The study of memetics is getting a little more mainstream attention these days, yet still seems to be largely ignored by the marketing community, for whom it is directly applicable.There are a few great talks that outline the idea of memetics at TED, below is one of them.
Basically, we all know how genes, information represented in the structure of DNA, survive by becoming more and more adept at making sure they replicate. Meme’s are the equivalent cultural packets of information.
This information isn’t represented physically in structure like in DNA, but can be represented by strings of “1’s” and “0’s” which take on a myriad of physical forms as magnetic bits on a disk, connections of neurons or the state of a semi-conductor.These memes, in the desire to replicate, are under the same evolutionary constraints as genes. The only difference here is that marketers/ communicators are the architects of memes, and people are the carriers. By studying the architecture of successful memes and their replication strategies, marketers are able to have more success in communicating a message, and growing a brand.
There are many places to begin to be able to study how memes travel and how they replicate. Anything from religion to YouTube will do. This allows us to begin to be able to understand the common features of particularly virulent strains of memes. We can observe how “retweets” travel through networks on Twitter, or how attribution affects marketing campaigns via analytics and then we begin to be able to see patterns of how memes flow throughout society – which then allows us to theorise why.The memetic perspective isn’t good just for marketers, but can be great for understanding and managing your own memetic environment. I even think it could have profound effects for how we manage social issues like rehabilitation. Is it any wonder that when we put criminals in a poor memetic environment like a jail for a sustained period of time that we don’t end up with model citizens afterwards? Perhaps introducing other memes via the Internet would have some cultural impact within rehabilitation centres?There is a large amount of cultural good that could come from improving the memetic landscape in rehabilitation centres. But I digress; in a marketing sense, whenever you are buying display ads, tweeting, or running a search campaign, you have the opportunity to deliver a memetic payload.What cultural significance are you going to have to have your memes adopted?
Quite often we hear that people on social networks don’t pay any attention to ads, and the the social networks themselves haven’t worked out how to make advertising within them work. Possibly it is because they were never meant to work, after all, we are social creatures.
Chris Anderson recently published his book “Free! Why $0.00 is the future of business” , around which there was a fair bit of debate. (Malcom Gladwell vs Seth Godin). Whether you agree with Chris or not, the clear trend is that advertising costs are rapidly dropping, the amount of information people are consuming is dramatically increasing as is their ability to filter and control it.
Traditional advertising certainly is – and by traditional, I mean interruption marketing. If the information isn’t supposed to be there, then trust me, most people aren’t going to care about it (maybe 0.19% will). That isn’t a lot, so it is a good thing those CPM’s are getting cheaper.
There are other advertising vehicles like sponsorship, which still seems to be effective – congratulations Red Bull – due to the fact that they are spending their dollars to enable some other grand cultural pursuit. As a result the brand, with the culture, spreads.
Google is still not in the business of interruption marketing. Sure, we’d all rather be in the organic listings than the sponsored section, so it isn’t surprising that the SEO industry continues to grow, but there still seems to be a lot of room for good marketing in the sponsored search results.
Given that we know that word of mouth is the most powerful form of marketing, and social networks provide a way to supercharge this, it seems to me that it is now cost effective to be spending large amounts of time and money investing in the communities that follow a brand. Many brands (although not enough) have switched on to the fact that they need to engage, listen and have two way conversations with their customers, but I’m not sure many have made the switch to say “Maybe we should invest in the community, and spend the money internally to free up more resources to engage”.
We are in the middle of the financial crisis, so where is that money going to come from? Well, the advertising budget would seem to make sense. It is important to remember that this isn’t money for advertising in social networks, this is money purely for socialising – just like that money you used to have for a “corporate lunch”. It could be for creating new forums, providing more time from internal staff, investing in socialisation tools and platforms, or incentivising the community to create. Whatever it is used for, surely the return for each dollar would have to be better than most advertising models currently offered by traditional “ad supported” websites/ industries.
Above: Possibly the worst pop-up I have ever seen.
The study of memetics is getting a little more mainstream attention these days, yet still seems to be largely ignored by the marketing community, for whom it is directly applicable.There are a few great talks that outline the idea of memetics at TED, below is one of them.
