When Good Memes Go Bad...

I found myself, upon uttering some random BS that was stuck in my head, explaining meme theory to people today. It got me thinking.

You see, after a day of spouting, tourettes-like, an intermittent vomit of song snippets, media references and other non-sequiturs, my assistant Justin commented... "it's amazing, how much random crap you remember along with all of the the actually useful information."

I think I might have been singing the theme song to Darkwing Duck to trigger this comment...

So I had to explain that, amongst all of the information that I gather that actually benefits my life, or the trivia that I have some sort of OCD compunction to learn, there are very competitive memes that the mass media sell us that just lock into my brain.

We all know memepool.com and have been rotting our brains with it for nearly a decade.

For those who don't know, a meme is a competitive, indivisible unit of thought or culture, and all the rage since the 90's (especially during the internet age, and especially with marketing-types.)

From Wikipedia: A meme, is a postulated unit or element of cultural ideas, symbols or practices that gets transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena. Meme-theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection (in a manner similar to that of biological evolution) through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an individual entity's reproductive success. Memes spread through the behaviors that they generate in their hosts.

So this explanation worked it's way into the birth of "viral" marketing, and thereby my usual critique of the general marketing community's attempts to use memetic theory to help their clients.

You see, in my opionion no one has, as yet, figured out how to harness the power of "good memes" to actually sell a product. If the product is good enough to generate a self-generating word-of-mouth consumer base, then no one needs to artificially generate that "buzz." If a "viral" campaign has to try to artificially associate good memes with a product, the consumer base catches on pretty rapidly and refuses to spread an obviously contrived message.

In my opinion, you cannot sell commercial products with contrived memetic campaigns.

But there is a different sort of "product" that has come to the forefront in the past few years: social entrepreneurship.

Again from Wikipedia
The main aim of a social entrepreneurship as well as social enterprise is to further social and environmental goals. Although social entrepreneurs are often non-profits, this need not be incompatible with making a profit. Social enterprises are for ‘more-than-profit,’ using blended value business models that combine a revenue-generating business with a social-value-generating structure or component.

I'm going to leave for another day the in-depth analysis about the relationship that I see between these two fields, and illustrate a horrible implementation of a memetic campaign.

Two days ago the "Society for Geek Advancement" kicked off their site launch by posting a video around all of the free video sites. They got over 80,000 views in two days, primarily through the use of big geek names on the internet (iJustine, Wil Wheaton, Steve Wozniak, etc) to speak about a social message.

The problem is twofold. The first is that, upon being directed to the site, all of the proud activist geeks of the world found... absolutely no useful way to direct their energy. The rallying message motivated people expertly, but there was no product, no purpose, to the call-to-action (yes, there is a lightly mentioned, un-heard of charity... but that's as difficult to harness geeks behind as it is to sell a product based off a viral campaign). The launch was premature, or just not well thought out.

This led to the second problem... those sophisticated, famous geeks who lent their name to the video, are rapidly disavowing the project (as Wil Wheaton) because it has proven as ingenuine and attention seeking as a product endorsement. When your stars are coming out to say that they were tricked into doing an infomercial, you have a serious credibility problem. Quoting Wil, "they haven't earned it, but they're wrapping themselves in our flag because their PR people told them to..."

And that tells me, unless someone really starts thinking about how to harness this viral campaign into a social mission, into social entrepreneurship, the site and mission will fail within a month of it's launch.

Good Memes gone Bad.

For a successful implementation, investigate the TED Talks.

tags: darkwing  viral  geek  media  meme  entrepreneur  marketing  duck  ted  social  memetic  talk  society  talks  fail  advancement  

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