Memetic Brand

Please click on this link & wiegh in.

Richard Florida, Roger Martin & Barry Wellman all have an opinion, I would like you to express yours!

UPDATE: five to six hours later …

So I weaved conformity & nonconformity, MySpace, Twitter & Facebook culture, innovation & creativity, the struggling artist/entrepreneur, Richard Florida & Roger Martin’s prescription for the Ontario economy & Barry Wellman’s thesis of networked individualism into one post http://bit.ly/utM1.

I had hoped it was a social media experience.  As in, are you experienced? This music should really be playing in the background while you review this.  Memetic Brand blog readers won’t be really entertained until they have the Hendrix, the MySpace blog post, the Florida post & and Wellman paper all open at the same time .

Some pretty interesting results.

It looks like I lost 30 followers immediately upon posting the question to twitter.

Qwitter reports that this tweet two hours before the time of notifications is the tweet that lost them. But the time of posting the question, “Should I Change My Avatar” with a link to the post & the time of receipt from emails from Qwitter are almost the same.  Has anyone else noticed Qwitter is not accurate?

It was a shameful question to ask or folks are just fed up my drivel.  Either way, obviously a notable breach of culture.

The link in the twitter post received quite a bit of attention, http://bit.ly/info/utM1.  Over 60 clicks.  So a lot more people read the post than qwit.

Both the readers & qwitters are about half from Canada & the United States.  Dunno if you can make a cultural observation from this?

Thanks to a few friends who played the game and spoke up on the side of reason.

I have changed my avatar.

Does this tell you more or less about me?

I can’t tell the difference.  Can you tell the difference?

(Forget for a moment that the former avatar was crafted 111 years ago, in another medium, for a different application

In any event, I do hope that this has been an interesting experience in social media.

I hope that we can all relate to each other better now.

Clearly I should have done this a long time ago.

I have also posted this with some comments over at www.socialcapitalvalueadd.com because it is a great discussion of how network thinking is emerging as a dominant form in the 21st century.

From about the 3:38 point in the video to 7:30 Barabási and Fowler have a focused discussion on the differences between social & tech networks and the role of natural selection in the formation & structure of social networks.

These are four highly recommended minutes for anyone working towards the understanding of memetic brand.

Hat tip to Valdis Krebs for sharing this item and these related links:

The genes in your congeniality:  Researchers identify genetic influence in social networks.

The PDF of the full paper.

The transcript is here.

Now that I have used Twitter for a while, I am more convinced than when I started that it is an example, along with activity feeds & other microblogging platforms, of a new medium that is particularly suited for memetic branding purposes.  It is involved in the genesis of shared perception.

Picked up on twitter …

MarkusvonRoder: Demonstrating the memetic trigger “Violation of viewing habits” - the Escalopter (escalator + helicopter)

Update:

I have turned my evolving reflections about twitter into a series of posts.  Catch the other thoughts:

Why Twitter Matters #1: Follow me, Follow You on Twitter

Why Twitter Matters #2: Memetic Logos

Why Twitter Matters #4: social capital discussion evolving

Comment, Kim Patrick Kobza, CEO, Neighborhood America: cognitive outliers, real time group cognition

Why Twitter Matters #5: Twitter and Social Capital

Why Twitter Matters #6: Twitter Love Song

UPDATE@Nov.4, 2008 - an overview of StockTwits from Stowe Boyd.

UPDATE@Dec.1, 2008 - Tim O’Reilly “Why I Love Twitter”

UPDATE, April 2010:  Could it be?  Is Pepsi listening?  What do you think of Pepsi foregoing the traditional Superbowl ad and stepping up with its REFRESH program?  For details on REFRESH catch this series by a group of my HumberPR students.  Kudos to Pepsi and Weber Shandwick.

ORIGINAL POST:

Hot selling book authors Seth Godin & Jonathan Salem Baskin, who both released manifestos in ChangeThis’ 50th issue (I was fortunate to have my manifesto released @ along with theirs), have picked up on Pepsi’s recent announcement that they are going to “pour some $1.2 billion over three years into a push that will include sweeping changes to its brands“.

Seth’s “punchline is: take the time and money and effort you’d put into an expensive logo and put them into creating a product and experience and story that people remember instead.”   He has a corner on the whole idea of making products remarkable that is well worth following.

Jonathan finds it “stunning that nobody is asking these businesses why they aren’t focusing on making cola relevant again.”  It is a great post.  Check it out. The bit that really got me noodling was:

“Use or need cases are used in technology development to identify the places and times  people might require a software product or widget.  That approach to the mechanics of consumption is based on actual experience, not imagined desires or emotional associations, so the strategy doesn’t start with brand…but certainly impacts it.”

Can we use this notion of memetic brand to get more prescriptive if we are sitting in boardrooms with folks like Pepsi?

The money quote from Introducing Social Capital Value Add would probably be a bad place to start:

“Social capital means far more to Coca-Cola than Coca-Cola means to social capital.”

Ah, that might just get you the door before you had a chance to get the account!  So perhaps it would be good to start with a little illustration of the difference between being “viral” and “memetic”.

I bet the traditional brand folks over a Coke have been counting all that “free advertising” they have been racking up since someone discovered what happens when you drop a mintos into a bottle of diet coke.  That is, after they took weeks to stop hand-wringing about what such an image does to “the brand”.

Now that is entertainment! I love it! Millions of views. Probably billions now that dudes like me are clipping it into web pages all over the internet. But is it selling Diet Coke? Hmmm …. maybe a little bit. That awareness and repetition is not likely hurting any. But I am pretty sure that this isn’t the stuff that is going to effect market share, or share of stomach or any of the other fun ways to measure soda pop.

So how about something that can be remarkable, address needs and mobilize the entire Pepsi ecosystem towards something amazing?

I am certain that there are many memetic approaches and I would very much appreciate it if you could jot down your thoughts below.  I admit it.  I am a bit stuck on this idea of a relationship between altruism and corporate motivations.

I think that I would like to present the folks at Pepsi with some case studies and trend analysis of approaches like the one the folks at TripAdvisor are taking.  I have some criticism of the execution and if TripAdvisor is still burning VC money, god bless ‘em.  The trick is to go beyond feel good CSR tactics and tie this into your mission and maybe even your business model if possible.

Then maybe we could get some serious new thinking about how to change the game with Pepsi.  How about a crazy idea like committing Pepsi to being a cure for cancer?  That just popped into my head as something provocative to help reboot thinking and then, as I sifted though my reader while procrastinating on writing this post I picked up this link from June Avila on the MaRs Innovation & Commercialization Blog:

Better Beer: College Team Creating Anticancer Brew

Yes.  Still seems off the wall, but somewhere between mintos & the cure for cancer there is a better way.

I like this little project.

Frank Tentler is scanning for the word “wish” in twitter streams and then he retweets the wish from the http://twitter.com/twishes profile.

This is Frank Tentlers memetic logo!  It is a great little way to position Frank at the intersection of media, aspirations, communications/technology, etc.

I wish I had the code for a little widget that would display the latest tweets from twishes.  I would embed it in this post and a few other places.

Update! Ask & you shall receive … Thanks Frank!

UPDATE: Another good example from Jacquelyn Cyr.

UPDATE 2 @ Nov.3, 2008 -

I have since come to think of some of the work that conferences are doing to assert their identities along these same lines.

Many now ask Twitterers at the conference to tag all of their related tweets consistently so that they can be viewed via Twitter Search and Twemes as one discussion thread.  #Mesh was the first that I noticed and SoCap08 retweeted all related tweets during the conference.

It looks like defrag08 is doing the retweet thing too.

Update 4@ Nov.17, 2008: Extending Mad Men into Twitter. Make sure that you follow the links in Paul’s post.

UPDATE 3@ Nov.4, 2008:

I have turned my evolving reflections about twitter into a series of posts.  Catch the other thoughts:

Why Twitter Matters #1: Follow me, Follow You on Twitter

Why Twitter Matters #3: Escalopter

Why Twitter Matters #4: social capital discussion evolving

Comment, Kim Patrick Kobza, CEO, Neighborhood America: cognitive outliers, real time group cognition

Why Twitter Matters #5: Twitter and Social Capital

Why Twitter Matters #6: Twitter Love Song

UPDATE@Nov.4, 2008 - an overview of StockTwits from Stowe Boyd.

UPDATE@Dec.1, 2008 - Tim O’Reilly “Why I Love Twitter”

Last night I made a post over at Memetic Brand’s sister blog, Social Capital Value Add, called “What’s with the dog?“.

Social Capital Value Add is an inherently complex concept. It is based upon lots of simple ideas that everyone gets right away:

- in 2004 broadband changed the game,

- there is a “new” word of mouth power out there that brands are vulnerable to,

- brand loyalty matters,

- etc, etc, etc.

The point of developing SCVA is that there is a lot more about all of this that we do not understand at the moment, than there are simple things to grab onto. How do you get across that complexity when people are time starved and operating with attention deficits (or what McLuhan would call “narcotic numbness“)?

Symbols matter. They signal something. They are the tip of the ice berg. But, we are developing the idea here at Memetic Brand that the symbol itself is a lot less important than traditional brand management has (rightfully, within the broadcast paradigm) us believing.

I am not betting on the dog. The dog is cute. I hope the dog gets your attention. I hope that the dog signals to you that SCVA is an idea worth passing on. I hope you scratch the dog a little (go ahead he likes that) and discover the Wizard of Oz metaphor that encompasses for me the difference between symbolic brand and memetic branding.