This is a guest post by Ben Farmer from Ivory Design.
Memes are created, appreciated and adored by all kinds of people. Business owners and online marketers love them because they’re a great way of enticing traffic to your site: legions of geeks like me will waste hours (literally hours) giggling at and sharing these weird little pictures we find funny.
Graphic and web designers love them the way head chefs and food critics secretly love McDonald’s: after a lot of hard, carefully thought out work, goofing off with a picture of a crazy dog with the caption “ermahgerd” is junk food for the eyes. And the Internet using public loves them because most of them are brilliantly funny. Some border on Dadaists weirdness and some border on artistic genius, but they all give the same end result: me giggling in a very undignified way, before clicking “Like” or “Pin This”.
It’s not so easy as jumping on whatever bandwagon’s currently getting the most Pins or Re-tweets, however: there are a couple of guidelines you can follow to ensure that a geek like me will giggle at your meme rather than hate or, worse, ignore it.
Follow me, geekbaiters!
Guideline no. 1: Thou Shalt Be Original
Lolcats are great, but they’ve hit saturation point. If you’re looking to create memes to place near adverts which need a good CTR or with which you want to go viral, you’ve got to be fresh. Jumping on bandwagons isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but you’ve got to be quick. Very quick. An indicator of how quick is best illustrated by the fact that, if I mentioned a new meme in this article, by the time you read it, it’ll already have hit saturation point.
One does not simply copy other memes if you’re after true viral impact: hire a geeky blogger or even a colleague’s son or daughter with a wacky sense of humour to create a little image or video for you. When reviewing it, try to put yourself in the mind of a computer geek (if you can imagine your meme on the front of a t-shirt worn by a character from The Big Bang Theory, you’re in with a chance). If that fails, email it to your younger family members or show it to your kids on Facebook (if they’ve allowed you to add them, that is). The “lol” is the currency of the meme: get a “lol” or two and you can comfortably run with it.
Guideline no. 2: Thou Shalt Not Overthink
Numa Numa guy didn’t have even the briefest brief when he made his incredibly popular video. If you find yourself in a board meeting over creating your meme, stand up and walk out of the meeting room a la John Cleese with a note on your back reading “Follow Me LOL”. Only get someone to film it first.
That’s actually quite a good idea. Just don’t blame me if you get fired.
Guideline no. 3: Thou Shalt Not Fake
Especially in the case of FAILS, people can tell if a supposedly spontaneous moment has been staged. Don’t try and stage a person’s slacks falling down during a presentation: it’ll look fake and only get derided. If you can capture this moment as it genuinely happens, however, you’ve hit gold.
Guideline no. 4: Thou Shalt Work with Animals and Children
Keep a camera on your pet or toddler long enough and they will eventually do something wonderfully funny. Just don’t let them get into dangerous situations.
Charlie Bit My Finger, one of the most famous memes of all time, happened randomly whilst two children were being filmed by their dad. He only put the video online to show their extended family: now they’re internationally famous. (Bear in mind that your kids may not thank you in their teen years for being made baby stars.)
Guideline no. 5: Thou Shalt Love the Meme
Research is just as relevant in this field as it is in all others. Spend a couple of hours an evening exploring the world of online memes to get a taste for them. If they don’t make any sense yet, just give it time.
Hopefully this has given you a good idea of what to do to make yourself some respectable meme content. Feel free to ignore any or all of the above guidelines: after all, most of the best memes weren’t made with going viral in mind, they were just made for fun.
Lol.
Good one Ben,
These days It’s all about memes, double meanings, and innuendo’s.
Did you see that skittles commercial that they banned?
Social Media > The Internet
Meme’s > Social Media
I haven’t seen the banned one, the last Skittles ad I saw was the one where the guy in the office turned his desk into Skittles by touching it. Made me LOL. Bought some Skittles.
Hmm… and I recall Ogilvy (was he the one?) saying that ads shouldn’t make you/people laugh, they have to sell…
do you think copywriting principles evolved over the last century?
Thanks for sharing this unfamiliar marketing strategy. Can’t wait to implement it ..To be honest I was completely oblivious to the Meme concept until you mention “Charlie Bit My Finger,” which I fondly remember laughing my butt off from Youtube…
Oh yeah, they’re everywhere. Companies are getting really desperate to implement them just as quickly as possible, because getting to a meme too late in advertising is death itself. For a business, obviously. As a person you probably would survive, but only just.
Innovative strategy to deal with social media. Much Appreciated !
After doing a long time blogging without social media now, I am trying this field so each and every tip regarding social media is very important to me. And I am getting very positive results. 🙂
Thanks for this tip too. I will implement it.
Hi Ben,
I haven’t gone too much into creating any meme’s yet but I might as well. It seems that those on the cutting edge of what is hot tend to do the best with their creativity and marketing. I will have to research some more about meme’s and see what I can come up with. It’s all about results these days.
Take Care.
Hi Ben
Just spent ages trying to get back to this post. Was going to try to sort out a meme this evening and thought I had saved this post. Wrong going to make sure I do this time. Great info
Thanks lee
I’ve always found working with memes to be dangerous marketing. If it works, it’s brilliant, but if it doesn’t, then it can blow up on you.
Wow, I seriouly never thought about using memes as a marketing technique. There’s high possibility of scuuess rate since these memes are kinf of a fun and known by almost everyone who uses the internet.
Thank you much for the post. It’s indeed invaluable.
Best,
Anup
As a nature and wildlife filmmaker, I have quite a collection of imagery that would lend itself to some great memes. I’m just not bright enough to come up with something clever enough to go viral.
Looks like I’ll need to find someone with a warped sense of humor to come up with something short and witty.
Memes are a good replacement to the traditional marketing and it’s actually fun to work with. The best thing about memeography is that it encourages maximum creativity.
Seriously, I hardly thought of using memes for marketing but I get often very attracted to them online. I think it’s a mighty idea to use them for traffic.
Thanks for waking up my mind on this