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."
How did you cultivate relationships with YouTube creators given that you were new to that community yourself?
We rounded up the top, most subscribed YouTubers of that year. That was in 2011. All of them were sort of on the brink of something big. They were a lot more accessible than they are now, and much more open to cold calls. In 2013, we started to do festivals. The first was in New York City, and it was wall-to-wall with teenage girls. It was a light-bulb moment: This is who we need to focus on. Once we realized that, it was obvious who we needed to book: lifecasters, these heartthrobs who are the boy bands of today. We focused on guys who can tweet and get thousands of hyperventilating girls to show up.
Did you have to convince people that social media stars were worth paying attention to?
In the early days. Now, nobody would argue that fact. The reason I was fired by that artist was because of the stigma around YouTube talent. He thought YouTubers were not real talent. For the first two or three years of our business, a lot of people thought we were rounding up bedroom performers. There was an education process where I had to say that their true talent is that they can communicate to and activate 5 to 10 million people at a time. That is incredibly valuable.