For their Stanely Cup playoff game on Saturday against the Ottawa Senators, the New York Rangers decided to add a social twist to the coverage. They brought in six of Instagram’s most popular users to cover the game. Starting with images of fans prepping for the match in the streets of New York, the Instagram photographers used all of the photo app’s features to create a unique social perspective on the match.

The photographers were not paid, however they surely benefited from an increased number of followers.

Multimedia networks such as Instagram and Pinterest have given artists and other creative types the chance to gather a large numbers of followers. Organizations have begun to understand these individuals as valuable ways to market to a wide audience.

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In today’s news, Anonymous creates a music service, Forusquare plans a new advertising strategy, and Facebook gains a professional network.

Anonymous Creates Music Platform

Like so many misguided young souls, a few members of Anonymous have quit their day jobs to make it big in the music business. A faction of the cyber-terrorist group has begun to create a music platform called “Anontune.” Their goal with this project is to “Create a service that seamlessly pulls songs streaming from all around the Internet.” It grabs songs from third party sources, such as YouTube, and let users create playlists and share them.
Many around the industry are questioning the success of the platform. Although the platform seems legal, Anonymous’ recent hacking sprees in the last few months will draw extreme scrutiny from the U.S. government. The allure of an ad-free portal to every virtually song on the Web will attract many music lovers, but its creators will need to make sure its operation breaks no laws.
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Foursquare Plans New Ad Platform

With their new advertising program, Foursquare will allow merchants to advertise alongside user check-ins. Retailers and restaurants can advertise deals and offers on their platform, which users will be able to view when they search local specials or recommendations.
Although Foursquare has been working with marketers from large brands for a while, until now they have not been able to pin down a set advertising plan. They commented on the new plan, saying “Our goal is to build scalable self-service tools that enable businesses to draw in new customers and retain and reward their most loyal ones.”
The growth of location based networking has been tremendous, and by advertising deals on Foursquare local businesses can draw in a greater amount of online consumers.
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Startup Brings Business to Facebook

LinkedIn may have met its match in Facebook partner BranchOut. The startup has raised enough funds to begin building an application that incorporates its professional network into the social platform.
BranchOut, which as an independent network already boasts 25 million users, claims an advantage over LinkedIn because of the breadth of its professional presence. They believe that social networking is advantageous to all levels of the workforce, whether it be executives, recent college graduates, or returning military veterans. They believe that by merging with Facebook they can draw an even wider range of professionals.
This partnership will become a strong competitor to LinkedIn. If photo-app Instagram and music-service Spotify are any indication, Facebook has the ability to bring an incredibly large user-base to a fellow platform. This, along with BranchOut’s mobile presence, will quickly turn Facebook into a viable and extensive professional community.
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Heating up the Internet today is a legend who made his mark long-before the Internet was ever conceived. Dick Clark, host of “American Bandstand” and “New Years’ Rockin’ Eve,” passed away at age 82 of a massive heart attack. Innovative in his programing, he helped launch many big music entertainment names.

Clark began his media career in 1947 at a New York state radio station, and moved to Philadelphia station WIFL in 1952. When he started his broadcast in West Philadelphia, no one could have predicted how his program would create and build iconic brand exposure for musicians – so widely expected today by Internet savvy consumers.

Millions of fans and celebrities alike took to Twitter to mourn his passing and pay tribute to his legacy.
For many Americans, Dick Clark gracefully ushered in a new age of media, and remains a television and broadcast icon. Through “Bandstand” he launched the careers of countless musicians, and set the bar for television programming as we know it. Forever the marketer, he was quoted as saying, “I don’t make culture. I sell it.” His eye for talent and presence as a host will be missed.

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In 2010, Tumblr CEO David Karp commented about ads on his site, saying “We’re pretty opposed to advertising. It really turns our stomach.” However, with his platform amassing 4.5 billion impressions a week, he’s had a change of heart. On May 2, advertisers will be offered space on Tumblr’s dashboard page, which earns about 120,000 impressions a day. These ads will come in the form of a “Radar” post. This will behave much like their highlighted posts, which are paid posts that can be viewed automatically by users across the platform.

Many new (or in Tumblr’s case, newly popular) platforms are built around the concept of an organic and seamless user experience. While this design can jet-set a social network’s popularity, it complicates the traditional ways of monetizing a site. Tumblr’s Radar posts are the latest industry attempt to marry profits and aesthetics, appeasing both users and investors.

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In today’s news, Twitter reinvents patent policy, Honda starts a Pinterest campaign, and the 2012 summer Olympics launches their social platform.

Twitter Institutes New Patent Policy
On Tuesday, Twitter announced that they have created the Innovator’s Patent Agreement (IPA), which states that the company will only sue over patent infringements with the consent of the designers or engineers who created them. The agreement still applies even if these employees leave Twitter. However, the microblog retains the right to use these patents to defend the company against litigation.
The creation of this agreement is seen as a response to the growing number of patent lawsuits throughout the tech world. The most recent case is Yahoo’s suit against Facebook, which was criticized as extortion by many industry experts.
Twitter’s IPA has already been met with approval, as executives from both Facebook and FourSquare have expressed their support. If more companies endorse this new idea of patent ownership, we could see the tech industry adopt a more open view of intellectual property.
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Honda Pays Pinterest Users
Honda has been quick to join the Pinterest craze. They launched their page less than a week ago, and are now continuing with a unique campaign on the site. They are paying top “Pinners” $500 to take a break from the site and go visit some of the places they have pinned about.
Lauren Ebner, assistant social media manager at American Honda, describes the campaign as Honda “dipping [their] toes in the water” and claims that down the road “it will be a good opportunity to market some of our vehicle launches.
The Pinterest users that Honda is finding have nothing to do with the automaker. However, Honda is building a relationship with the platform’s all-star users that they will hopefully be able to utilize in the future. If successful, Honda could advertise through these highly trafficked Pinterest profiles.
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Olympic Village Goes Social
It was only a matter of time before the social home of the 2012 Summer Olympics arrived. The Olympic Athletes Hub has officially launched, and features athletes’ profiles, candid photos, training tips, and status updates. The site also includes some gamification; users can collect points for following athletes for both virtual and real world prizes.
If major sporting events of the past year are any indication, the Olympic Athletes Hub will be a huge success, and skyrocket viewership for this already much anticipated event.
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Hulu, a popular video streaming site, has restructured their advertising cost structure in favor of marketers. They will only charge for ads that have been watched in full.

Although this may seem like a gamble, Hulu’s ad-videos pop up much like a commercial break on traditional TV. If viewers want to watch the rest of their program they need to sit through it. They claim their completion rate for ads is 96%, which is 15% higher than most online long form video.

Hulu expects that the lost revenue from half completed ads will be quickly made up by brands competing for the last available spots.

Because of Hulu’s network television-like programming, they will be able to succeed with this new ad structure. Other video websites like YouTube and Vimeo are formatted quite differently, and a pay per-fully viewed ad method would not be worth it.

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The journalism world saw a series of firsts yesterday with the annual awarding of the Pulitzer Prize. Reporter David Wood won the Prize for his “Beyond the Battlefield” series, which ran exclusively in the Huffington Post. This is Wood’s first Pulitzer, although he was honored as a finalist in 1998. It is also the Huffington Post’s first Pulitzer, as well as the first time the award has been given to a commercially-run, exclusively digital media outlet.

ProPublica.com , a nonprofit website, won the prize in 2010 and 2011. However, Dean Starkman, editor at the Columbia Journalism Review, describes the Pulitzer Prize’s bestowment upon a commercially run site as “a big breakthrough.”

It is also a big breakthrough for digital publications. The Huffington Post is a unique news source, covering a plethora of subjects, multimedia forms, and social-sharing functions. Their Pulitzer Prize is a strong support for this strategy. Other news websites have begun to adopt these tactics, and, in light of this award and struggling print sales, we may see them start to go completely digital.

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Google co-founder Sergey Brin is worried about the Internet. More specifically, he’s worried about Facebook and Apple taking control of it. The amount of control they have over software that can be released of their platforms is too restrictive, according to Brin. It is a threat to online freedom.

Brin also expressed concern for the entertainment industry’s efforts to control file-sharing, and contries such as China and Saudi Arabia restricting their citizen’s Internet access.

This is an interesting concern from the co-founder of the Internet’s biggest, and some would argue, most monopolizing company. Google recently reworked their search engine format to display its own results and sites above the rest of the web.

Is it possible that the web is becoming too small for it major players? As the Googles, Facebooks, and Apples of the world continue to grow and expand, we may see the answer to that question.

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U.S. Facebook users have shown a disintegrating interest toward ads in 2012. According to a study by ad agency TBG Digital, in the first quarter of the new year, ad-engagement on the social network dropped 8%. Also, they have increased their cost-per-thousand impressions and their cost per click rates.

However, TBG Digital CEO Simon Mansell says there is no need to worry. Facebook has upped their ads per page, and this, along with the hike in price, will keep their revenue solid.

If Facebook’s ad engagement continues to drop, they will need look to other sources of revenue. The study also discovered that Facebook has become a competitive traffic driver to news websites. This is due to their social reader app, which lets users see what articles their friends are reading. The network’s click-through rate to these sites grew 196% this quarter. If Facebook were to deviate from their advertising-heavy business model, their social reader app is a promising alternative.

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