Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Subway stations are great places for art, commissioned or otherwise. The anxieties of a bustling platform, the boredom of waiting for a delayed train, or even the drudgery of another day’s commute–all can be soothed, or at least temporarily smoothed over, by a well-placed placard with something nice to look at. Renowned artist Mark Wallinger recently finished a new collection of soon-to-be-subterranean pieces to celebrate the London Underground’s 150th anniversary, though their subject matter is somewhat at odds with the whole idea behind these modern marvels of efficiency in the first place. By the end of this summer, at every one of London’s 270 Tube stations, passengers will be able to take a few seconds to contemplate a tiny maze.

The project is part of the ongoing Art on the Underground program, and it’s the largest-ever commission of its kind. For the full set, Wallinger created 270 different labyrinths, one for every stop. The first 10 of the series are being installed this week; the rest will follow in coming months. Once they’re up, each two-foot-by-two-foot piece will be a permanent part of the station in which it’s posted.

“The journeys we take on the Underground are unique to each of us,” Wallinger said in a statement accompanying the project’s debut. “I hope Labyrinth can perhaps reflect that individual yet universal experience.” And in a sense, the maze is the perfect thing to capture that dynamic. Each will be instantly recognizable as such–like the ones you’ll find in any kids’ activity book, they’re nothing more than ordered clusters of black and white lines–though every passerby will have the opportunity to navigate the lines on their own, be it superficially, from a distance, or up-close, scrupulously following their path with a finger.

From the initial pieces, it seems like some will be easier to complete than others. The puzzle for Embankment station is a straightforward spiral to the center. The thin-lined Oxford Circus labyrinth offers a significantly greater challenge, with some potential wrong turns and dead ends thrown into the mix. But for all the pieces, the magic only exists so long as the works stay pristine. Hopefully, the city’s transportation officials have a plan for dealing with the inevitable product of the first drunken ass who happens to encounter one of these with a Sharpie.

For the founder of a company as hot as Pinterest, Ben Silbermann has been awfully quiet of late. After claiming the title of fastest-growing web site ever (according to Comscore, at least), wowing audiences at the South By Southwest Interactive conference, and bagging a cool $100 million in venture capital from the Japanese retail giant Rakuten, Silbermann went off the grid this summer to address what has been in the eyes of many a rare shortcoming: The lack of apps. Despite Pinterest’s exploding web traffic, the three-year-old company has not had a presence on either the iPad or Android platforms.

“Pinterest was made for tablets,” Silbermann confided to me last month. He agreed to temporarily lift Pinterest’s summer-long lockdown to give Fast Company an inside look at its development process. (It was the first time he’d spoken with a reporter at length; the results will be published next month in a cover story as part of October’s Design Issue.) During a visit to the company’s new headquarters, an expansive loft in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood, I sat in on a design critique for the new iPad app and got to play with an early version, which Silbermann unveiled at a launch party last night.

Sharp, on the left, and Silbermann Pinterest calls this their biggest launch since the grid design was unveiled, in 2009.

Reporters and some of Pinterest’s most active users were treated to a make-your-own terrarium station (terrariums being a popular Pinterest meme), as Silbermann showed off the new iPad app as well as a new app for Android devices and an updated version of the Pinterest’s iPhone app. It was the biggest, Silbermann told me, the most important launch since he and co-founder Evan Sharp created the original Pinterest grid at the end of 2009. “In perfect world we would have had this a year ago,” says Sharp.

Though the update to the iPhone app and the new Android offering give Pinterest an improved presences on mobile phones, the big news is the iPad app. Even before last night’s launch, iPad use accounted for more than 50 percent of Pinterest’s mobile traffic—despite the fact that the company had no app—according to data from AddThis. More than that, iPads, which tend to be used in more relaxed settings, seem perfectly attuned to the laid-back user experience Silbermann and Sharp are trying to cultivate. “You want to be comfortable and just let yourself really explore things,” says Silbermann. “Pinterest is a discovery experience.”

The iPad app largely mimics the look and feel of Silbermann and Sharp’s popular website. Users can share, or “pin,” images and can explore the pin boards of users they follow. But crucially, the new app uses a feature called “sheets” designed to make it easier to skip between pin boards in a manner similar to tabs on a web browser. Another nifty tweak: A button that allows users to see all the pins from a given web site. The idea behind both features is to subtly encourage users to find new people to follow, and ultimately, to create a way for users to easily discover new stuff without going to a Google search box, the Amazon.com homepage, or anywhere else.

That’s important to Pinterest as a business. As Silbermann told me repeatedly—and as the forthcoming Fast Company feature will explore in depth—Pinterest isn’t trying to be just another social network. Silbermann and Sharpe are trying to solve the problem of discovery, helping their millions of users find (and eventually buy) new things. “We want to build a service that helps you discover things you didn’t know you wanted,” Silbermann says. “There’s a ton of opportunity in that core behavior.”

Top image: Africa Studio/Shutterstock

illustration by matt dartford

For decades, Steve Jobs extolled the virtues of “building the whole widget”–in other words, designing and manufacturing a computer or a digital media player or smartphone as an organic whole, from the molecular materials of the hardware to the abstract bits and bytes of the software. The resulting products may not always have been as inexpensive or utilitarian as the standardized machines that ruled the PC marketplace, but they did always possess the svelte and winsome quality that Apple’s loyal customers love with a passion.

Earlier this summer, Microsoft tried to make like Apple. The company had never itself built computers, out of deference to its many hardware partners, but on June 18, it revealed the results of a three-year secret project: a sleek and distinctive Windows tablet PC called the Surface. No mere iPad knockoff, the Surface is Microsoft’s effort to build a “whole widget” of its own. It could well be the most beautiful and best engineered Windows device ever made. And it has bells and whistles that won’t be easy for Apple to quickly mimic.

Google too has concluded that it can’t really compete against the iPhone long term without its own end-to-end laptops, handsets, and tablets–hence its $13 billion acquisition of Motorola’s cell-phone design and manufacturing business. The Motorola patent portfolio is valuable, to be sure, but Google wants to find a remedy to the fragmented world its Android architecture has fostered. The immense diversity of Android devices and generations of not-quite-compatible operating systems are beginning to look like liabilities, especially to app developers who don’t want to have to support multiple versions of their own products.

So with Google and Microsoft as emerging widgeteers, might Apple finally be losing one of its historic advantages? Hardly.

At the annual World Wide Developers Conference held June 11 in San Francisco–the first big event since the death of Jobs–Apple demonstrated how its software prowess and skill at building interlocking digital platforms is the real game changer. How? By enlarging the definition of the whole widget. Increasingly, the Mac, iPhone, and iPad do not exist alone. Instead, Apple now offers a multidimensional, integrated ecosystem of devices held together by the centripetal force of iCloud. Apple’s ideal customer, who likely owns at least one of each kind of product, can now share a single user identity, and core personal content and data can be viewed, consumed, used, or manipulated in familiar ways regardless of platform, with any changes or additions from one gadget instantly available on any of his other Apple gear.

In other words, Apple can now boast of providing a complete, coherent, and consistent digital experience at home, at work, in your car, and on the go–without any conscious effort on the part of the user. It’s as if just at the moment when the visiting team finally steps up to the plate, they discover that the home team has moved the fences out, raised the pitcher’s mound, and increased the distance between the bases. This is a different ball game.

Apple didn’t announce some silver-bullet innovation at the WWDC to make all this possible, but instead described literally hundreds of new features and data services borne of software, many of which integrate how all its hardware products create, display, and share digital information. New versions of its Mac OS X and iOS for portable devices, along with much-improved data storage and remote processing services accessible via iCloud, will all come together in the next few months to markedly improve the quality of the entire Apple digital experience. Indeed, in many ways, improvements for the Mac will result in new capabilities for customers’ existing iPhones and iPads with no new hardware required.

That is what you get when you enlarge the widget, and it doesn’t even reflect the inevitable hardware improvements Apple is so famous for delivering like clockwork.

Microsoft and Google clearly understand this strategy. But Apple’s ecosystem is the product of carefully nurturing smaller whole-widget ecosystems in such a way that they could be stitched together. Until recently, Microsoft has always tried to contort Windows to fit just about any class of hardware–using a one-size-fits-all strategy that has never played out well in non-PC devices. Google has tried to turn its browser software into a modest computer operating system, even as it took a completely different approach to Android smartphone software, and now is trying to make coherent architectures that are intrinsically different. Software can paper over just about any incompatibility, but a patchwork is not an ecosystem.

Apple’s Tim Cook knows he has to be very careful not to over-standardize these individually dazzling devices. That’s why it is unlikely that Mac OS X and iOS will ever subsume each other. The masterstroke is in using iCloud to knit them together, which hides the complexity of managing and not duplicating all those trillions of bits that each of us consume or manipulate every day. For today’s digital consumer, syncing data, managing your access to it, and keeping it all straight and secure is the key to a powerful digital experience that we are only now beginning to grasp. Cook, an operations wonk who is a master of taming complexity, might even be better at figuring this out than Jobs was. And since Apple usually improves any screen it focuses on, a new and improved AppleTV platform could become an intriguing fourth species in the ecosystem.

So while it’s certainly a bonus for consumers that Microsoft and Google have joined the game, Apple’s lead could conceivably widen before they can even begin to play. There will be glitches as Apple moves into its post-Jobs era, but Microsoft and Google have so much to learn that the company has plenty of time to figure out how to live without Steve.

Forget London. Much of the 2012 Summer Olympics action is happening on Twitter. Athletes have used the social network to share photos and status updates that take their followers inside the Games. Fans have used it to revel in Olympic drama and — in the U.S. — tweet result spoilers for viewers stuck waiting for NBC’s tape-delayed primetime coverage.

How did all the Twitter chatter stack up over the event’s first 10 days? Mass Relevance, Twitter’s official social curation and integration partner, tracked the tweets to produce the infographic below, which shows just that.

Through 10 days, there were more than 28.4 million Olympic-themed tweets, according to Mass Relevance, and users worldwide sent an average of 2,000 tweets per minute. Swimming led the charge as the most talked-about sport, followed by gymnastics, basketball, soccer and volleyball.

American swimmer Michael Phelps was the most-discussed athlete, with 574,000 mentions. He was followed by American basketball star LeBron James, British diver Tom Daley, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt and American hooper Kevin Durant. But look for Bolt and other runners to surge up the rankings over the second half of the Games, when much of the Olympic attention turns from swimming and gymnastics to track and field.

Interesting to note is that Daley was at the center of one of the Olympics’ biggest Twitter-centered stories so far. After a disappointing medal-less performance in the men’s synchronized diving championships, he used Twitter to out a troll who sent a hateful message referencing his late father. The interaction gained widespread attention and the troll was later arrested on suspicion of malicious communications.

Check out the following infographic for the full picture of how tweeters followed the Olympics’s first 10 days, then let us know in the comments — who do you think will dominate the social buzz for the remainder of the Games?

Facebook has a mobile problem. Many of its users transitioned from logging in through their browsers to logging in on phones and tablets, but advertising revenue has not followed at the same pace.

The company’s first mobile-only ad product, sponsored stories, launched just earlier this summer. Today, it announced its second: mobile ads for apps.

Facebook users who click these new ads will be taken to the Google Play or the App Store to buy the apps they advertise. Developers can purchase them using a simple dashboard that asks for little more than audience and budget, similar to the interface used for advertising on the web platform.

The holy grail of app-store marketing is being featured in an app store. But if an app store won’t have you, buying a presence on Facebook’s app makes a pretty logical second choice. The platform has 543 million mobile users as of June. And according to Facebook developer Vijaye Raji–who announced the new ads on the Facebook Developer Blog–links on Facebook have sent users to Google Play and the Apple App Store 146 million times in the last 30 days alone.

Not too long ago I decided to take the plunge and get a puppy. Boy was it the right decision she is cutest most well behaved puppy although as she gets older and gains a little more free thought she’s also gained quite the attitude. Realizing she doesn’t have to listen to me and just staring at me blankly whenever I give her a command. Anyway I bring this up because today’s infogaphic is how to care for your pet in hot weather. Now if your Summer has been anything like the one here in Austin, TX then it has been a hot one. It takes more than a couple of hands to count the number of days the temperature has gotten over 100 degrees.

Needless to say it is hot out there for a pet. So what can you do to ensure your pets safety during this blistering hot Summer? For one if your pet has long hair do them a favor and cut it short if you were covered in fur you would get hot too. If you decide to go out on a run in the middle of the day don’t take your pet with you, remember it is twice as hot for them as it is for you. Wait until it’s past six or take them out early in the morning when it is still cool. Today’s infographic also includes some helpful tips if your pet suffers a heat stroke. The best thing you could do for dog in this situation is just dunk them in some nice cool water to get their body temperature down.

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Food is a key factor in our heath, wellness and weight. Replacing processed, canned and frozen foods with fresh foods has a solid impact on your health. I have a constant problem with keeping my produce fresh long enough to eat it and choosing high quality produce. Most of this can be fixed by simply checking which fruits and vegetables are in season before heading out to the grocery store.

Today’s infographic is a handy little chart that informs you of what produce is in season. The chart is very well designed, it is perfect to print out to hang in your kitchen, or to bring along to the store. This summer, be on the look out for some fresh raspberries, strawberries, pomagranates, peaches, cucumbers, basil, lemons, grapes and figs, just to name a few.

Eat fresh, stay fresh and maintain a healthy lifestyle! Do any of you infographers try to maintain a diet of fresh foods? And we would love to know, what are your favorite fruits and vegetables?

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WHY YOU SHOULD START A COMPANY IN…

New Ideas, New Markets, New Insights

It used to be, if you were serious about starting a tech company, you went to Silicon Valley. But emerging entrepreneurial hubs around the country are giving startups new options. In this series, we talk to leading figures in those communities about what makes them tick.

CLICK HERE for hotbeds of innovation in other U.S. cities.

To most people, Nashville is a one-note town: Music City, home of the American country scene. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, says Liza Massey, president and CEO of the Nashville Technology Council. “It’s great because it shows we have a creative, vibrant community.” But now another type of creative professional is stepping into the spotlight: the tech entrepreneur. Not only have the big technology leaders like Microsoft, Dell, and HP come to town, but frisky social media startups such as Emma, Moontoast, and Populr, are sprouting up here, too. Plus, there’s a burgeoning healthcare industry with high-tech needs. Which poses one of the best problems a city can have: Nashville now has 1,200 vacant tech jobs and not enough qualified workers to fill them.

So the city’s Technology Council has launched Nashville Is Hiring, a massive recruiting campaign that uses strategies both conventional (partnering with community colleges) and decidedly unconventional (going after middle school kids) in hopes of filling those jobs and starting a larger conversation around how to make Nashville a great place for tech workers. It is one of the Council’s several initiatives, which move beyond the “great quality of life” pitch and work toward making real grass-roots change with job candidates, educational institutions, and employers.

You might be wondering: Why so many jobs to fill? Well, for one, business is good. “The city has become so good at attracting and starting businesses that we’ve actually weathered the recession quite well,” Massey says. “I get pulled into meetings all the time with companies who are looking to expand and all they want to work on is tech workforce.”

The real problem is that while it’s easy to sell families on Nashville–the city has great schools, affordable housing, and no state income tax–it’s a lot harder to lure recent graduates. Employers aren’t always offering the hip, culture-driven workplace that young creatives seek.

The Technology Council wants to help employers understand that the young, recently graduated tech workforce is looking for a very different kind of work environment. “We have to tell students that you’re not going to be Dilbert in a cubicle, you’ll have flexible hours, and you’ll be able to work from home,” Massey says. Massey and her team encourage that structure by pointing companies to the postive aspects of ROWE, or results-only working environment, the kind of ethos pioneered by companies like Best Buy and Zappos, where employers focus less on face time, and more on work achieved.

Nicholas Holland, an entrepreneur and founder of Populr, a publishing platform that allows users to make good-looking single-page websites, and the digital agency Centresource, serves as a local expert on ROWE, advising companies large and small on its benefits. Holland challenges Nashville executives to think differently when it comes to structuring their office life, from initiating flexible hours to placing a focus on corporate culture. His argument is that companies can use ROWE to add a lot of value for potential employees without spending more on recruiting or facilities. “Right now, there’s a lack of resources so everyone is trying to entice and incentivize the same tech pool,” he says. “Larger firms, especially in Nashville, like healthcare firms have the ability to throw a lot of money at the problem, but many workers are looking for other things like a fuller career path, or an ecosystem that supports their personal lives.” (Holland sent me his answers using his company’s product, which includes many more ROWE resources.)

The Nashville Technology Council also works closely with local government leaders, many of whom are on a coordinating committee that meets once a month. One of those members is Matt Largen, director of the office of economic development in Williamson County, south of Nashville. He’s partnering with local community colleges to find funding sources for specific IT certification programs that meet the immediate needs of companies in the area. Across the region, says Massey, the Council works with the 14 universities, as well as community colleges, to tailor programs to employers’ needs, namely in healthcare, where technology changes rapidly.

But Nashville isn’t just focused on college outreach, they’re also targeting junior high school students. Largen says his team is laser-focused on increasing the number of eighth graders who enroll in a track they call Foundations of Information Technology. “We know there is a high retention rate of students who start in the foundation class and continue throughout the IT track so we decided to focus our energy and resources there,” he says. This includes sending a letter from the Nashville Technology Council to every eighth-grade parent and bringing in volunteers to answer questions about IT careers. “The bottom line is that we have to reach out to kids who show an interest and aptitude in technology and make them aware of the wide variety of career options.”

It seems like it might not be the best investment of energy–there’s no guarantee that those students will stay in Nashville when they enter the workforce–plus, could so much emphasis on tech that early be pushing kids away from other potential careers? Largen says that since technology is so pervasive in all jobs, a focus on IT in schools means building a stronger regional economy, period. “In today’s economy, talent drives economic development,” he says. “Plus, growing our own sector is going to be the direct result of efforts to push IT into early grades.”

Katherine McElroy, a partner at C3 Consulting, also works closely with Nashville’s public schools, where she says teachers, too, need to be aware of the widening tech field. She encourages local tech companies to host three-day “externships” during the summer for teachers. “It really helps for teachers to see how technology is used throughout companies in all types of industries,” she says. She also points to local efforts to engage young women, like an Art2Stem camp for girls in the summer, and the local Women in Technology-Tennessee chapter, that sponsors mentorships and scholarships for girls.

Although the Nashville Is Hiring campaign has only been recently announced, Massey says the effort will include an ad campaign as well as visits to tech conferences like SXSW. Earlier this year, the Technology Council sent a street team of young Nashville residents to the Tennessee music festivals CMA MusicFest and Bonaroo wearing bright yellow shirts that exclaimed “I’m a hotspot!” with QR codes that could be scanned for more information about the tech jobs available.

Massey hopes that the campaign will allow them to entice workers from nearby Atlanta, Indianapolis, and Raleigh, but their bigger range of initiatives will also allow them to lure tech workers away from larger cities like L.A., New York, and Chicago. She thinks their efforts show candidates that Nashville is dedicated to creating the best tech working environment in the country. “I challenge them to find another city on their short list that has such a coordinated effort and is taking such a holistic approach.”

Follow the conversation on Twitter using the tag #WhyHere.

Image: Cheryl Casey via Shutterstock

The 2012 Olympics in London are being touted by some as the world’s “first social Games.” While some question just how social they’ll actually be, there’s no doubt that networks such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube will play an unprecedented role in how information is disseminated from London, and how the global sports conversation is driven during July and August.

Why the big shift? It’s simple: Four years is an eternity in Internet time and since the last Summer Olympics in 2008, social media has exploded.

Web use in general has grown rapidly, too. In 2008, there were about 1.5 billion Internet users globally, according to the International Telecommunications Union, making up about 23% of the world’s total population. By this summer’s games, that number will have swelled to about 2.3 billion users making up about a third of the world’s total population.

Summer Olympics feature some of the most popular international sports — including soccer, basketball, swimming, and track and field — so that’s sure to fuel the global buzz as well. For more context on just how and why social media will reshape this year’s Olympics in relation to 2008, we thought it’d be interesting to take a quick look at a few of the world’s most popular networks and how they compare then and now.

Facebook

2008: A tweet in August of 2008 from then-Facebook executive and eventual Path co-founder Dave Morin gleefully celebrated Facebook breaking the 100 million-user threshold. 2008 was also marked by reports around the web of Facebook — gasp! — passing MySpace in popularity. The social network debuted its now omnipresent chat feature that year as well.

Today: Facebook claims more than 900 million users, is fast becoming a portal to the web at large for many and is a publicly traded company. Its founder Mark Zuckerberg is a global celebrity.

Twitter

2008: 2008 saw explosive growth for Twitter, and it still finished the year with about 6 million registered users who sent about 300,000 tweets per day. The social network and its users were still very much finding their way, as evidenced by this official blog post explaining @replies. In 2009, Minnesota Timberwolves forward Kevin Love would tweet that the team’s coach had been let go, breaking the story and causing some in the sports world to speculate that maybe, just maybe, the service could change how news was delivered and consumed.

Today: Twitter currently claims more than 500 million users who collectively send some 400 million tweets each and every day. Sports news regularly breaks on the network, it’s become a prime marketing channel for athletes and much of the London 2012 conversation among media and fans is sure to take place there.

YouTube

2008: By fall of 2008, YouTube users were uploading 10 hours of video to the site per minute. The site had emerged as the go-to destination for web video and had been acquired by Google two years prior. It also launched its mobile site, pre-roll ads and 720p HD option in 2008. But that success was nothing compared to what the site would look like four years later.

Today: Iconic Olympic moments are sure to go viral and become immortalized on YouTube seemingly as they happen this summer, and it’s easy to see why. The company says it receives over 800 million unique visits per month. Those visitors watch more than 3 billion hours of video per month and upload 72 hours of new video content per minute. Five hundred years’ worth of YouTube video are watched on Facebook every day and more than 700 YouTube videos get shared on Twitter each minute.

What It All Means

Just looking at the the three most ubiquitous social networks reveals a sporting scene and world at large that have been transformed by social media since the last Summer Olympics. And that doesn’t take into account services like Pinterest, Foursquare and Google+ — none of which even existed in 2008. This summer, expect news to break, social sharing records to fall and moments to live on as never possible before thanks to social media. And to think — this will all pale in comparison to what 2016 has in store.

How will you use social media during the 2012 Olympics? Share with us in the comments.

Thumbnail image via iStockphoto, cmannphoto

The Boston Celtics know how to win. And while the team is now preparing for the next NBA season, Peter Stringer, Senior Director of Interactive Media is on the court every day. With 6.5 million fans on Facebook and 600k followers on Twitter, Peter’s work is just getting started. Serving customers in today’s hottest networks is one thing. Catering to a worldwide community of rabid sports fans requires in a series always-on digital arenas takes a different level of engagement altogether.

As part of an ongoing series that celebrates the experiences, vision, and strategy of those leading transformation, Peter shares with us how the Celtics approach social and digital strategies to compete for attention and affinity before, during and after each season.

What is the prevailing mission and purpose for the Boston Celtic’s social media strategy?

Fans have an insatiable appetite for news, information and inside access to the team, and we try to provide that across as many platforms as possible where we’ve established an audience. For the Boston Celtics, that currently means Celtics.com, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest. If our fans are congregating on these platforms and discussing our team, we want to be the dominant voice in that conversation.

From a business standpoint, we want to learn as much about our fan base as possible, and turn those passionate fans into customers. To achieve that, we are actively collecting data from them in exchange for opportunities to win tickets, merchandise and unique Celtics experiences. We want to know where they live, what other brands they like, if they already buy tickets, etc. We have a product that our fans are incredibly passionate about, and therefore, they’re willing to make that value exchange.

What are some of the unique challenges you face as a sports franchise?

Social media and sports dovetail very nicely, so in some ways my job is actually easy. But the challenges I face are much more practical in nature. For instance, when you’ve got a massive audience like we do, you can’t afford to make a mistake. That toothpaste isn’t going back in the tube. You want to be sure that the message you send out is on brand, not only from a marketing perspective, but also from a basketball operations perspective.

I take great care in managing our social media properties to be sure that they reflect our team and brand in the right way. The Boston Celtics have a reputation built on 17 championships and 60 years of history. I don’t want to tarnish that with one poor tweet that doesn’t hit the mark or sends the wrong message. It can be tempting to try to be funny, sarcastic, or irreverent, but risk usually far outweighs the reward.

Maybe that’s a bit dramatic, but that’s the lens through which I see our social channels. I look at every tweet, Facebook post and Instagram photo as an official statement from the Boston Celtics. And at the end of the day, the social media channels should reflect the team’s brand as a whole, and not attempt to create it’s own identity. After all, our product is our players, head coach, and the team’s incredible legacy. So I try to channel their voices, their thoughts and their moods and deliver them to our fans.

What is the current size of the communities you manage and what has overall growth and size of your social media footprint evolved?

Facebook is obviously our biggest channel, with over 6.5 million followers. That makes us the second biggest Facebook fan page in North American team sports. We were growing by about 15-20,000 fans a day until last year’s F8, when changes to the News Feed throttled our growth dramatically. That seems to be true for most teams and brands, and our reach rate per post has been decimated by the Edge Rank revisions. Given how frequently Facebook tweaks their platform, it was bound to happen, but I think Facebook has really hurt brands in this regard. These days, only photo galleries really seem to get any penetration into News Feeds thanks to heavy sharing by fans.

We’re at about 580,000 on Twitter, and that number continues to grow. During the postseason it’s been escalating at much faster rate than normal, which is to be expected. The quotes, pictures and notes we’re tweeting are getting a lot more attention the further we progress in the NBA Playoffs.

As for Instagram, we just passed 200,000 followers today, and that growth has been driven by taking a unique, more artistic look at the team. The credit for that goes largely to our team’s creative director, Keith Sliney (@pantone356). I snap a few photos here and there from the road, or if I see something at practice that warrants sharing, but by and large, he’s the driving force behind that platform and I believe we’re the #1 or #2 sports property on the service, and among the biggest brands globally as well.

We’ve been dabbling in Pinterest this season with merchandise and photos from our Instagram feed, and that’s picked up some steam. We were also the first team to my knowledge to try running a “Pin It To Win It” contest based on Pinterest to promote our Celtics web store.

What are the expectations of fans and how are they engaged as customers and as stakeholders?

Sports fans expect scores, news and information instantaneously on their phone during every waking hour. They no longer want to surf to ESPN.com, Celtics.com or anywhere else. They just expect it to show up in their Twitter feed. And so for us, that means tweeting our news as soon as we can effectively (or realistically) break it. Running social media for a sports team is an around the clock job, because this type of news can break at any time.

The challenge here is that some of the news fans really want will never be able to come directly from the teams or leagues first. When it comes to trades, for instance, that news never breaks on a team’s official feed first, because we’re not allowed to announce anything until it’s actually official and approved by the NBA league office. By that time, players’ agents, league employees or even team executives have already leaked the story to reporters. So connected journalists have a huge edge in that regard, when it comes to breaking news first. However, we still have a massive advantage in audience size. A beat writer who covers us probably only has 10-20,000 followers, so it may take them time to get their tweet circulated. Our tweets, on the other hand, get a lot more amplification and tend to circulate quicker, especially when we have big news.

That said, we do spend a lot of time mobilizing and orchestrating our fan base. We were the first NBA team (and to my knowledge, pro sports team) to put our @Celtics twitter handle on our court, and we’ve been promoting #CelticsChat throughout our local TV broadcasts throughout the season. We curate the conversation from #CelticsChat into GameTime Live, our live stats and game-blogging application on Celtics.com that allows fans from all over the globe to follow the action and join in a conversation around the game.

But I think the biggest thing we can provide through our social channels is an inside look at the organization. For instance, last night’s Eastern Conference Finals Game 6 vs. Miami is a perfect example. I snapped a photo of a simple message on the dry erase board in our locker room that was authentic and symbolic. It said, “12:30 Flight – Pack for a Week.” The implication was simple for fans in the know; it was a message to our players that after we win Game 7 vs. Miami, we’re flying directly to Oklahoma City for the NBA Finals. It was a motivational message from the coaching staff to our players, and by sharing that picture with 200,000 fans on Instagram, and 500,000 on Twitter, we sent a message of hope to a fan base still reeling from a disappointing loss. It helped turn the page from the past to the future. It was simple, raw and powerful; the perfect combination of insider access and emotional marketing. We just shared our coaches’ marketing to our players with our fan base. It was one of my favorite things I’ve ever shared with our fan base, and I really think it struck a chord with them.

What were some of the challenges you faced to get here? What challenges do you still face?

Staffing and bandwidth remain a challenge for us. When I started with the Celtics in 2005, I was a one-man show and my job was simply managing Celtics.com, a site that had little-to-no basketball content and was simply a ticket sales driven property. Given my journalism background and existing passion for the team since childhood, once I got my feet wet, I started overhauling the site, revamping the design and emphasis into a content driven site. Then we started dabbling in video and production in the 2008 season when we won our 17th NBA championship.

In the following seasons as Twitter and Facebook emerged, to me they were obvious extrapolations of what I was already doing with Celtics.com. But every time you add a platform or distribution channel, you add additional work. We’ve yet to launch a mobile app, and part of the challenge is simply a resource issue. Professional sports teams spend millions of dollars on world class athletes, but our technology and staffing budgets aren’t anywhere near what outsiders would imagine.

How did you get buy in?

Buy-in on social wasn’t really an issue here at the Celtics; I’ve been given a lot of freedom to drive the direction of our digital and social media platforms by our CMO and Team President and they’re very much sold on the importance of social media. As our Facebook and Twitter grew to become some of the biggest of the biggest in pro sports, and the audiences wildly outgrew our email database, it became clear that these channels would evolve into a large marketing channel and that’s exactly what’s happened. I’ve certainly done some evangelism internally, and I’ve done quite a bit of speaking around the country talking about what we do as a brand in the social space, so that helps as well.

What are some of the prime metrics that you use to define success?

From a success standpoint, I keep my eyes on how many tickets we’re selling via our social channels, and database growth. I look at the number of names we acquire for our database from each promotion we run, the best of example of which would be Celtics 3-Point Play, our first-of-its-kind Facebook application. On a more granular level, I look a News Feed reach and post sharing; ‘Likes’ and comments on posts are far less important in my view. Most comments are garbage anyway, and a ‘Like’ is almost meaningless unless the numbers are well above or below the norm. Sharing is far more relevant – if someone is willing to share your content with their friends, that’s a far better indication that you’re hitting the mark.

How does strategy materialize in the organization?

We revisit strategy mostly during the offseason, because during the season, there’s not much time to be plotting this stuff out. There’s always another game or practice to cover, corporate partner to satisfy or internal fire to extinguish. But on the whole, our strategy is simple: Our fan database is at the center of everything we do, and all of our digital platforms should be geared at building our database, which in turn gets us in front of more potential customers. “Engagement” is a great buzzword for social media, and it has its place, but monetization is the leader in the clubhouse for me.

How have you organized around social media to manage an extensive and engaged network? What does the social media organization look like?

I oversee our digital marketing and social media, and have a full-time direct report who generates a most of the written content we distribute. We also have a part time video producer, a full-time video host, and another part-timer who helps out on our game nights. We’re looking to add a technical developer this summer, and may potentially add additional staff as we continue to bite off more initiatives and create more content in the digital space.

Any special practices for internal coordination?

– Social CMS?

– Style Guide?

– Best practices?

– Training?

Given how small our organization is, a lot of this stuff isn’t formalized. As we grow, we’ll need to put more processes in place. For now we’re small and agile, but we certainly aim for consistency in our approach in terms of how we deliver against our digital and social media platforms.

Any final advice, tips, or cautionary tales to leave us with as we put your experiences into action?

I think to do social media right, you have to appeal to your fans’ passion points, even if your brand isn’t something they’re are organically passionate about. The only way to do that is to understand your audience and your customers. That’s easy for the Boston Celtics to sense, but probably a lot harder for consumer brands to decipher. I would advise figuring out who they are and what they want before you formulate your strategy. That means collecting data, surveying fans, keeping up with your competitors and studying leaders in the social media space.