Memes are cultural units, such as ideas, values or patterns of behavior that are passed from one person to another. While the majority of memes are short-lived (examples include fads, viral videos, or even most news stories), other memes manage to snowball, living on indefinitely and frequently acting as precursors to cultural shifts or new trends. A couple recent examples of memes are rick rolling, Obama’s Hope Campaign and the puppy cam.

Product marketers can learn a lot about how messaging spreads simply by reverse engineering popular memes.

As a marketer, it’s rare to come across the opportunity to work on a project or campaign where the underlying memes are powerful enough to result in a cultural shift. However, startup marketers are in a unique position. Because we aim to solve specific pain points, our memes tend to elicit excitement in a way that the latest deodorant, for instance, does not. So how can we use this technique of reverse engineering to advance our own products and messaging?

Let’s take a look at the rise of Twitter, a fascinating phenomenon that has gone from anything but mainstream to become a featured technology in the latest Presidential race, help change the face of news and become a must-have at media events such as the Grammy’s.

The concept of limiting a message to 140 characters and then publishing it publicly is a complete departure from conventional communications (even more so than say use of Facebook). Nevertheless, Twitter’s penetration into the daily lives of the average American is truly extraordinary. How did this happen? How did such a bizarre technology with a funny name manage to be written about in the New York Times, used by the current President of the United States and featured nightly on CNN?

It all starts with building traction. Successful memes are able to build a foundation for buzz, create a snowball effect and spread virally across connected networks. Rather than trying to re-invent the wheel with new marketing campaigns and tactics, marketers can use the technique of reverse engineering to, for example, consider the attributes that allow for rapid uptake. Using this knowledge, we can then engineer products and business models better positioned for getting traction.

The following attributes are those I believe central to Twitter’s success as a meme:

-The Present. Twitter is a phenomenon occurring right now, not something theoretical or off in the future
-Tangibility. Anyone can try Twitter; it is a real, tangible product available to any person with web access
-Accessibility. Twitter is free and simple to use. It also inherently lends itself to a viral spread (by default tweets are public and indexed in Google)
-Uniqueness. Twitter is in fact “different.â€�  It’s not the Zune following the iPhone. This uniqueness helps promote people’s talking about it
-Hierarchy of Need. For many people Twitter is a tool that appeals to the highest of the Maslow’s hierarchy: Self-Actualization
-Enablement. Twitter is a platform that enables other things; it is not simply an end solution. Twitter’s API allows for the creation of other niche applications, that appeal to the long tail and reinforce many of the other attributes

If you think of other attributes I am missing, please add them in the comments…

In my opinion, the foundation for marketing any new concept has two objectives:

1)    Create a snowball effect
2)    Create sustainability of the message (trends, jargon, memes)

It is my hypothesis that the basis for accomplishing these objectives starts by connecting unstructured data and people. In the early days of marketing a new product (pre-launch), the theoretical benefits are just as important as the actual product in terms of market and investment validation.

Fortunately, it’s now easier than ever to connect the dots and begin to build an organic campaign to promote your products’ objectives and values. Though cliché, the best startups are truly those that solve specific pain points.  Thanks to the social web (blogs, Twitter, etc) it’s now easier than ever to identify people suffering from the very pain points your new product or company plans to address.

As marketers, we should be actively searching across the web to identify those persons already talking about these pain points. Step two is simply to add structure to help guide disparate conversations and messaging into common language that will provide the foundation for our desired snowball effect to take hold.

Therefore, the first goal of a startup’s marketing or pre-launch campaign should be to identify the unstructured data points that exist on the web and to connect them. This is also imperative to best position your memes or message for rapid traction.

Here are three reasons why connecting the dots is such a powerful technique:

The Power of Collective is Partially to Empower the Individual. As the expression goes, ‘a rising tide lifts all boats.’ When people are aware of others who share their same beliefs, they feel a greater sense of personal empowerment. Universally people are much more likely to publicly talk about their own opinions when those opinions are openly supported by others.

Common Language Creates Importance. It may seem obvious, but it is difficult to build a trend when the language people use lacks consistency.  At a basic level, if you can get a group to agree on common language and keywords, Google is much more likely to begin to associate that content together and thus guide people naturally to related content. These agreed upon keywords are necessary to establish authority, and authority is good for building validation.

Cross Linking Lends to Deeper Dives. This is the same principle bloggers use to increase page views. By having lots of cross linking between people and ideas you promote deeper dives into content. Wikipedia is the master of this where one Wikipedia entry often contains links to 20 or 30 other entries. Remember, when you are cross linking and connecting people and ideas the goal is not to push your own product. Instead, just be an interested party looking to advance the general cause.

While on Facebook this afternoon I stumbled across a few funny photos where someone had apparently used Photoshop to add UGG boots to a number of their friends’ pictures. In other cases, they had taken photos of celebrities wearing UGGs and added their friends faces. The results (pictured below) are comical but also suggestive of innovative advertising opportunities that brands would do well to consider…

A couple thoughts:

-Brands could easily build an application allowing their products to be mixed and matched on friend’s images (accessorize your friends).

-Brands could work with Facebook to create images of their products overlaid semi-transparently on photos. Imagine an UGG advertisement actually being the image of a pair of boots superimposed on a photo you are viewing. In this case, UGG’s would be superimposed on all your friend’s feet until you “x” out of the fake boots in order to view an ‘un-altered’ photo. Done well, the product placements might not even hinder the photo viewing experience

-Seeing your face superimposed on celebrities is fun and inherently viral. If the celebrity happens to be wearing UGGs, that’s genius marketing

-Eventually brands might compensate or ‘pay’ users in virtual gifts if brands are allowed to ‘doctor’ profile images or create social advertisements featuring a user’s photo with the brand’s product added into the background

This last point is important because it also highlights a trend I expect we will see more and more. While many web applications are beginning to embrace virtual currencies swapped between users, I think currencies get even more interesting when a third-party (advertiser) can get involved. eBay and Etsy have proven that by empowering users to with a platform to produce income, a businesses can achieve epic virality and engagement. Digg has a black market where users get paid to provide Diggs and strategy.

To quote from a recent comment on Howard Lindzon’s blog: “We need to start recognizing customers as assets”…

It is amazing how fast the world changes. 50 years ago the biggest asset for most companies was their equipment. 15 years ago the biggest assets for most companies were their employees. Today, in 21st century – the time of social networks, the biggest assets for new companies are their customers. All this suggests that an entirely new revenue models need to be created – models, where customers give and receive back something of higher value than their own contribution. The new companies’ role is to bring together people, who are able and willing to help each other. But how are they going to profit out of this? – by sharing profits with their customers.

I expect that brands looking to leverage the social capital of their customers will be a major trend going into 2009

Tumblr’s Merry Christmas. It was great to see Tumblr picked up $4.5M in a series B. I love Tumblr and maintain a Tumblelog myself. That said it’s my belief that Tumblr currently has a major shortcoming: how far behind it’s SEO (reach) is relative to WordPress. For example, I would never change this blog to Tumblr because it would devastate my traffic. Because the majority of people who take the time to write and produce online content are looking to *increase* their audience, I see Tumblr as a tough sell to people who understand the issue. Following suit, I would think offering premium feature sets would be a much easier sell to bloggers on WordPress since in many cases WP bloggers actually rely on their blog as an income generator. Tumblr still feels a little stuck in the vanity blog category and I really wonder how much this SEO issue will limit Tumblr’s growth going forward.

…I still love you though Tumblr.

Twitter & SEO. I posted a Tweet two days ago suggesting that Twitter could greatly increase product awareness by allowing for dynamic backgrounds where people could insert HTML. Many people have taken to using their Twitter backgrounds as make-shift profiles since Twitter only allows a profile of 2-3 short sentences. Such a change could have major consequences. People increasingly use their blogs and other online presences as virtual business cards. However people rarely link back to Twitter profiles because they simply can’t list much information about themselves: it’s like handing someone a business card with only your name. If Twitter made such a shift to dynamic backgrounds, more people would link back to their Twitter profiles (rather than say Linkedin or a WordPress blog) and the amount of Google juice would go through-the-roof as a result of increased backlinks.

Startup Onboarding. I have been enjoying playing with Zentact, a new CRM tool that plugs into Firefox. After you upload your contacts, the plugin searches the keywords on the websites you visit and matches them with tags assigned to your contacts. Once a connection is made, Zentatct prompts you to send that person a quick note or link, allowing people to be more proactive about maintining relationships (as opposed to simply ‘relationship discovery’). The problem is that when you have thousands of contacts, manually tagging each one is a royal pain-in-the-ass. I’m wondering when someone will launch a company that simply helps people set up and optimize new accounts with startups (pre-population, customization, tutorials, etc). Anything already exist?

Tiny URL Advertisements. I’m also a big user of Betaworks‘  short URL service, Bit.ly. Bit.ly got me thinking that it would be easy to do a quick redirect to an advertisement, before redirecting to the site being called. I think if such an Ad was shown for only a half second I really wouldn’t mind. In fact, if the ad was visually stimulating and I was only catching a glimpse of it, I might actually be tempted to click back and engage with the ad…sort of a reverse psychology play.

“Welcome. You’ve Got Mail!â€�

When Gmail first launched, it was superior to AOL email in every way but one. I ultimately converted to Gmail because of its superior functionality: I’d never need to delete another email and I could view threaded conversations in a much more intuitive manner. Still, as lame as it sounds, I really missed that cheerful “Welcome!â€� I had grown so accustomed to with AOL.

This afternoon on the subway I watched a fabulous TED talk by game designer David Perry called “Will videogames become better than life?â€� [watch the video below]. One of Perry’s opening questions is: Can a video game make you cry? The answer for many is, yes.

The emotional connection between gamers and their games is well documented and has fueled the outstanding success and growth of gaming industry. How successful? Well, it puts web 2.0 to shame:

Retail sales in the PC game software industry reached $911 million in 2007, bringing the total console, portable and PC game industry to $18.8 billion, a 40 percent increase over the $13.5 billion generated in 2006. -Source

U.S. online video game subscriptions are generating $1 billion a year in subscription revenue –VentureBeat

The average MMOG game costs $50 to buy and subsequently charges $10/month. What software product(s) do you know that can command similar revenues? Clearly there is something going on with games that transcend simply graphics and entertainment.

Despite this, rarely do you hear a startup talk about ways it is working to establish an “emotional connectionâ€� between its product and users. People talk about fostering community, and yet, people freely jump between various soc nets demonstrating little loyalty. The focus of most startups remains on functionality, price point, and network effects. Too often, people completey ignore interface altogether, let alone make it the primary focus. Color palettes aren’t even the tip of the iceberg and yet that’s where most interface innovation ends. Personally, I believe web software is missing out in a big way. It will be interesting to see how a new generation of web products can better take advantage of this opportunity and how this comes to impact the ability to drive revenue, retain community and grow a product virally.

I know it’s something I’m thinking about regularly.

Thursday I attended the TechCrunch/Austin Ventures panel: “The Web Starts at the Grassroots.� Eric Schonfeld of TechCrunch was the moderator of a topic which proved to be much more ambiguous than expected.

One of the key questions that emerged is what separates a grassroots initiative from a viral initiative? In my opinion, there is an enormous difference, and I’d like to take a stab at articulating what this is.

Grassroots initiatives as I see them consist of a series of sustained group efforts over time to achieve objectives supported by all participants. For example, Saturday morning at my hotel in Austin there was a meet-up of Austin locals organizing a cancer awareness bike ride. There were 20 people or so attending the meeting and each person left with a specific task that they’d report on when the group reconvened the following week. This series of meetings and the fact that everyone was ultimately looking to raise awareness and capital for a cause clearly makes this a grassroots initiative in my mind.

Now contrast grassroots with an example of an initiative that is simply viral, like the now famous OBama Girl Video on YouTube. Another example of viral was shared on the panel; word-of-mouth marketing leading to a huge turnout (on short notice) for an autograph session with tennis star Andy Roddick. Getting a huge number of page views or a on-time turnout (with the incentive of an autograph) is not grassroots.

What’s confusing is that viral efforts — like grassroots efforts — are started when an underlying group of people become passionate or excited about a particular message, goal or opportunity. The key difference though is that viral efforts tend to involve very limited commitment. Consider the difference between joining the Facebook group for Obama versus volunteering to hand out fliers two nights a week.

Understanding this distinction between grassroots and viral is critical because grassroots movements are inherently more powerful mechanisms over time. The additional level of commitment and time required suggests movements that are more sticky and sustainable. My guess is that if we wanted to predict the next big movement or trend, we should be looking for those with grassroots traction; not simply viral traction.

From a marketing perspective, consider what would motivate people to help build Wikipedia even though contributors were offered no incentive. Contrast this with 37 Signals’ new affiliate program: if you get people to sign-up for Basecamp, you get a commission. While the strategy of 37 Signals has the potential to become viral, it likely won’t, or it will be short-lived. The TechCrunch spike is the same thing. I’d much rather build a launch strategy around a small group of uber-committed folks who simply can’t live without my product than take my chances on a one-time traffic rush, hoping some percentage sticks. The later is what I have previously dubbed Tipping Point Marketing. I wish the panel had been able to dive into this difference in more depth.

As a side note I was truly impressed by the diversity and the passion displayed by the Austin startup community, especially those participating on the panel. Austin is an amazing place and I look forward to following the progress of the areas’ startups.

 

Initially I was very annoyed that Ashton Kutcher’s company was selected as one of the 50 most innovative startups at TechCrunch50 and I largely still am. However, after I learned that the primary monetization for the site’s video content was via product placement, it really got me thinking.

If the future of media is video and content creation on the web, and if said distribution necessitates use of many different sites (i.e. not walled gardens), than the future of advertising could really be product placements.

What does this mean? I think it means opportunity.

One of the great things about product placements is that there is almost unlimited potential for availability; a movie script could literally have hundreds of placements if folks were willing to invest the time to tweak sets and wardrobes. Alternatively, an entrepreneur could just automate the process and help to set market rates.

As an example, take a look at the image up top. It’s a blueprint showing areas where advertisements could be served on a blog. Why couldn’t this same blueprint idea be applied to scripts, or even spontaneous daily web shows? It would sweet if I could go to a marketplace and buy spots for product placements; maybe actors wearing LeveragingIdeas T-Shirts? As a buyer, I could look at stats for demographics, traffic, etc for syndicated shows, or I could be more risky and take a chance on a one-off event or viral video. Maybe it gets huge traffic, maybe it doesn’t. Of course product placements can’t be as precise as web ads where you only pay when someone clicks. Still the opportunity could be huge for targeting, engagement and the long tail.

Seems to me like there is big opportunity here for someone, if such things don’t already exist.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGvkZszS21Y[/youtube]

Louise: You know…Lisa’s husband just found out he has cancer

Harry: But, he’s covered, right?

Louise: No! He just joined a startup and he can’t afford a plan

-Commercial from HarryandLouisereturn.com (see video above). Part of a campaign to increase healthcare awareness

Neat trick…

Just because some competitor’s blog shows 10,000 subscribers…don’t take it at face value

Feedburner hacked! from Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Vimeo.