Memes to be discussed!

Seven steps into ensuring succes of your viral!

In the last few months I have been working hard on my thesis, which will be made available on this blog soon, for my master International Business and Marketing Management at the Tias Nimbas in the Netherlands. My thesis title is: Memes are the driving forces behind Viral Marketing and Word of Mouth. 

From my literature review i have created these seven steps to outline how an intended viral launched has the most chance to be successful. Extensive perhaps, but complete. 

 

1)	The creator of the intended viral knows to whom the message should be send, by doing online research to identify networks and opinion leaders, track their behaviour and receive permission to contact them.
2)	The intended viral is created, as any communication, with the right aim towards the right target group, focused on the right gender, while being cultural aware of a global audience. The message send to this target group includes Mavens / E-Fluentials / Opinion leaders who contribute in making the message go viral.
3)	The intended viral should contain a message that connects with the reader and triggers him/her to forward the email, for various reasons; the message is important or will be perceived to be of interest to the potential receiver, thus making the sender have a positive emotion while forwarding the message.

 

Checkpoint: The message connects best to the reader if it is aligned to the right emotion that makes the context of the message have the most impact. This emotion being preferably surprise with either the emotion joy, sadness, anger, fear or disgust.Surprise implies that the message has new context, is remarkable/unique, is refreshing and therefore creates new food for thought and so has WoM potential.

 

4)	It should be made as easy as possible to forward the message, any threshold is one too many. Once the message has gone viral it could last for a long time and build further on established WoM.
5)	The creator of the viral should follow the viral (and have the right tools to do so), guide the spreading by giving new bursts by seeding the viral in new communities along the way and encourage publicity.
6)	The creator should openly interact with receivers and forwarders (i.e. blogs, forums, reviewing sites) regarding the context of the message or the underlying product/service/brand, extending the virals life.

 

Checkpoint:  A viral is successful if it reaches a significant audience that connects with the viral, acts on the message of the viral and as a result reacts to the product/service/brand by creating more awareness and/or sales, therefore delivering tangible, measurable and ongoing brand benefits.

 

7)	When connected to the consumer, it is critical to maintain an intriguing, trustful and transparent communication. Meanwhile creating a basis for permission based marketing for future endeavours.

Update!

It has been a while since the last post, but I received a lot of feedback regarding "The 10 steps to creating a successful Viral" and I will give this feedback all back to you soon! 

So stay tuned for this update and new posts to come....

The 10 steps to creating a successful Viral

Reading about any literature I could find on WoM and Viral Marketing from now till 50 years ago, from the Six Simple Principles of Viral marketing to the Six Primay Emotions I found many models regarding Viral Marketing were incomplete, nevertheless very good, but incomplete to describe the full process of a VMC. Perhaps I have missed a great article that sums it up even better?  

I came up with these 10 steps to have the highest probability of making a succesful Viral and I invite you to comment as explicitly possible on each of the steps or on the total picture. 

An intended viral launched has the most chance to be successful if it follows these comprised steps:

1)     The creator of the intended viral knows to whom the message should be send, by doing online research to identify networks and opinion leaders, track their behaviour and receive permission to contact them.

2)     The intended viral is created with the right aim towards the right target group, focused on the right gender, while being cultural aware of a global audience. The message send to this target group includes Mavens / E-Fluentials / Opinion leaders who contribute in making the message go viral.

3)     The intended viral should contain a message that connects with the reader and triggers him/her to forward the email, for various reasons; the message is important or will be perceived to be of interest to the potential receiver, thus making the sender have a positive emotion while forwarding the message.

4)     The message will connect best to the reader if it is aligned to the right emotion that makes the context of the message have the most impact. This emotion being preferable surprise with either the emotion joy, sadness, anger, fear or disgust.

5)     Surprise implies that the message has new context, is remarkable/unique, is refreshing and therefore creates new food for thought and so has Word of Mouth potential.

6)     It should be made as easy as possible to forward the message, any threshold is one too many. Once the message has gone viral it could last for a long time and build further on established Word of Mouth.

7)     The creator of the viral should follow the viral (and have the right tools to do so), guide its spreading by giving new bursts by seeding the viral in new communities along the way and encourage publicity.

8)     The creator should openly interact with receivers and forwarders (i.e. blogs) regarding the context of the message or the underlying product/service/brand/etc, thus feeding the viral with new life.

9)     A viral is successful if it reaches a significant audience that connects with the viral, acts on the message of the viral and as a result reacts to the product/service/brand by creating more awareness and/or sales, therefore delivering tangible, measurable and ongoing brand benefits.

10)  When connected to the consumer, it is key to maintain an intriguing, trustful and transparent communication. Meanwhile creating a basis for permission based marketing for future endeavours.

Full Disclosure: Sponsored Conversations on Twitter Raise Concerns, Prompt Standards

I just read a great post from Brian Solis about Sponsoring on Twitter.

Is it clear for people on Twitter when somebody is doing an advertisement tweet or a sponsored tweet or is just really being enthusiastic and willing to share with you his/her thoughts about this great product/service. 

The discussion leads to the point how to get full disclosure, a topic which remains and becomes more and more important. Openness and honesty are key on the web, it creates credibility. 

It seems to me we are on a very interesting crossroad, as a community we are discussing now how to protect our own integrity and show the road on how fair business is supposed to be done. We are taking the role of the government in our own hands regarding regulations on how to have full disclosure. As in ads in magazines it shows on top of the ad sometimes that this is indeed an advertisement, just to be 100% clear to the reader what they are looking at. 

Examples of disclosure now are to put AD or SP in front of the Tweet to show its either Advertisement or Sponsoring. A comment on this post from "deylight" is to use "EM" as a short code for Emergency, being used by institutional body's. 

The Twitter community wants to take control in their own hands and organize disclosure them selves, but will we come to one unified agreement? If we could get one coding list and actually stick to it (how to burn those who do not hold itself to the coding; banned for life?), it would give Twitter a whole new level of usage. 

Outbreak of the H1N1 virus in Kansas, everybody stay inside? New tasting of the new Ben&Jerry icecream exclusively at the boulevard of Miami in 1 hour? If we know what we read and we trust it, the potential of Twitter grows exponentially.

Brian Solis his post: http://bit.ly/sGI2p

How do ideas spread? What makes a story grow?

Language seems to be the obvious answer for the first memes to be spreading efficiently, before the time that there was a printing press or even monks or other literate people. Susan Blackmore suggests that language was created with the purpose of spreading memes. The moment imitation within the first humanoids started, the transmission of ideas was born. The human became a replicator of ideas!

What are exactly qualities of a good replicator? Richard Dawkins presented the theory of replicators:

• Longevity:
  A physical replicator does not need to last forever, but it must exist long enough to be replicated. 
• Fecundity:
  A replicator needs to make a certain number of copies to persist as a replicator. 
• Fidelity:
  A replicator needs to have a certain degree of accuracy in its copies. 

Richard Brodie describes three ways of penetration, which relate to the fundamentals of a successful replicator. He describes three processes; conditioning (repetition), cognitive dissonance and the use of the Trojan Horse to spread memes; ideas being replicated.

Conditioning, or repetition works according to the following process; If we hear something repeated often enough, it becomes part of our programming. Advertisers and salespeople know this well. Any good book on sales will tell you that most customers do not buy it until they have been asked five to seven times. It takes that many repetitions (read also my post about Religion)  to implant the “Buy me” meme in the customer. The second way is through a mechanism known as cognitive dissonance. When things do not make sense, our minds struggles to make them make sense. In a way you alter your own perception to accommodate your own feelings, you change your perspective. The third way new memes enter our minds is by taking advantage of our genetic buttons in the manner of the Trojan horse. We tend to pay special attention to for example warnings of danger, cries of children, and sexual attractiveness. Chrysler did the same with a campaign where they used the song “I Drove All Night” from Celine Dion with their commercials, as such that the feeling of feeling good would be connected to the car, even after the campaign.

However penetration suggests that there is a push effect, there is also need of a pull effect, as described by Malcolm Gladwell a company is in need of three sorts of people who help spread the message. These are the missionaries of your idea. These three types are called Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen.

Connectors are the gossipers who know everyone else and ensure that information moves fast through the population. They know many people in different walks of life. They provide links between social networks. The second type of people are Mavens; they are helpful people with expert knowledge of those who are important in some area, and so they can introduce the idea to that strategic “someone” who can be vital to the further success of the idea or product in that area. The message needs to be spread fast enough to be spread again, therefore the Salesmen come to act: they are the people who share the idea with passion and make the receiver enthusiastic. They add what Gladwell calls “stickiness” to an idea (meme). Stickiness gives a message impact; it “sticks” to your memory-bank, so you cannot get it out of your head.

Additionally one more element could be added; be the first in the brain of the consumer, have the “first mover advantage”. Robert Aunger argues when the rate of growth is this fast, the population of replicators rapidly satiates the environment. So in a competition, the replicator with the highest initial concentration, when multiplied by its growth rate, wins the race. Thus initial conditions have a large impact on the final composition of the population. In effect, this kind of growth gives an evolutionary advantage to those first on the scene. Once a solution is found, it becomes difficult for any later arrival to invade the population and dominate it, regardless of how good it is.

If companies show the best intention and dictate values that are not only for their own self-interest will consumers copy their values? In what sense does a consumer contribute in passing on brand values? Having a good image with values, does this make it easier to spread your message?

Reviewers should be payed? Yes or no? The first fine is a fact.

Andy Sernovitz's has made a post regarding a news topic: 

Social Media Safety Warning: NY State fines $300,000 for fake reviews. Learn to protect your brand.

His first point why this is good news is the following: "All ethical marketers know that we survive and thrive only through the trust and respect of our customers. Any effort to clean up the the bad actors is good for those of us who base our reputation and leadership on honesty and openness."

Andy continues with setting up guidelines for a company how to handle "getting" reviews, rule number 1: "Never pay for posts or reviews.  Do it even once, and you break the trust forever. Everyone will assume you pay for all reviews."

However Scott White (from BIG) cares to differ with not allowing companies to pay for reviews:

"Blog reviews are becoming a big business and have put a lot of bloggers to work. That’s a good thing."  Paying for reviews is "the biggest pile of crap I think I’ve ever heard and here’s why. Paying for someone to review your product or service has been going on since the beginning of capitalism. As long as the review is UNBIASED it’s kosher. Period. End of story. Bloggers are allowed to write whatever they want, good or bad."

However can a person be unbiased when he has received money? Lets take a look at the pharmacy business or any business. Doctors who were receiving gifts or incentives used to be common practice, but many companies have set up guidelines to limit this, due to the ethical issue. Business should be done fair, doctor practices should be untouched, a patient should receive the best medicine for him/her, not because a doctor just received a nice trip to the Bahama's from one manufacturer. 

Is it the same with writing reviews for companies/products? Are bloggers perhaps different and does the transparancy of the net create such an environment that I would still value a review if I knew some company paid that person to test the product. If that blogger has written many reviews for many different companies, yes perhaps, but still he could favor one company more than the other. But even when this person is not being paid he would still have preferences. 

Bloggers are allowed to write about anything they want of course, but should they be paid to be stimulated, the question perhaps is whether bloggers really need stimulation? Isn't it in the nature of the blogger to be stimulated by itself to share thoughts and discuss ideas. In this huge community of bloggers you can find somebody who is interested in your product. A company could contact the blogger to make him/her aware of products, but actually pay? 

If Bloggers receive money to review, they should mention that they received money to do the review. Would I still value his review if he wrote reviews only for this company? What's in it for me to believe him I would think? He receives an incentive, why should I be unbiased in believing him? 

Does paying reviewers kill the bloggers credibility? And therefor backfire on the paying company? 

Chriss his post:http://bit.ly/4msr1t

Andy's post: http://bit.ly/GYXuT

Religion, the most powerful transmitted idea?

Ideas that make sense, replicate better than those that do not by the very nature of the human mind. Pretty straight forward, right?

One of the most powerful memes in our society in the last centuries is the meme of religion, which deserves to be spoken about in more depth, and as Richard Brodie believes as well is an excellent example of the impact of a meme on people and society. Religions that have explanations for tough questions are much more popular than those that challenge people to think for themselves, such as Zen. Of course, those answers regarding tough questions do not have to be true, as long people can relate to them and understand.

Rituals are used in most religions, from Sunday church to saying grace before meals. The more an action, idea, or belief is repeated, the more comfortable we get with it and the less we question it: we become conditioned or programmed by it. Successful religions have evolved to embody what any advertising executive would tell you: repetition sells. Many religions are based in fear: Fear of God’s wrath, fear of burning in hell, fear of ostracism by one’s community. Setting up artificial dangers (pushing our primal buttons) and claiming to be a safe haven from them is a very powerful part of a belief system. Most people also have a button that draws them to belong to a group.

A good example of the strength of rehearsal is the Koran. The koranic requirement for public prayer five times a day spreads Islam by enunciating the faith within earshot of nearby non-Muslims. The frequent recitation of these prayers also helps preserve the faith by preventing Muslims from forgetting what they believe. According to Aaron Lynch this matters most in historical and modern regions of low literacy, since scriptural “memory” depends on reading. If we take stories in general as an example, any story or event that has great emotional impact, or has the effect that you cannot stop thinking about it, will go round and round in your head. With you thinking a lot about this event/story, you are more likely to pass it on to someone else, who may be similarly affected. 

A religion formed in this way, as a cultural virus, evolves not toward truth, not even toward the betterment of its adherents, but toward more effective memes. According to Richard Brodie this is the most crucial point: meme evolution is not designed to benefit the individual. Although memes could of course be beneficial to the individual. Many individuals have many personal benefits from believing and having faith in a religion, alone or in a community.

We have entered a stage of human civilisation where memes can have a long lasting life, due to the never-ending internet. Do we enter a stage where memes have a continuous influence on our lives or even stronger put; will memes (not only religious memes) lead our lives even more as they see fit? Will the continues transmission of ideas, in a medium like Twitter, have more impact on us than the newspaper of 10 years ago?

How will new communication effect our lives? And the future...

Don't you wonder how much the world will change in the next 3 years, 10 years and the unthinkable 20 years? 

http://bit.ly/wytUa

How will the world look like for the next generation, the children who are born now, most of them in India and China. Did you know how many college graduates graduated in 2006? In the US there were 1.3 million, in China 3.3 million, in India 3.1 million. How many of those 3.1 million Indian graduates speak english? An astonishing 100%. Who would have thought that it is predicted that in 10 years the number one English speaking country in the world will be...China!

The next generation of kids has a different live than ours, clearly! But who would have guessed that 70% of 4 year old kids in the US have already used a computer? That 21-year-olds have already sent/received 250,000 emails or instant messsages and 50% of them has created content on the web.

We are currently preparing students for jobs and technologies that don't yet exists...in order to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet. To bring Einstein to the equation: "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them".  

More interesting points can be found in this clip: Did you know 2.0.

http://bit.ly/wytUa

How will our world look like in 5 years? Do we even wish to think about how much the world will have changed in 20 years, will we be ready or will we be unable to catch up?

Similar clip, but more visual and potentially impactfuller, however the pace is also faster that all the data can dazzle you... your choice!

Twitter, the buzzing of a mosquito?

Which channel do we use for which purpose? These days we have many available channels to communicate through. I will stick to the online channels to keep it within limits: email, twitter, blogs, corporate websites, social networks as Facebook, Hyves, Hi5, Myspace, business networks as Linkedin, Plaxo, "share-with-a-friend" as to send a clip from youtube to your friends as a must see clip, and more for sure.

In the "old" days there was like one rule for communication; any official document (or any document from a company) would go on a physical paper. That’s not even a solid rule anymore. Bills and information comes through on email and you can even cancel some subscriptions online, no real signature is required. If we use an analogy to create an image of when we use each channel could we describe it with the analogy of a mosquito?

Twitter could be seen as hearing the buzz of a mosquito, it gets your attention very brief and when the mosquito flies away you have lost the attraction (and irritation). Is Twitter really something more? Emailing, "share-with-a-friend" (in a sense also an email) and leaving a post on a blog is like a bite of a mosquito, it stays a bit longer in your point of view, until your inbox has reached the next 50 emails and its out of your first page or you have posted a new post. Oldest rule in the book; out of sight, out of mind (heart).  We would call the forwarding of an email and the tracking of a friend on Facebook the rash of the bite. The rash grows, as does the spreading of the email (and the funny/interesting contents). And when the itchy part of the bite gets scratched a lot the rash stays a lot longer, potentially growing into an infection! Would this be equal to the email who is really catching our attention and keeps being send on? 

What could be the cure to this infection and what makes us from keeping to send an email forward? And to link this to social networks; what drives us to keep checking our Facebook friends to see what they are up to? 

Tracking the life and death of news

Cornell Chronicle: Tracking the news cycle.

As more and more news appears on the Internet as well as in print, it becomes possible to map the global flow of news by observing it online. Using this strategy, Cornell computer scientists have managed to track and analyze the "news cycle" -- the way stories rise and fall in popularity.

The ideal, Kleinberg said, would be to track "memes," or ideas, through cyberspace, but deciding what an article is about is still a major challenge for computing. The researchers sidestepped that obstacle by tracking quotations that appear in news stories, since quotes remain fairly consistent even though the overall story may be presented in very different ways by different writers.

Memes; a metaphor or is there more to it?

Memes; is it a metaphor for the mechanism of how ideas spread (or don't) or can memetics explain more?

The most common and more easily accepted role of the meme is that memetics stand for the process of how ideas are being spread through out the world; does the idea catch on? is it interesting for people to talk about? do the right people talk about it and do they know the right people to spread the meme to larger populations? It is the very mechanism behind Word of Mouth that defines successful WoM.  

However memetics is also based on the ideology of why we think the things we think. This goes a step further and this ideology is based on an important insight relevant to social species like humans. According to Robert Aunger this begins by recognizing that many of our thoughts are not generated from within our own brains, but are acquired as ideas from others. What memetics argues is that, once inside us, these thoughts then go to work for themselves, pursuing goals that may be in conflict with our best interests. These ideas have their own interests by virtue of having qualities that make them like biological viruses. Central question here is: do we have thoughts, or do they have us? At this stage memetics could lead to a good filosophical discussion. 

The moment we talk about memes being part of the evolution process - being part of the missing link between primates and us humans - there are more disciplines that would like to participate in the debate. 

The process of getting a meme across requires imitation, Susan Blackmore suggest that imitation requires three skills: making decisions about what to imitate, complex transformations from one point of view to another, and the production of matching bodily actions. These basic skills, or at least the beginnings of them, are available in many primates and were probably available to our ancestors of 5 million years ago. Primates have good motor control and hand co-ordination, and good general intelligence, which would enable them to classify actions and decide what to imitate. To indulge in deception, pretence and social manipulation you need to be able to put yourself in another’s shoes; to take the other’s point of view; to imagine what it would be like to be that other. This is precisely what you need, to be able to imitate someone else.  

These thougths can confirm the suggestion that imitation is an enormously demanding task, and that it takes a large brain to be able to do it. It is further predicted that many aspects of language and thought will turn out to be best understood as by-products of our brains’ ability to select which aspects of the word to imitate. These are: selection for imitation, selection for imitating the best imitators, selection for mating with the best imitators, and (possibly) memetic sexual selection. Once early hominids achieved imitation, the second replicator (the meme) was born and these processes began to drive the increase in brain size. The enormous human brain has been created by the memes.

Memes could only come into existence when the genes had provided brains that were capable of imitation – and the nature of those brains must have influenced which memes took hold and which did not. However, once memes had come into existence they would be expected to take on a life of their own. It could even be suggested that the human brain is an example of memes forcing genes to build ever better and better meme-spreading genes. 

Memes having control over genes, with the genes still thinking they are in control?