[An Internet Reference] founder Joe Federer is a social strategist and creative with over a decade of experience building social presences for major brands. Joe built social creative and strategy teams at agencies like Ketchum PR and Energy BBDO before joining Reddit as Head of Brand Strategy.

His book, The Hidden Psychology of Social Networks, was published by McGraw-Hill in October 2020. The book outlines Joe’s approach to building social strategies using frameworks derived from evolutionary biology and psychology.

After years building social teams in big agencies, Joe decided to start his own

As Joe says in his book, if 12-year-olds on the Internet with old versions of Photoshop can make content that earns millions of views, our creative can too. The problem is that while most agency creative teams are talented artists, they rarely speak Internet. We speak Internet.

When you work closely with social content, you’ll find that rarely is your most polished content your most engaging content. To succeed in social, you need a team that understands the local language.

[An Internet Reference] is a collaboration between Joe and various talented creators, strategists, growth hackers, and community managers

…and you may have noticed that our logo is a pear with teeth. It’s actually a really old meme called “lolwut,” based on a surrealist painting posted to deviantart in 2006 by an artist named Ursula Vernon. Here is a link to the original—you can buy prints of it, and you absolutely should.

Meme culture is a weird, hilarious, creative, ludicrous, often deeply offensive, and deeply expressive endeavor. Nonsensical as they may be, memes undergo an evolutionary process of selection, and lolwut is an evolutionary marvel.