TUMBLR IS THE LOVE CHILD OF PUBLIC ACCESS, MTV AND AL GORE.
 

ANYONE CAN GET A SHOW NOW.
 

AND IT’S CREATING ALTERNATIVE CULTURE FASTER THAN THE INTERNET CAN KEEP UP WITH.
 

FACEBOOK AND GOOGLE HAVE TRIED TO DRAW NEAT CIRCLES AROUND THE WEB.
 

BUT TUMBLR IS OFF SCRIBBLING IN THE CORNER WITH CRAYONS AND SNIFFING GLUE.
 

TUMBLR IS WHERE TODAY’S POP ARTISTS HANG OUT.
 

NO ONE UNDERSTANDS THEM YET, BUT THEY ARE BREEDING AND GROWING IN NUMBERS.
 

THEY ARE CREATING INCESTUAL SPAWNS OF EACH OTHER.
 

THEY ARE PHOTOCOPYING THEIR BACKSIDES.
 

AND THEY DON’T GIVE A DAMN WHAT YOU THINK.
 

THEY ARE INVENTING CULTURE AND CHANGING THE WORLD
 

BUT THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT THAT.
 

YOU CANNOT DRAW AN ORDERLY CIRCLE AROUND THEM.
 

MARKETERS CANNOT EVEN DIP THEIR TOES INTO THESE WATERS.
 

TUMBLR’S GUARDIAN PIRANAS WILL CHEW YOUR MEDDLING ADVERTISING HANDS DOWN TO THE BONE.
 

RESPECT THEM. GIVE THEM SPACE. AND JUST ENJOY WHAT THEY SPAWN.

In 2012, I had a pretty good year in social media. 

2) Andrew “Oyl” Miller Viral Strategist

If you think you need to be an early adopter to be one of the world’s most popular pinners, guess again. Dissatisfied with his meager 250 followers, Miller, a Tokyo-based copyeditor, cracked the code to gain 25,000 fans—in just three days.

Miller didn’t stop there. Just a few months later, he’s sitting on 1,000,000 followers and counting, making him one of the 50 most-followed people in the world. The best part? Miller says anyone can do what he did.

“I think you have to be willing to be obsessed and really dive into some kind of niche,” Miller told us in August. “And I’m sure at this point, there are some huge opportunities to own some untapped subject matter, like I did with sports. But I think if you approach any subject with a degree of artistry, looking for the unusual point of view, and keeping your pin choices surprising, that you will also be able to find success.”

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE.

August was by far the most successful social media month I have ever experienced. In less than one month’s time, I went from having 150 followers on Pinterest to over 400,000. There is no single trick or secret I can offer to repeat my journey, but there are several key things that I was mindful of before and during my rapid follower ascension.
 

START PINNING
It sounds simple, but I know a lot of people who are on Pinterest but who don’t participate. The first step to creating a reputation on Pinterest is to find a way to get involved that makes sense for you. Love dogs? Create a board dedicated to canine images you find online. Love funky old houses? Start a board. Just do it. Now.
 

If you are a sports fan, be sure to check out my Sports board. It is currently growing at a rate of 20,000 followers a day and has accumulated over 400,000 followers, making it the current most popularly followed sports board on Pinterest.

Welcome to the gold rush.

One week ago, my Pinterest account was sitting at around 150 followers. Not too bad, but as with every social media platform, I have ambition. I knew Pinterest had the potential to make content go crazy viral, and I wanted to find a way into the action.

I signed up for Pinterest over a year ago, and pretty much just had an account, but forgot about it. Then I started reading all this hype on Mashable and Fast Company about how Pinterest was going to be the next big platform. So I wanted to up my game before the big brands ‘figured it out,’ the way they have figured out Facebook and Twitter.

Pinterest is the social media wild west. There are no reliable theories about how to do it. It is still a wide open range of possibility and experimental usage. The only thing that has guided me was a commitment to being authentic with how I chose the images I would pin. My Pinterest account has to be a pure reputation of my visual point of view. I will not repin anything that does not inspire me in some way.

Pinterest is not to be used as a platform to SPAM. If you do, as some brands are guilty of doing, you will fail. Your follower count will wither and die.

Aside from my commitment to authenticity, I also committed to a simple schedule. I committed to pinning for 15 minutes every morning when I came into the office. I would browse the internet specifically to find inspiring images to pin. The combination of this authenticity and discipline created a depth of quality and inspired images. I knew that each time I added even a single photo, that one day, when someone discovered it, it could be the one image they had been looking for.

With every single photo carefully considered and hand pinned, I can guarantee there is a quality to go along with the quantity of my boards. There are no throw away images, and the Internet is responding to my care and attention as I am now closing in on 50,000 followers in about one week’s time.

Pinterest is still the wild west. There are a lot of social media cowboys out there looking to get rich quick. But if the results and payoffs are your motivation, you will have clouded judgement when it comes to how you pick your images. If your point of view is not the lens through which you browse for images, viewers will sense the scattered, random nature of your board. If you pin simply to go viral, you are missing the entire point of Pinterest.

Pinterest is curated passion. Passion cannot be faked. It cannot be subjected to focus groups and marketing strategy. Passion comes from individuals with strong points of view. And that passion, is what makes people react like wild fire. That authentic passion is the reason I am the 226th most followed person or brand on Pinterest and rising.

Welcome to the gold rush. See you out on the range.

Follow me on Pinterest by clicking here.

The last few days have been an absolute whirlwind surrounding my Pinterest account.

Four days ago, I was a standard Pinterest user, with a meager 250 followers. Then, I was discovered, and the follower notifications flooded my inbox. Currently I have 26,718 followers, which makes me the 267th most followed person or brand on Pinterest in the world. I now have more followers than Oprah, Martha Stewart or Etsy. Those are three entities that have supposedly mastered Pinterest.

In the past three days I have been contacted by global marketing directors, a chief innovation officer and dozens of interested digitally savvy folks. They all ask the same basic question: How did I do it?

While I don’t believe a perfect blueprint for overnight viral success can be mapped out, this has been a targeted goal of mine for the past three months. In that time, I have slowly, and daily, been charting out a roadmap for viral success on Pinterest.

Quite simply, I’ve been pinning my passions. All of them.

Right now, it is my Sports pins that have reached the all important digital Tipping Point. Every day, for the past two months, I have been spending 10 minutes each morning, surfing Tumblr and my favorite sports blogs, specifically for images to add to my Pinterest boards. Some days I added just one photo, other days I added ten. The only rule I had was to make sure I pinned something about sports every day. I knew that the discipline and focus of a mission like that wouldn’t hurt my chances of achieving viral success.

I have 24 boards, and I’m working to create a depth and taste with them all. I am very selective in what I pin. And I never think about if a certain image will be popular or not. My only filter is ‘does this image get me excited personally?’ If I am inspired by something about an image, I will pin it to the corresponding board on my Pinterest. You can’t force it. You just have to develop your instinct to know when you find something inspiring. It’s not about pinning the things you think you should like, but rather, pinning ONLY the things you actually love.

As the Sports images I have been curating are raking in hundreds of repins an hour, I feel certain that other boards of mine like Film or Hoop Dreams, will eventually also be discovered. It is the excitement that one day someone will stumble upon them that keeps me moving forward and trying to make each board as surprising as possible. There are a ton of bad Pinterest accounts out there. I am very selective in who I follow. If you actually take your time to curate only the best content, and not SPAM people with just any old images, people will be excited to see what you have to offer.

I see a lot of brands who really misuse Pinterest (and Facebook for that matter.) If you pin or post desperately, that vibe will come across to users. If you are indiscriminate about what you share, people will sense your sloppiness of thought and be turned away. However, if you commit to only showing the most fascinating things that make you personally excited, users and fans will be attracted to that authenticity, and the social recognition will follow.

Essentially, the more selfish you are about sharing only the things you like, the more chance you will have of deeply connecting and engaging with your audience. It doesn’t happen overnight, even though it seemed to have happened that way for me. The truth is that it took me three months of planning, consistency and discipline to put myself in a position to go viral. Now that I have gone viral, the depth of my content is serving me well, as posts from all different time periods are reaping the benefits of my new found exposure. I have taken the time and effort to ensure that every single pin on my boards is something that I am excited about. And now I am excited to share those visual findings with my new followers and beyond.

All 26,783 of them ;)

(I literally gained 65 new Pinterest followers in the time it took me to write this post.)