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  • July 9

The Dangers And Advantages Of Meme Marketing

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Meme marketing is a phrase you probably don’t even need explained. It sits there in our brains like it’s always been there. It just seems, right. Anyways, if you need a primer: A meme is born, defined in its traditional sense here, and then pushed to market something. This push is not always done by the creator of said meme.

Now, meme marketing can be really annoying when overdone. A good meme marketer doesn’t care about search results like this: their website is their story. And then they sell that story to for a couple of million bucks. Sounds silly, for someone to pay a couple of million bucks for some random pictures of cats. Still, it has happened and will probably happen again.

Let’s get something straight. The icanhazcheezeburger.com guys didn’t invent the meme whereby cats are captioned with silly phrases: the meme’s most famous early days took place on the magnificently debauched Something Awful forums and 4chan message boards, although some will argue that lolspeak originated earlier than that in the online gaming world. No matter the beginnings, it was co-opted and ultimately sold by the guys who ran that website. Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami did quite well for themselves and ever since the race has been on to duplicate their financial gains. This has met with varying degrees of success.

The thing is, it’s hard for a meme to catch on big enough for that to happen. Anecdote time, once I created one. Or tried to. It was based off of a minor character from hit TV show “LOST.” His name was Keamy and he was a hardened mercenary, so I took a picture of him looking especially menacing and I’d Photoshop it in to various historical and pop culture scenarios. It actually caught on. It was in USA Today, various blogs, some other places. Still, even with a minor press push, nothing became of it. We didn’t sell the website for two million at any rate. Heck, I’d have settled for a hundred bucks.

But also, that’s not the point. Not every meme becomes (or needs to become) a huge hit to elicit some commercial success. Success can be found within niches. It can always be successful in some niche of Internet marketing. Meme creation follows a lot of the same rules as regular viral marketing, but it requires a bit more patience and a lot more tact.

You do not want your memes to get annoying. The “been there done that” danger of creating a meme is large. You have to be careful. As far as is possible, a meme marketer must achieve a tolerable level of niche saturation. You gotta walk that fine line between everywhere and, well, nowhere. It can be tricky.

Take, for example, blogger Martin Bowling. Martin Bowling has become rather infamous for his supposed like of the alcoholic beverage Zima. I’ve never tried the drink and probably never intend to, but somehow, a story developed whereby Martin was linked with the drink. What apparently started as a silly joke on Twitter has developed into a plan to possibly create a URL shortening service. On a niche level, the idea has really taken off, the meme is gaining weight.

This works, as far as I can see it. Martin’s blog has attained some popularity and the zi.ma domain name encompasses the traits of the best URL shortening sites. Most of all, the idea works because it developed organically. Nothing is worse than some forced meme marketing. Everyone knows, believe me everybody knows.

I’m sure you’ve seen what I’m talking about. Some company somewhere trying to turn some sad little penguin into a meme. Or just mentioning the same word over and over again all over their online presence, and in print. Memes don’t work unless people want them to. Memes, first and foremost, have to capture people’s imagination. Take away that and you got nothing.

Less than nothing, actually. When companies try to force their memes on the unsuspecting public, it turns into a net negative. Not only does it fail to advance their cause, it actually goes in the opposite direction. No company wants their brand to become the object of ridicule and derision. This is all too possible with a failed meme marketing approach.

However, this is all null and void if you are a really talented marketer. They can make it appear natural and sometimes that is enough to launch your meme into the marketing stratosphere. They don’t have to come about by accident, they just have to look that way. Remember that and it will give you a leg up.

To equate this to something truly SEO-related, think of the theory of keyword over-optimisation. In a way, us humans are search engines. We are acutely aware of keyword or keyphrase over-optimisation, and we rate a person or a brand lower if they think their pushing of certain keywords is unnatural. The best meme marketing takes place on its own and simply needs a good eye to pick which ideas are likely to become viral phenomena.




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