A Meme is a Terrible Thing to Waste February 16, 2009
Posted by krgaskins in marketing, psychology, social media.Tags: memes, twitter, viral
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The Ecstasy
Recently, The Boston Phoenix sent out two calls on Twitter for followers to “tell us your love life in 6 words” with the incentive that the “winner will be published!” Tweets included a link to the contest page. There it was explained that the favorite 6-word love life summary, selected by authors of the featured book Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak by Writers Famous & Obscure, would be published in their next Six-Word Memoirs installment.
A few notable Six-Word Memoirs on Love & Heartbreak by Writers Famous & Obscure:
“Job requires me to contemplate cunnilingus.” – Dan Savage
“Foung my ex-husband on Craigslist. Twice.” – Yin Shin
“Will always follow you. On Twitter.” – Mircea Lungu
I love The Boston Phoenix. They’re smart, punchy, hip, interactive– and they do local like no one’s business. Naturally, I follow them on Twitter.
I also catch a lot of meme-happenings on Twitter. If you’re an active Twitter user, you may have noticed the diverting and wildly successful #nerdpickuplines phenomenon (started by @luckyshirt) a couple weeks ago, which was picked up by the LA Times Blog. (Some of the best #nerdpickuplines on Favrd can be found here). If you weren’t tuned into #nerdpickuplines, perhaps you caught the “7 Things You May Not Know About Me” (#7things) meme rippling through Twitter recently, which no doubt spawned a rise in Tumblr account sign-ups and had Twitter meme-ees sighing exasperatedly when someone on Facebook raised the ante to “25 Random Things About Me.” According to the New York Times, the “25 things” craze caused note creation on Facebook (totaling 5 million in the first week of February) to be double that of the previous week and higher than any single week in Facebook’s history.
The Irony
After reading The Boston Phoenix’s call for Twitter followers to “tell us your love life in six words,” I couldn’t help but recall the #6wordepitaph meme (started by @joeschmitt), which had gained some momentum in December. It yielded, at the very least, several hundred responses over the course of a day. (I have yet to find a Twitter web-tool that will provide me with a complete search results count over time for a specific term.) Investigating the contest’s destination page and the public replies sent out to The Boston Phoenix by Twitter users (there were only 11 in total), I concluded that many of the answers given as #6wordepitaphs rather ironically resembled some of the “love life & heartbreak memoirs” offered up:
“Those pants made you look fat.” – @sween
“OD’d on Viagra. Went belly up.” – @modat
“Crap. I guess it was infected.” – @trelvix
I can’t say definitively, but I suspect that if The Boston Phoenix had rolled “tell us your love life in 6 words” into #6wordlovetale (or something similarly brief), and smoked it themselves a few times (to get the meme fired up), the response rate would have been much more impressive.
Do you miss Memes?
Why would responses likely have been much more impressive? Because Twitter-folk recognize the neatly packaged #hashtags, and are ready to jump on the meme-bandwagon. Not all of them, for sure; memes have to be introduced with flair and finesse. But memes are “a thing,” and the term “a thing”– well, that’s a meme. Got it? Check out the Twitscoop stats for mentions of the term “meme” on Twitter. It’s buzz-worthy.
Granted, “meme” refers to countless ideas and behaviors passed along over any number of different mediums. And the buzz-worthiness of a term alone can render it nearly memeingless. Dawkins coined the term in The Selfish Gene, defining it as: “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. Example of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches [...]. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain.” I’m talking about a specific, self-conscious variety of social media memes.
So why do memes spread? Because they’re able to. “A song like Jingle Bells may spread because it sounds OK, though it is not seriously useful and can definitely get on your nerves [...]. Of course, the memes do not care; they are selfish like genes and will simply spread if they can,” explains Susan Blackmore in the The Meme Machine.
It’s no surprise that jingles and catchy slogans have been the bread and butter of advertisers for quite some time now. They’re neatly packaged and easily transmissible. Social psychologists will also note that participation or engagement is a key factor when it comes to moving one’s attitudes about ideas, policies, people or brands in a positive direction, regardless of how small or subconscious that engagement feels. For example, when McDonald’s plays their familiar ba-da-da-da-da tune, it’s fairly difficult not to chime in with, “I’m lovin’ it” at the end, regardless of your conscious sentiment towards McDonald’s.
Analogously, welcome to the world of #catchyhashtags and social media memes. We’ve evolved to the online realm, but ease of transmission and engagement are still, if not more, important factors when it comes to spreading any idea.
The article from The New York Times on Facebook’s “25 Random Things About Me” is a pretty clear-cut brush-off, without much of an eye to the psychology behind the craze or the potential applications of this brand of memes: “As with anything on the Internet, why this particular distraction has suddenly become a phenomenon is anyone’s guess. For most, it seems to be a creative way to indulge in social networking without coming off as needy or shamelessly self-absorbed.” The New York Times also noted that the Internet has conditioned users to enjoy and feel accustomed to writing about themselves; the “25 things” meme borrowed the “creative surreality of a Mad Lib” in helping to “fill the void not satisfied by the constant onslaught of uploaded photos and navel-gazing status updates.”
Well, that’s one way to look at it.
Or you could think that memes which allow people to combine the “creative surreality of a Mad Lib” and the “indulgence of social networking” (since the Internet has conditioned us to love exhibiting personal aspects of ourselves to the online world) are the ones which happen to replicate most successfully. And those conditions leave plenty of space to be combined with the goals of causes and brands as well. Rather than aiming generally to “spark conversations” about brands and trends– (check out trend-tracking on TweetStats– these types of conversations are already going on, and sometimes, it’s a matter of sending a new, directed “ripple” out)– or tweeting a request that’s not neatly packaged, alluring, or fad-worthy, companies should perhaps focus on tailoring a meme to be recognizable as such and highly “replicable.” I suspect there’s great value to investigating why certain online “threads” are particularly imitable, and what aspects of these can be adopted for practical business use, beyond sheer entertainment value. (As if that wasn’t enough!)
#6wordepitaph probably got thousands if not tens of thousands of tweets. It was the number one topic on Twitter for 12 hours, besting the election.twitter.com memes I’d started in late October (one about voting booth thoughts – would Michelle vote for Barack, for example – and another #itsnotoveruntil). For most of the business day there was a new one every second.
#nerdpickuplines was started by @luckyshirt, but it didn’t take off until he encouraged me to tweet mine (I had DMed him a few). One thing I learned in October is that to get a meme to take off, you need to get people to want to participate, and my most successful ones all involved me roping in some ringers. My two favorite are @kariedwards and @bsheepies, who can’t resist a challenge. On a few, I’ve DMed them in advance so that we’d each tweet several at the same time so that they’d be sure to find an audience.
Also @luckyshirt has now changed his bio to take credit for the meme. Hilarious! I’m still attached to my bio line and wouldn’t have changed it even if I’d won the Shortys.
Hey everybody, @luckyshirt here. I want to tell you all a story about a bear and a tree and a fire. Ready? Ok, here we go.
Once there was a bear. His name was @luckyshirt (off the top of my head). The forest he lived was plagued by meme bugs. These bugs got into the Twittertrees and ate away at them until they were dead sticks poking out of the ground. The bees of this forest didn’t like making honey in dead sticks, and the unicorns had abandoned the forest because no marshmallows grew there.
@luckyshirt the Bear remembered hearing the Ranger explain that fires can actually rejuvinate patches of dead or dying forest, so he set to work setting a fire. He had around 550 trees around him, and he knew if he could get those burning, the whole forest would be up in flames in no time.
So he went into the middle of the sticks and flicked a cigarette butt on a pile of leaves. The nearest tree began to burn, and then one other began to burn shortly after. That second tree was known as @joeschmitt.
As joescmitt burned, sparks landed on nearbly trees and set them burning, too. In the other direction, the original fire was also igniting other trees, and they, in turn ignited others.
Sure enough, the forest was ablaze in no time. The Twitter forest burned all day, and lush marshmallow patches began to grow immediately, which attracted the unicorns. When the LA Times wrote a story about it, someone claimed that the @joeschmitt tree started that fire by itself, and the @joeschmitt tree decided it was time to set the record straight.
The @joeschmitt tree commented that he and @luckyshirt the Bear SHARED responsibility for the fire, because @luckyshirt the bear started it, but he caught on fire and set fire to nearby trees. @luckyshirt the Bear thought, “That’s odd… Why isn’t that FIRST tree that caught fire claiming responsibility? Or the pile of leaves? Or the cigarette butt?” But then @luckyshirt remembered that the topic at hand was determining who STARTED the fire, and that @joeschmitt the tree was an attention whore.
The End.
This meme started without the planning that @joeschmitt describes, and it started as a result of EVERYONE within tweetshot taking interest and participating. Everyone who used the hashtag shares the credit with making it successful. That’s the point, and that’s how this works. But if the discussion is about giving credit to the person that thought the idea up and started it: here I stand, and I have no problem basking in that awesomeness (as evidenced by my bio).
I should also mention that I started for @baileygenine because she posted on her blog that she liked nerd pickup lines after I DM’d one to her the day before.
Did I mention that @joeschmitt is an attention whore? Oh, don’t worry. He won’t be upset by this. It’s attention, silly.
Cheers!
Twitter is a great place to try new things.
Earlier this evening, we had a successful round of 20 questions…with 15k followers, it was fast and furious!
I’m with you on the memes. The best ones are not just fun to write, but fun to read and pass along.
I’ll have to think of a good one!
Interesting little tale there, @luckyshirt, but there’s one fact you’re leaving out. The fire you started burned only your own tree, and just barely. By morning it had gone out. You tried to restart 12 hours later, and the only taker was me. I started myself on fire with your meme, because – Damn it! – I know how to start a fire. I have always given you credit for the first tweet:
http://twitter.com/joeschmitt/statuses/1180260028
http://twitter.com/joeschmitt/statuses/1180503196
And I’m the one who commented to the LA Times to make sure you got credit:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2009/02/twitter-nerds-u.html
Have you considered that I’m so good at starting fires because I’m such a windbag? It may be true. I’m not saying.
I think @joeschmitt and @luckyshirt just need to have sex and be done with this nonsense. I love you both; memes are hard, wah wah wah. (I know, I’ve tried. “#chuckdied”) The end.
When will you two realize that we didnt start the fire. It was always burning since the worlds been turning. We didnt start the fire, no we didnt light it, but we tried to fight it.
Man, Schmitt, do you have any idea how this is making you sound?
Bottom line: claiming credit for spreading an insanely popular meme like this one is ridiculous.
This thing hit all corners of Twitter, and would have likely done so with or without you. The guy with 3 followers who played along is just as responsible for its success and the lady with 6,000 followers who contributed. Unless we get John Nash to sit in his shed and pull some yard across points on the internet to map this thing, we can’t know how exactly it spread.
Claiming that this thing blew up because of your experience and influence only serves to make you look like the Don King of Twitter claiming that Mike Tyson pounded Zach Braff in the ring because of your promotional influence.
Please understand that I’m not trying to take credit for its success. As I’ve just explained, that’s ridiculous. I *am* taking credit for its existence, however. I’m proud of that, because I should be. It was a good idea.
Is this where I tell everyone to follow me on Twitter?
By the way, Schmitt, I didn’t have a tree in the story. Maybe you should wait for the cartoon to come out before continuing.
Oh, and face.
Oh, really @luckyshirt? I assume you’ll be TwitPicking your “I started #nerdpickuplines” tattoo for all to see, right?
Also how did @jamield and @steelopus get their avatars over here and we didn’t? They must be the real geniuses.
Seriously, I wrote 6 printed out pages of original nerdpickuplines for #nerdpickuplines, and I was #3 on the list (after two re-tweeters) (I haven’t looked to see if I’m still #3.) Besides me, though, there were SEVERAL others out there when it was a #1 trending topic late one night, who were writing them fast and furious, too. So what??
Big deal if you started it, big deal if I wrote 6 pages of them, big deal what went on, really. Who cares? It was big fun, so I’m just happy as a pig in sh*t that it got started, regardless of who did it.
Now, how do I get MY avatar over here on this page like @jamield and @steelopus did?
If I were a REAL nerd, I could figure that out.
CJRomb, what do you mean you were #3 on the list. What list?
2nd, it’s quality, not quantity that counts.
3rd, if you’re writing 6 printed pages, you’re doing Twitter wrong.
Finally, who are you on Twitter if we want to follow you?
Real nerds bring their avatars. #nerdpickuplines
3rd
I’m not “doing Twitter wrong”, especially seeing there’s no rules anyhow.
I meant when I printed them all out, they filled 6 pages. I’m not being very articulate this morning.
2nd
Well, I certainly got a lot of feedback from others who thought they were funny. But really? I was laffing my a$$ off and that’s all that mattered to me.
1st
@cjromb – I’m already following you. Been for awhile. You’re not following me. But I’m dealing with that.
P.S. I was watching a list of the top tweeters, along with a time graph of when it was trending. I’ll have to see if I can find the name of the site, and put it here. BRB
Doh. Try that again.
I SAID, Real nerds bring their avatars. #nerdpickuplines
That’s better.
Ha, I’m still on there in the third spot as a trendsetter:
http://twopular.com/trend/_nerdpickuplines
So, ya, there is that. You’ll have to decide for yourself if you think they were funny or not. Some were better than others.
But about those avatars!
Hey baby, have you registered at gravatar.com? #lameassnerdpickuplinetosolveyouravatarissue
@CJRomb, I don’t know what trendsetter means in that link, but I suppose I take consolation in being the #2 retweeted person on #nerdpickuplines. I suppose that makes me the nerd dating guru.
I’m also looking in to the gravatar thing @SarahInMI mentioned, because damn it! you people can’t see my face enough.
Excellent post.
Also, the fire bear tree story made me cry a little.
Girls, girls… You’re BOTH pretty, and you BOTH deserve all of the attention one can get while sitting alone at your desk in your parents’ basement with pork rind crumbs collecting on your stained t-shirt.
Oh, and it’s your turn at Scrabble, @joeschmitt. Let’s get our priorities straight, mister. Wasting time playing Scrabble is FAR more important than wasting time commenting about blogging about tweeting.
wait wait wait…. there’s a @joeschmidt and a @joeschmitt ?
now, what were we talking about? oh, #nerdpickuplines
how’s about: “I started #nerdpickuplines, baby.” – who gets to use that?
Personally, I’m just bummed that #nexradpickuplines never took off. However, this reinforces my personal life experience that RADAR isn’t an effective aphrodisiac.
Well-done as always, Kim.
As a person who stalks both of you, I designate myself moderator:
@luckyshirt started it and he wins cause his story is hysterical.
Also, @joeschmitt was about 4 minutes after him so that means that you guys have to shake hands, pretend to be friends during school and fight at 4 at the monkey bars near the swingset. Your weapons are words. Be ready.
I had to filter my Twitter feed to EXCLUDE any Tweet with #nerdpickuplines. Who’s really responsible and what’s your address? I have a special delivery for you.
Critz brings up another phenomenon that is very interesting to me: Memehating.
Is it because the flood of posts scroll your timeline (and favrd) too fast?
Great post! I really love memes. I think they’re so compelling because they force me to activate parts of my brain that are sitting there dormant most of the day. It’s like a Rubik’s cube of funny and if I could just … get…that…last…side.
The 7 things was very hard. I am not a navel-gazer and it took days to get that out, but give me a silly hashtag meme and I can go for days. I’m going to go read The Meme Machine. Hopefully one day I can realize my dream of becoming a Certified and Licensed Memeologist.
Holy crap! I had this open from last night when there was only ONE reply. Boy, I had no idea there was this much excitement over meme creation. So just to be clear, I’m hereby calling dibs on using a script format for jokes. ME: You can’t do that, that’s totally ridiculous. ME2: Shut up! I can do what I want. ME: You’re pathetic. ME2: I know you are but what am I?
Melissa: There really ISN’T this much excitement over meme creation… IN A WORLD WITHOUT ATTENTION WHORES.
…how do I get there?
@luckyshirt and @joeschmitt love each other really, but hey, guys, for the love of Twitter, can you stop all this & sort us out another meme, please? Otherwise I’m going to have to get out my meme generator – and you know how the beta testing on *that* went…
Oh man, it dropping off the top rope onto @joeschmitt’s neck a meme?
where do i sign up for this dm advance warning of memes?
http://twitter.com/juliafish/statuses/1200382470
I think @myrmalca has the most sensible solution.
Everybody! Stop debating and start a new meme. OR. continue with #nerdpickuplines (no, I haven’t gotten over it. just yet.) And someone should charge up #turdpickuplines.