SAN FRANCISCO — Past midnight, in a dimly lighted warehouse jutting into the San Francisco Bay, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger introduced something they had been working on for weeks: a photo-sharing iPhone application called Instagram. What happened next was crazier than they could have imagined. 

In a matter of hours, thousands downloaded it. The computer systems handling the photos kept crashing. Neither of them knew what to do. 

“Who’s, like, the smartest person I know who I can call up?” Mr. Systrom remembered thinking. He scrolled through his phone and found his man: Adam D’Angelo, a former chief technology officer at Facebook. They had met at a party seven years earlier, over beers in red plastic cups, at the Sigma Nu fraternity at Stanford University. That night in October 2010, Mr. D’Angelo became Instagram’s lifeline. 

“Adam spent like 30 minutes on the phone with us,” Mr. Systrom recalled, “walking us through the basic things we needed to do to get back up.” 

Mr. Systrom, now 29, offered this as a parable for the roomful of would-be entrepreneurs who came to hear him talk at Stanford last spring: in the intensely competitive start-up scene here, success is as much about who you know as what you know. “Make sure to spend some time after the talk getting to know the people around you,” he told his audience. 

Those people, he might have added, might one day shape your destiny. They might one day press money into your palm. They might nudge you to quit your day job and gamble on a vague idea. This week, barely 18 months after that night in the warehouse, Instagram was scooped up by Facebook for $1 billion, turning Mr. Systrom, Mr. Krieger and several of their friends-turned-investors into multimillionaires. 

The extraordinary success of Instagram is a tale about the culture of the Bay Area tech scene, driven by a tightly woven web of entrepreneurs and investors who nurture one another’s projects with money, advice and introductions to the right people. By and large, it is a network of young men, many who attended Stanford and had the attention of the world’s biggest venture capitalists before they even left campus. 

Many companies say it is beneficial and that their apps will help people forge new connections and meet someone they perhaps should know. App stores have been flooded with such tools in recent weeks. 

Kismet, Glancee, Highlight, Ban.jo, Meeteor, Pearescope, GetGauss, Intro, Qrious, Mingle and Sonar, hope to transform the smartphone into a social dowsing rod that delivers an alert when it detects other people nearby who share interests, friends or career goals.

Many of these services made their debuts or released fresh versions right before the opening on Friday of South by Southwest, the technology, music and film conference in Austin, Tex.

They want to catch the eye, and thumbs, of the throngs of technology enthusiasts, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who flock there to see the latest in start-ups and innovative ideas. What they really want is for that concentrated crowd of early adopters to return home and influence everyone else to use their apps. That strategy worked for Twitter and Foursquare, after all.

Cross-Channel Media Measurement

So if everything offline is either digital, part-digital, or driving to digital, can marketers continue to measure these two tactics separately as they have historically?

Many marketers have realized there is significant impact that both offline and online can have on each other - it is not a zero-sum game, rather 1+1=3. The modern marketer therefore requires a measurement framework that looks holistically at all tactics.

Channel attribution is an important consideration that marketers continue to struggle with - if my print efforts directly influence my online efforts, how can I separate the two to determine which is working better? How can I "give credit" for those upstream awareness activities (which often takes place offline) that ultimately lead to customer acquisition (that often takes place online)?

A holistic measurement strategy that is carefully developed can help marketers ensure they have the appropriate metrics and data points in place in order to truly analyze and understand how their various media tactics are performing. This approach helps marketers identify the best media mix (across online and offline) to achieve their objectives.