Market Moment: Internet Memes

14
August

By: Morgan | Categories: Feature: Market Moment, Features, Marketing

It’s time once again for a “prospect market moment” in which we try and channel our inner millennial teenager. (Come on, stop screaming and sit down, it won’t be so bad.)

Okay, so I’ve got this really ~~terrible~~ great musical medley of internet memes. It’s precisely the sort of thing you’d find linked from about 2.5 million MySpace accounts. Queue it up and start listening right now.

Okay, now open the bash.org random page and start reading some chat excerpts (okay, so this is from IRC, which is not really anywhere near as mainstream as AIM et al, but it all comes to about the same…). Now I want you to cross from the bash.org window to this entry while listening to the song. It would also be good if you could do something else too like talking to someone in your office. Well, if they haven’t all gone running yet. Now you’re channeling that inner teen!

Today’s subject is Internet Memes. Internet Memes are those fantastic and random bits of media that, for complex and probably unpredictable reasons, become suddenly and briefly very popular across the ‘net.

In general, memes are humorous pieces, most often video or animation based (although fark.com has generated many image-based and text-based memes). Once you’re done listening to the song, check out these Wikipedia articles on each of the memes that were mixed into the medley:

The Hampster Dance
All Your Base
Badger Badger Badger
Numa Dance
Bananaphone

Several are quite dated, but memes are always best identified in hindsight—especially for us old, twenty-something fogies.

Many of you are probably familiar with the current marketing term for this, which is “viral.” Really, virals have been around for as long as the internet has. It’s an overly-complex and buzzword-ized way of discussing how word-of-mouth works online. Do you have a family member that forwards you not-funny jokes and scare-messages via email? Those are virals, albeit within a very different and much easier to influence market.

Harnessing the power of marketing via meme or viral is very difficult, though the material is most often created relatively easily in the wild. For instance, colleges have spent thousands on Flash cartoons by consultants that specialize in higher ed marketing. For an example at an attempt at a viral, look at Franklin & Marshall’s flash cartoons, which I was introduced to by Andrew Beedle (who worked with F&M to create it) in his presentation at the 2005 Carnegie Communications conference. In my opinion, this cartoon seems too much like what it is—an attempt by adult marketers to appeal to a young audience with an extremely discriminating sense of authenticity born out of the examination of themselves and their social circles during the process of identity-building that is part of coming of age.

For some examples of Flash cartoon media that is popular among Millennials, check out the New Ground’s Flash Portal or just ask your nearest prospect.

The type of content that becomes a meme is deceptively easy to create, but whether or not it clicks with the market is hard to predict. I imagine something like 75% or better of every meme and viral on the web was created in a college dorm room. Memes are frequently accidents—Appalachian State University achieved the kind of free exposure that many colleges and universities would kill for with their unintentionally campy “Hot, Hot, Hot!” video, intended to be shown at Alumni receptions, and they did it completely by accident. Unfortunately, allot of people were laughing at them and not with them. With the right spin and releasing a tweaked version of the original video, they might’ve turned it wholly in their favor. Of course that didn’t happen. The whole ASU affair is an excellent example of how most schools are still either clueless when it comes to managing their web marketing and PR for the younger generation, or else they have hamstrung their talented staffers by bureaucracy and censure.

The moral of the story here is, if you want to learn about memes and virals, save your budget and ignore the Johnny-come-lately higher-ed marketing firms that think they can harness the phenomenon. (The only advertisers I’m aware of that have really succeeded have been high-profile, high-dollar video studios. See Sony’s Bravia commercial for example.) Understand that most internet memes—indeed most humor among the millenials—is going to be self-depreciating, which means that your boss probably won’t like it. Get rid of empty buzzwords—called a meme, a phenomenon, or a viral: it’s just word of mouth at work online.

Remember relevance and look no farther than your market.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 14th, 2006 at 3:21 pm and is filed under Feature: Market Moment, Features, Marketing. It has been viewed 1537 times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.