upload a video response, and more.”

Getting Started

Lanz says, “If they haven’t already, brands should make sure they have a presence on YouTube by creating their own channel.  We recently redesigned channels on YouTube so it’s even easier to organize content and create a brand channel that’s viewable across all devices.

“Once they have created a brand channel, brands need to think carefully about how to drive viewers to engage with it.  Marketers use video ads across YouTube, Google search, and the Google Display Network to promote awareness for their videos.”

Need help?  Larger brand advertisers may have a Google sales representative that they can contact to help them get started, but you don’t need to actually speak to someone at Google or YouTube to advertise on the video site.  You can get started at youtube.com/yt/promoteyourself or youtube.com/yt/advertise.

Do you have any experience with advertising on YouTube? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

“Alright TV was born from my social media network, and the daily exchange of positive, inspiring and uplifting messages that I have through my social network,” she told Mediabistro in the latest installment of So What Do You Do?. “Viewers are hungry for faith-friendly and inspiration programming, and Alright TV has grown mostly through word of mouth, our online followers and within the faith community.”

Edmonds stressed that her team is always open to pitches for new programming. “We’re going for high entertainment value that has positive messaging. That’s the formula and the directive that we’re asking people to look for when they submit content to us,” she said.

Read the full interview, including contact info for who to send your content pitches to, in So What Do You Do, Tracey Edmonds, Award-Winning TV and Film Producer?

– Nicholas Braun

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Photo by John Barnett

John Barnett, co-creator of Bright Mango’s Wood Camera app, is a professional travel photographer and cinematographer and a contributor to Getty Images. While some photographers reject photo-sharing sites that are aimed at artsy amateurs, Barnett has embraced Instagram as an artistic and social medium. Since joining the network in 2010, he’s attracted more than 43,000 followers. Here are a few of his best tips.

1. “The biggest thing you can do is post good content.”

“All the principles that have applied to photography for the last one hundred years apply on Instagram,” said Barnett, but the application itself has two notable limitations:

First, because you’ll be using an iPhone or an Android rather than a DSLR camera to take the pictures, you’ll be working with a fixed lens.  Barnett advised moving in closer to an object to get a better shot.

Second, because you’re working within a small, square space, it’s hard to capture landscapes in a single shot. Focus on “details that people wouldn’t see in National Geographic,” Barnett said, or “try shooting a “series of images that will tell the story.”

2. Don’t limit yourself to Instagram’s filters.

Apps like Pro HDR “are great because they pull out the color and contrast that the eye doesn’t see,” said Barnett. Slow Shutter is good for capturing streaks of light, fast-moving traffic, or rippling water. “Anywhere there’s movement, you can capture something that the eye doesn’t see,” he said.

Barnett’s own app, Wood Camera, lets you control the sharpness, brightness, contrast, saturation, and hue of your photos. You can also customize your photo’s radius, position, and intensity with tilt-shift and vignette effects. In January, Wood Camera was the #1 paid app in the App Store.

3. “Don’t clutter people’s feeds with 40 images like people do on Facebook.”

When you post an entire album’s worth of photos at once, your followers may only “like” one or two pictures before moving on to something else. Barnett posts one image every few hours instead of several in a row to give each photo a chance to be seen. On days when he’s shooting an event, he’ll save the pictures on his phone and edit them before he puts them on Instagram.

4. “Use appropriate hashtags.”

“If hashtags aren’t applicable to your image, it’s a misuse of the system,” Barnett said. To start, use hashtags related to the location or event where your image was taken.

But hashtags can be fanciful as well. Barnett was taking pictures at a museum when he noticed that many of his photos showed people staring at paintings or sculptures. He started tagging his pictures with the hashtag, #LookingAtArt. Soon, hundreds of people saw the hashtag and used it to inspire their own pictures.

The Instagram team even featured the hashtag on the company blog.

5. Engage people with similar interests.

Many Instagram photographers use the network to share their passion for certain topics, like classic cars or their favorite cities. By following others with similar interests, liking their photos, and leaving positive comments, you can find a niche among people who are more likely to follow you back.

“Instagram is a community where everyone is upbeat,” Barnett said. “It’s a place where you can connect with people, see their world, and show them your world. One thing we all have in common is our love of photography and great images.”

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“It’s a terrible, terrible situation. Most of all, it’s an interesting issue regarding what social media can do right now,” said Swisher. “I’m not clear she should have published their pictures. I don’t know. It’s a great debate [around] what should have happened in that situation. When you’re irked by somebody in a car next to you, do you tweet a picture of them swerving into your lane?… But now you have these tools that amplify your voice. The question is how much amplification should you be doing?”

Read the full interview at So What Do You Do, Kara Swisher, Co-Executive Editor of AllThingsD.com?

– Nicholas Braun

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Set in St Louis, MO in a dystopian future, the TV show debuted in the U.S. on April 15 and aired next day in countries around the world. The game, set in San Francisco, launched simultaneously across PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 platforms on April 2. On the night of the U.S. premiere, “Defiance” ranked in the top 10 most-watched cable shows among adults ages 18-49, according to Nielsen’s TV ratings, and brought in 2.7 million viewers.

Dana Ortiz, VP of brand marketing for Syfy at NBCUniversal, explained how the team set “New Earthly Rules” for introducing sci-fi fans to a futuristic story by starting the conversation in the past.

The Concept

Despite the novelty of the transmedia experience, the team still had to distinguish this post-apocalyptic story from others that had come before it, Ortiz said.  Dubbed “New Earthly Rules,” the marketing campaign for the show posed the question, “Can aliens and humans coexist on a war-torn earth?” Said Ortiz, “It’s not unlike the Gold Rush era, when people really picked themselves up and started a new life.” In this case, the survivors would be sharing the planet with six other species that had come to Earth as a result of an alien invasion.

The Audience

Syfy divided the target audience into three segments: gamers, who were generally the most vocal group; television viewers, who generally wanted to follow an epic tale and who were looking to see what their friends were watching; and a more immersive group that fell somewhere in the “sweet spot between gamers and television enthusiasts.” These were the people, Ortiz said, “who wanted to dive down that rabbit hole” and find out more about the series.

The Execution

Syfy kicked off the campaign in July 2012 at Comic-Con in San Diego, where “gamers and entertainment could converge,” Ortiz said.

To keep the momentum going without blowing the budget, “Social ended up being a big part how we ended up getting the word out,” she explained. “We couldn’t sit and wait for the purse strings to open.”

The team set up a Facebook page and an official “Defiance” website, which Syfy shared with Trion, as well as a Twitter account. At the center of the campaign were a series of “making of” videos on YouTube that showed how the sets, makeup, costumes, characters, and storyline came together to form “Defiance.” (These were also posted on Facebook.) Said Ortiz, ”From the get-go we knew it was rich content that was really going to sustain us.”

Once they created the content, the team “strategically placed ‘Defiance’ into conversation about pop culture,” Ortiz said. Ads were timed alongside key episodes of shows like “The Walking Dead” and “American Horror Story,” film premieres like “The Hobbit,” and throughout the Hollywood awards season.

In December 2012, fictional and real worlds collided as the Mayan calendar came to end, which some people predicted would set off a cataclysmic event to end life on Earth. It didn’t matter that the apocalypse never happened. “Just the fact that people were talking about the Mayan Apocalypse was reason enough for us to insert ourselves into the conversation,” said Ortiz.

Even live events, which included Comic-Con and the February’s TED conferences, aimed to draw in remote fans. Perhaps the most hands-on experience was the “The Defiance Container Village” at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in March 2013.

Ortiz described the village as a high-end “shanty town” where three participants — “Defiance” cast member Jesse Rath, Forbes journalist Jeff Bercovici, and blogger Curt Johnson — could experience the festival with 24-hour concierge service, security 24/7, their own bathroom and shower facilities, and maid service twice a day. Johnson had earned his spot in the village after racking up 14,000 retweets in 3 days in a Klout competition to spread the word about “Defiance.”

Other attendees could mill around the village and post what they wanted (usually bacon) on the Need/Want Social Bar to share on an interactive wall and on Twitter to compete for food from a food truck and other prizes.

Rath was one of several cast members who posted to Twitter and other networks about the upcoming series.

Here’s a pic of me living in my shipping container at #DefianceSXSW @defianceworld twitter.com/jesserath/stat…

— Jesse Rath (@jesserath) March 15, 2013

Ortiz said that participation was voluntary, but the actors were given guidelines for how to post to social media and were kept in the loop when the marketing team had an event or a piece of content they’d like to promote.

The Results

Syfy’s digital team set high Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for measuring the success of the campaign. Throughout the process, they were able to work with the research team to measure viewers’ intent to watch, which is usually something they don’t start measuring until weeks (as opposed to months) before the show. According to Ortiz, the campaign met its benchmarks every month except December, but even that didn’t lower their expectations. January brought more content and by the date of the premiere, “Defiance” had 250,000 Facebook fans.

Statistics from social media research firm Fizziology confirm that viewers were using social channels to talk about the show. On the night of the premiere, “Defiance” received more than 10,500 mentions on social media sites between the start time at 9:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m. the next morning. In addition:

• Social conversation about the show was 95% positive
• 6% planned to play the game afterward
• 6% were relieved to see a good sci-fi series
• 4% can’t wait to see the next episode
• 2% used the word “Shtako,” which is one of the alien race’s word for poop in the show

“The great thing about having a long-lead campaign is that it gives you an opportunity for long-lead planning,” Ortiz concluded. “We were able to optimize and tweak every aspect of the campaign.”

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If the internet followed school schedules, these 119 memes would have been at the top of their class in 2012/2013: Dramatic Chipmunk, Courage Wolf, and Grape Lady are just a few of the characters who appear in CollegeHumor’s interactive meme poster, “Internet Class Photo.”

We asked the poster’s creators — CollegeHumor illustrator Caldwell Tanner and editor-in-chief Streeter Seidell — to sign our yearbook. They gave us something better: a full explanation of how and why they made the most labor-intensive meme round-up we have ever seen.

“The main inspiration for the poster is actually the Simpsons poster that features every character,” said Tanner. “We thought it’d be fun to do a poster in that style, but for Internet characters. Some of my favorites are LongCat, NyanCat / DoubleRainbow and Goatse – it’s hidden, see if you can find it!”

The CollegeHumor team spent more than a year compiling and illustrating this tribute to internet culture. “Streeter made a huge spreadsheet full of memes and Internet cultural references, and then I chose ones I thought would work visually, and the ones that were most visually interesting,” Tanner explained.

Seidell described the selection process this way: “The Internet churns out accidental celebrities every day so the challenge with this image wasn’t so much who to include, but who not to include,” he said. “We made sure to get most of the classics in there – Numa Numa, Star Wars Kid, Grape Lady, etc. – while still making room for more recent ones like Grumpy Cat and Overly Attached Girlfriend.”

The result is a chart with two layers: the first layer is a full-color illustration of all of the characters; the second layer is a black-and-white legend that assigns a number to every meme. Clicking on each of the memes reveals the source video or illustration for easy reference.

“What Bob Clarke did for Mad Magazine, Caldwell has done for CollegeHumor,” said Seidell. “He’s given our articles and comics a unique look and feel that really resonates with people all over the Internet. He’s also an accomplished comedy writer, constantly adding jokes to his illustrations and subtle references to other CollegeHumor series and personalities that fans pick up on. He’s really the full package and has a great work ethic, clearly on display with this massive, intricate image. Caldwell found additional places for jokes by placing certain memes next to each other or in front of each other. Or even in leaving some off, as he did with the Forever Alone rageface. If you look at the poster long enough a ton of subtle jokes will start to pop out that just reinforce his skill and care with every project, even one as silly as trying to put all the memes online into a single image.”

View the full illustration here.

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USA discovered Theatrics through its previous project, “Beckinfield,” an interactive sci-fi web series that launched in November 2010. At the time, said Evans, the network execs already had other plans for “Psych,” but the platform won them over with its potential to involve the viewers in the story.

Over the course of eight weeks, fans followed detectives Shawn and Gus (played by James Roday and Dulé Hill) as they solved the case of a reality series in which the contestants were turning up dead.

Using Theatrics’ collaborative video storytelling platform, viewers could play the role of Digital Assistants as they helped the show’s stars crack the case through a series of challenges, games, and real-time conversations on Twitter.

At the heart of the second screen experience was the “Theory Wall,” where viewers shared their observations about the show’s contestants with the team and the other community members.

For Evans and Theatrics co-founders Bob Gebert, Biff Van Cleve, and Steve Park, the challenge was in making the video platform simple enough for a broader audience. Viewers were given a choice of recording a video directly from their webcams or uploading one from their computers.

“It really struck us how comfortable audience members were in recording videos and speaking to the camera,” Evans said, “from grade schoolers to grandmas.”

The enthusiasm and personality of each Psych-O shone through as the Digital Assistants went over the show’s details with a fine-tooth comb. “Chess seems to play a big role in this case,” theorized one viewer, who posted the video under the handle jcardozo. “Tyler is clearly playing chess and Grey is reading a book on [Nikola] Tesla, who was an engineer and an avid chess player…Interesting.”

Now that the series has run its course, Theatrics has launched in Beta a creative platform where artists can develop characters and story concepts and invite other members to get involved.

“We cracked the code on making user-generated content fun and social,” Evans said. “The next step is to translate that to artists who want to create their own shows.”

Image via reddit.

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