With that kind of growth, it’s no surprise that an increasing number of brands are tapping into Tumblr’s uniquely engaged community.

Described as a content network by its 25-year-old founder, David Karp, Tumblr has settled comfortably at the intersection of design, content and social media.

Tumblr founder David Karp. Image by Scott Beale, via Flickr.

Tumbleloggers (as they’re known) can display and share 140 character posts, lengthy blog entries, high-resolution pictures, personal charts and lists, quotes, songs and videos, in one customizable space.

While continuing to foster a unique and dedicated user base of over 13 million visitors, Tumblr has avoided being lumped in with social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter by maintaining its focus on visually rich content.

Meanwhile, Tumblr’s strong social component and easy sharing have made it a more popular blogging platform than WordPress, which it now surpasses in numbers of blogs.

The community

Tumblr’s community is considerably younger than many of its competitors. Where recent statistics have pegged the average Facebook and Twitter users as being 38 and 39 years old, respectively, 50 percent of Tumblr’s users are under the age of 25.

To reach this young, international community, Tumblr has begun sponsoring local meetups around the world. On a monthly basis, tumbleloggers are receiving up to 9,000 nametags and 3,000 Tumblr stickers from the platform’s community organizers in order to facilitate these Tumblr-centric events.

In June, the Tumblr team even received a happy birthday YouTube serenade from a few hundred Brazilian fans meeting up for the platform’s biggest get-together yet. Tumblr’s community was also a driving force behind this winter’s mass online protest against a pair of proposed anti-piracy bills in the U.S.

What’s in it for brands (and what brands should be on it)

What all this means is that Tumblr provides brands with an opportunity to engage a young, media-savvy community with smart, relevant content.

But it’s not a perfect match for everyone. The demographics, for one thing, indicate that marketers should focus on brands that already resonate with the Tumblr community. So life insurance companies, stay away.

It’s also worth bearing in mind the site’s layout. Like upstart Pinterest, it’s all about the visuals and snappy content: Think Twitter plus pictures. This makes the platform perfect for companies that regularly roll out new products or content, namely: broadcast media outlets, magazines, record labels and fashion brands.

J.Crew's tumblog

Take J.Crew, for example. Marketers found a way to make the retail brand’s photogenic merch feel right at home on Tumblr. The brand’s tumblelog has secured a faithful following by inviting followers to tag along with their favourite designers on “inspiration trips” to Paris and Italy while listening to the Brit-pop playlists that fuel their creative genius.

Unlike Facebook, Tumblr is not a one-size-fits-all social network. But as J.Crew can attest, if you’re targeting the cool kids, it’s a shoe-in for success.

Photo by Tim Needles via flickr

You were hired as The New Yorker’s first Web editor in 2006, when NewYorker.com was relatively primitive and “blog” was a four-letter word to most staff writers. How have attitudes toward the Web changed since then?

They’ve changed a lot. We relaunched the site in March 2007 but when I came it hadn’t been redesigned since March 2001. You really couldn’t find anything other than the current week’s content, and even that packaged better would have been more appealing to people. But because of the late 20th-century Web design of it, it was a narrow, dark page.

Some of my job is being the Web evangelist in the office – getting people involved and explaining why the Web is helpful to them and their story. One of the reasons we started the Out Loud podcast was the chance to sit down with someone every week and introduce this stuff to them.

It’s comforting for a writer to know they’re in a magazine with a circulation of 1 million people, but it’s a different thing to be able to chat with 30 people who are engaged in a topic you wrote about last week. And writers who are hesitant to do that end up really enjoying that kind of connection with readers. It’s also a good way of reaching a different audience, people who might want to be reading The New Yorker but have to drive to work.

How has the Web changed the magazine’s content? Are writers encouraged to write pieces that will be shared on social networks? Are editors taught to write SEO-friendly heads?

The only changes you see in the magazine are the digital Eustace Tilley in the front-of-book with a box on the contributors page saying what’s online. We also run Web refers as notes at the end of a piece. We leave the headlines on our pieces but we use more SEO-friendly page titles. Not necessarily Digg-style page titles – just straightforward page titles with the proper nouns that refer to what’s in the story.

So no Top 10 lists or other “link bait” stuff?

Well, David Remnick did a long piece about jazz DJ Phil Schaap in the magazine, and wrote a list of his favourite jazz albums for the website. We called it “100 Essential Jazz Albums” – and that got a lot more clicks than his article.

We also did a contest on our books blog called Critterati, encouraging people to dress up their pets as their favourite literary character. We’re aware that people like looking at pictures of dogs and cats on the Internet but if we threw all our energies into this stuff we obviously couldn’t support the kind of journalism we do. You can’t send someone to Rwanda for a month on the kind of revenue earned from pictures of cats!

But fundamentally, The New Yorker is something you want to sit with and not be distracted by. I don’t mean this in a spiritual way, but it’s a meditative experience. The Web is fundamentally a distracted experience.

Businesswise, what’s the goal of the website? Are you trying to monetize through clicks and ads, or is it ultimately about getting new subscribers?

The most immediate business goal of all Condé Nast websites is to generate print subscriptions. Having a website is much easier than sending out a lot of mail to people – especially younger people who don’t necessarily open mail. And the website has been a consistent generator of subscriptions.

We’re also trying to raise awareness of our stories and our magazine. We don’t post the whole magazine online and we keep an eye on what kinds of stories tend to do well. We’ve also seen more and more traffic for our online-only content.

We do a lot of thinking about what it means to be a magazine brand, and The New Yorker has one of the strongest brands in media. How do you take an 85-year-old institution and bring it into the digital age without compromising its identity?

It’s a really good question because if you had to come up with a list of adjectives for what the New Yorker brand represents – excellence, polish, depth – those aren’t necessarily things you can achieve on a blog, podcast or Twitter feed.

When we started the website the original plan was to fact check blog posts and that just doesn’t work. You can’t ask people to write in a freer, more immediate way and then put them through the same editorial machine. But New Yorker writers tend to have informal voices that are a lot more formal than most.

In terms of podcasts the revolution is that we’re able to take an office without windows, outfit it with a Mac, a couple of microphones, an M-Box and a phone box and operate at a very high level. We try to bring that sense of polished editing and excellence to things we can do simply but well.

Probably our biggest success on the site was a video of a man trapped in an elevator for 41 hours, which was a companion to a Nick Paumgarten piece in the magazine. I had gone to enough Web seminars where they say videos on the Web have to be less than three minutes long, so I handed off the elevator surveillance tapes to a multimedia producer and told her to cut it down by tomorrow. It became a big viral success and brought a lot of people around the world in to read an 8,000-word piece on elevators.

Who runs the magazine’s Facebook and Twitter accounts and how do you ensure they remain in line with the New Yorker brand?

Facebook and Twitter are joint ventures between our Web department and our public relations department. We joined Twitter fairly early on, before Ashton and Oprah. The New Yorker is all about cutting through the noise and telling people about the few things they should know. Our Twitter philosophy is very much the same: You put a couple of things out there a day, and only when they’re really important.

By far the best conversation about the Obama fist bump cover – in terms of diversity of opinion and civility – took place on our Facebook page. It was the kind of discussion your high school social studies teacher would be proud to have. But we’re not as informal or personal on Facebook or Twitter as some people have chosen to be. I don’t think anyone is tweeting from inside editorial meetings. That’s not the culture of this place, and I don’t think that would come as a surprise to anybody.

Does all this multimedia content merely expand the New Yorker brand experience for existing readers, or are you engaging people who might not read a 10,000 word article but will happily listen to an 11-minute podcast?

I think we’re doing both. Some of it is a generational question. For a 55-year-old reader, the idea that someone might both be interested in reading a 15,000-word piece about a shooting in Zambia and also be an active user of Foursquare is kind of anathema. But there are a lot of 25-year-olds who don’t see a contradiction between those things.

So in some ways we’re trying to cultivate the next generation of New Yorker readers. Some of it is giving people a taste of what they’re missing, some of it is supplementing the magazine experience, and some of it is about reaching a more international audience.

The New Yorker is not a magazine for everybody, but I think we have to make sure to reach the audience it can reach, and the Web is a great way of doing that.

©istockphoto.com/Gary Cookson

In 1964, Marshall McLuhan coined the famous phrase, “the medium is the message.” McLuhan’s book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man hypothesizes that any specific medium — a book or a film, for example — conveys information in very different ways than any other medium, and that the choice of medium for specific content is just as important as the content itself.

McLuhan’s original concept essentially covered every technology, from light bulbs to the spoken word and even to roads and airplanes.

Redefining Media

I know what you’re thinking — “The light bulb is a medium?” Yes. In fact, anything with a social effect can be considered a medium. The light bulb allowed people to engage with content in the dark of the night. It had profound social effects.

Social media fit right into this picture. Brian Solis constantly revises his “Conversation Prism” graphic to reflect the ever-evolving Internet landscape of digital content creation and distribution platforms.

New channels (media) are created, launched, and tested every day. There are platforms to share video, deliver e-documents, share slide presentations, and distribute just about anything else.

There are live video platforms, audio platforms, and a wide variety of chat tools. Websites create social networks, groups within groups, and networks of groups within networks. It’s dizzying.

Now digital media can be dissected infinitely. For example, there’s blogging, then live blogging, then life streams, video blogging, status updates, micro-blogging, and on and on.

Understanding Any Social Medium – McLuhan’s Way

McLuhan was ahead of his time when he redefined media. In our social media age, we must pay just as much attention, if not more, to the medium as to the content.

And each medium is different to different people.To a 55-year-old CEO, Facebook is where his daughter chats with friends. To a 25-year-old marketing associate, it’s five thousand brand advocates. That’s proof of McLuhan’s theory that different societies – even different age groups – are affected in different ways by the same medium. That’s true of any new medium, regardless of content.

Shoes and Politics: Two Quick Examples

The folks at Zappos pride themselves on customer service, and their adoption of GetSatisfaction.com is another example of the medium as the message: We care about your customer experience so much that we’ll interact with you where you interact already.

But the medium itself has run into problems as more and more people participate on Get Satisfaction and interact with Zappos. It’s hard to find a specific issue and difficult to thread similar issues. And it’s impossible to navigate all the issues. The medium itself is now creating customer experience concerns for Zappos and is reflecting badly on the Zappos brand.

On the other hand, the Obama administration’s use of media like Twitter, YouTube and Flickr underscores their desire to be perceived as more open and transparent than previous administrations.

McLuhan’s Advice

In the context of today’s online experience, McLuhan would advise you to understand what development stage any new medium has reached in its social and cultural evolution. He’d want you to study the medium and its social effects even before you consider content.

As McLuhan argued, technologies are to the surrounding culture as words are to a poem: the former derive their meaning from the context formed by the latter.

Robert Scoble is one of the world’s leading evangelists of all things digital. Previously with Microsoft, Scoble has also worked with Fast Company among others. He is perhaps best known as a blogger: millions around the world read it every day. And one of Scoble’s most famous creations is his starfish, a great, colorful visualization of the amorphous social-media landscape. Inspired by Brafman and Beckstrom’s “The Starfish and the Spider,” Scoble emphasizes the online media ecosystem’s decentralized and interconnected nature. Below, we dissect the starfish, laying out each medium’s strengths and weaknesses and examining which players are converting each into eyeballs and dollars.

Video

Strengths:
youth audience, viral, multiple senses, easy to embed, creativity, control over message
Weaknesses:
production costs, online video not as popular with adults, oversaturation
Services:
YouTube, Google Video, Kyte, Seesmic, Hulu
Conversions:
Politicians and interest groups use video to spread the word. Aspiring musicians and filmmakers can market themselves on the cheap. Grey-market entrepreneurs who provide links to TV shows and movies are making a killing off ad sales.
Who’s making money?
Let’s face it: YouTube will never be the cash cow Google expected it to be. And how annoying are those commercials networks lace their videos with? There is hope, however, in sites such as Hulu, where the big boys get a share of the pie.

Photo

Strengths:
“worth a thousands words,” cheap, easy to share across platforms
Weaknesses:
static, copyright confusion
Services:
Flickr, Zooomer, SmugMug
Conversions:
Citizen journalism sites such as Gothamist and CNN’s iReport are thriving off our Flickr photos.
Who’s making money?
Flickr has stayed afloat with its premium subscriber model but Yahoo suitors such as Microsoft may think they can squeeze more money out of the photo-sharing leader.

Blog

Strengths:
personal, interactive, multimedia, free and easy to use
Weaknesses:
Casual tone can lead to political and corporate gaffes. Many companies are leery about opening themselves to criticism through comments or linking. “Post or die”: maintaining a popular blog is a full-time job.
Services:
WordPress, Blogger, TypePad
Conversions:
Google, Wal-Mart, Amazon, McDonald’s and Whole Foods are among the most powerful corporations with successful. – and surprisingly readable – corporate blogs.
Who’s making money?
Blogs are the lifeblood of what Internet evangelist Jeff Jarvis calls the new “link economy.” According to a Wall Street Journal story, more Americans earn a living today from blogging than firefighting or computer programming (although some bloggers have questioned the Journal’s accounting).

Events

Strengths:
Welcome to the real world.
Weaknesses:
“If you build it, they will come”—except when they don’t.
Services:
Zvents, Evite, Eventful, Upcoming, Facebook
Conversions:
Scoble likes to talk about an unofficial Obama rally that was organized online and drew more than 4,000 supporters – plus the future President.
Who’s making money?
Depends on the cover charge.

Collaborative Tools

Strengths:
internal efficiency, transparency
Weaknesses:
Expensive and buggy. Will our privacy evaporate in a cloud?
Services:
Zoho, Zimbra, Google Docs
Conversions:
Google’s ever-evolving collaboration tools build brand loyalty (not to mention dependency).
Who’s making money?
By keeping its programs in perennial beta mode, Google can scrap unprofitable – or just plain crappy – creations while saving face. What happened to Vista Beta, Mr. Gates?

Wikis

Strengths:
Crowdsourcing, transparency, unabashed geekiness: Wikis are the coolest social media on the block.
Weaknesses:
The hazards of democracy: Wikis are fair game for critics, pranksters and sh*t disturbers.
Services:
Pbwiki, Twiki, Wetpaint
Conversions:
Wikipedia, anyone?
Who’s making money?
Wikis are the NGOs of the Internet economy. They won’t make money, but the geeks won’t let them fail.

Audio

Strengths:
intimate, easy and cheap
Weaknesses:
Radio is so 1930s.
Services:
BlogTalkRadio, Odeo, podcasts
Conversions:
The Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network just keeps growing.
Who’s making money?
Even public-radio producers have embraced mid-podcast advertising, which is somehow less annoying than video ads (how can you not buy a mattress endorsed by Garrison Keillor’s soothing baritone?)

Email

Strengths:
personal and timely
Weaknesses:
spam!
Services:
MediaPost, AWordADay, TPM Daily Digest and other so-called Bacn.
Conversions:
Six months after the election, President Obama is still tapping into his campaign e-mail trove to sell himself to the American people.
Who’s making money?
We’re so used to ads in our inbox, who would mind a few more?

SMS

Strengths:
even more personal, even more timely
Weaknesses:
except for when cell-phone carriers fail to deliver on time
Services:
Communications Channel
Conversions:
Obama announcing his running mate via SMS was a neat idea, but the cat was out of the bag hours before that early-morning text.
Who’s making money?
As if the Verizons and Videotrons of the world needed another revenue stream.

Microblogs

Strengths:
niche, timely, personal
Weaknesses:
limited audience, time-consuming
Services:
Twitter, Jaiku
Conversions:
Freelance writer Daniel Baum blabbed in 140-character form about his rise and fall at The New Yorker – just in time for his new book launch.
Who’s making money?
So far, Twitter is another VC trust-fund baby. But its powerful real-time search capabilities make it extremely attractive to a conventional search engine such as Google, whose results will always be a few steps behind.

Personal Social Networks

Strengths:
It doesn’t get much more personal than this. An advertiser’s dream.
Weaknesses:
Some might think twice before playing in another company’s walled garden.
Services:
Facebook, Myspace Linked In
Conversions:
Facebook has converted nearly every high school and college-aged kid into a computer geek and online consumer.
Who’s making money?
Program developers, online marketers and Mark Zuckerberg have all made a pretty penny from Facebook. But questions about proprietary rights and privacy continue to loom over the site.