Meet the Woman Behind DigiTour, the Social Media Star-Studded Festival

By Sheila Marikar (original source Fortune)

How do you get young people to look up? Take the digital stuff on their screens and put it on a physical stage. As the cofounder and CEO of DigiTour, Meridith Valiando Rojas, 30, corrals popular personalities from YouTube, Instagram, and other social media networks into a live show that descends on dozens of major cities each year. Valiando Rojas may be writing the book on social media stardom (Selfie Made is due in September) but her digital chops haven’t always been welcome. Before founding DigiTour in 2010, she pushed a musician to embrace a new medium—and was promptly fired.

FORTUNE: What gave you the idea for DigiTour?

Meridith Valiando Rojas: My career started in the music business. In 2008, I was managing an artist for Capitol Records. He was 15 years old and supposed to be the next big thing. A year went by and the label had spent a ton of money with no real results. It was ready to drop him. So I sat down with the president of Capitol, who went through a laundry list of things needed to save the artist: first, social media; second, tour … then I tuned out. A social media tour—nothing like that existed. I figured we could create one, put him in the mix with some YouTubers, and hope their magic rubbed off on him. I thought this was the solution of all solutions. The artist was a lot less excited. He fired me. I said to my boyfriend, now husband, “Let’s do the tour anyway.”

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