What people search for varies over time. Copying results in large scale swings in search query popularity due to herd behavior.
If you can quickly create content that matches what people have recently started searching for, you can attract
a lot of attention. This approach is known as "trend riding" or "trend following".
Trend riding is a very common technique. People frequently promote their own content on the back of news stories, for example.
The picture for this post illustrates the basic approach. It is content linked to a trending topic (the American election) with
an attached advertisement, using memetic hitchhiking.
Talking about memetic hitchhiking, trend riding can be regarded as a special case of this where the memetic linkage between the carrier and the payload is linkage in search space. That's an unusual type of memetic linkage - but it can still be effective. All the usual logic associated with memetic hitchhiking applies in this case.
In fact, as the picture illustrates, content doesn't have to contain the search terms to benefit from the effect. Sometimes, association is enough. That means that the memetic linkage involved can be in virtual worlds created inside brains.
Riding trends can sometimes work better than simply hitch-hiking on popular content. The problem with popular content is that others will have the same idea as you - and your message may get lost among the messages of others. If you can get in early on a rising trend, others may not have identified it yet - resulting in more traffic for you.
These days there's a fair amount of pop memetics out there.
Know Your Meme is one of the best-known examples, but these
days, most news channels give some coverage to memes and there's
plenty of idle speculation about topics such as why some
memes are more successful than others. Marketing is another
common source of speculative pop memetics.
Taking a historical perspective, it seems likely that
memetics has been hindered by real scientists not wanting
to associate themselves with the work of folks such as
Richard Brodie
and Aaron Lynch.
Evolutionary psychology illustrates the down-side of popular
interpretations producing inaccuracies.
There's a whole bunch of scientists that view evolutionary psychology as
a giant cess-pool of poor-quality scientific speculations. While I don't
think this is a defensible attitude towards evolutionary psychology, I
can understand that
looking down on dodgy science
probably plays a signalling role for scientists.
Should memetics take care to avoid the fate of
evolutionary psychology in this area? I'm inclined to
think that a wealth of memetics "just so stories" are
inevitable at this stage - and that there's not much
that can be done about this.
Indeed, it seems to me that evolutionary psychology
has suffered little from its reputation for consisting
of just-so stories. Instead, if anything, controversy
appears to have attracted attention to the ideas
associated with the field. Sometimes, marketers claim
that there's
no such thing as bad publicity. Evolutionary
psychology seems to illustrate this idea.
Memetics also seems to have considerable potential for
controversy. Where evolutionary psychology focuses on
human universals, memetics studies the causes of
differences between humans. This is a potentially
sensitive subject area touching on areas such as
inequality, xenophobia, political differences and religion.
One one hand this makes it all the more important to
get the science in these areas right. However, it may
also offers memetics controversy-based marketing opportunities.
The recent piece of pop memetics This Video Will Make You Angrydescribes how
warring memeplexes attract attention and energy of netizens. The
term "meme" has does a good job recently of hitch-hiking -
its way to success - by attaching itself to highly-spreadable
viral content. Perhaps the term "memetics" can do something similar -
by hitch-hiking on controversial scientific content relating to
topics such as politics and religion.
Hi. I'm Tim Tyler, and this is a review of this book:
Zarrella's Hierarchy of Contagiousness: The Science, Design, and Engineering of Contagious Ideas by Dan Zarrella
Dan Zarrella's an internet marketing Guru. He's researched
internet marketing and social media, and has some ideas about what makes things go viral. Some of them are encapsulated in this book.
The book is very small and very short. Much of it was previously posted on Dan's web site. However a small book-shaped package is a convenient format. Dan says the bunnies on the front represent rapidly-reproducing ideas.
Dan uses memetics, cites Richard Dawkins and says:
Our world is made of memes. If you've ever seen the matrix movies, You'll remember their world was composed entirely of computer code. Everything people interacted with was built from computerized instructions. Similarly, our world is made of contagious ideas. Everything made by huamns - from the chair you're sitting on, to the book you're reading - exists only because someone had the idea to invent it and that idea caught on, spreading from person to person.
It's a memorable image: our world is indeed made of memes.
The book is full of social media marketing tips of the type Dan posts on his blog. It's full of graphs and charts telling you what and when to tweet for the best results.
There was one bit of the book which I really didn't like - where Dan defined a measure of the rate of increase of memetic infections per generation, claimed that trying for an explosive epidemic was unrealistic and then recommended using big seeds.
Dan doesn't seem to think small seeds are effective. It is true that you should spend some of your marketing budget on seeding your idea. However making your idea spreadable is really very important. Dan says that when you do get a viral idea, it's just a fluke, and you shouldn't build your marketing strategy on luck. But relying on big seeds is not really correct advice in general. Pop songs may not reach every single member of the population before dying away, but they do reach many millions and that's good enough for their composers.
Some do have to rely on big seeds, since they have content that requires it - but most should try and use highly-contagious memes in their marketing, for best effect.
Dan advocates a science of marketing. However, few marketers do very much science, since they often don't want to publish their raw data, and they often don't trust what other marketers say. It's probably more realistic to advise marketers to cherry pick the best bits from the scientific method - such as iterating the process of performing experiments, measuring their outcomes and making changes. Maybe it's best to regard marketing as a technology - rather than a science.
The book is pretty neat. It is short, readable and fun. Most readers will probably be hungry for more details, but at least this is a start.
Social media marketing departments must decide how to allocate their budget between making content that will spread - and distributing that content.
The initial distribution is sometimes called "seeding", and focusing on that distribution is sometimes called using a "big seed".
Big seeding was popularised in 2007 by an article entitled Viral Marketing for the Real World - by Duncan J. Watts, Jonah Peretti, and Michael Frumin.
So, in the light of their article, the question naturally arises: does big seeding actually work?
For my epidemic threshold article I made a simple computer
simulation of epidemics that produced graphs showing how the number of infected individuals could increase or decrease over time.
An epidemic - showing the number on infected hosts plotted against time.
The model that produced the above diagram is extremely simple. Individuals are modelled as being either infected or not infected. They have a constant probability of dying in each generation. Senescence and pathology are not modelled. Infected agents infect more agents (randomly) in each generation. Then some individuals (chosen randomly) die, and are replaced by healthy newly-born individuals. The population size is a fixed constant - so the death rate and birth rate are equal. The plot was made by varying two parameters: the infection rate and the death/birth rate. These variables are sampled from a uniform bounded random distribution to create the plot.
The seed population is fixed at the same value for each run and is shown as the y-intercept on the left hand side of the diagram.
The diagram illustrates the concept of an epidemic threshold - if content is insufficiently infectious, it dies off, and goes extinct.
The next issue I wanted to explore was to see how the seed population size
influenced the extinction rate.
This is a plot of survival against seed population size.
Here, "survival" refers to having a population size of at least
1 at the end of the run - i.e. it refers to not going extinct.
This graph illustrates two main things:
Having a seed population too small is often fatal - random fluctuations in population size too easily
cause your seed population to execute a random walk into
extinction.
Big seeding rapidly runs into diminishing returns - provided you seed on a reasonable scale, success depends quite a bit on how much you exceed the epidemic threshold by - and not so much on the size of your seed population.
How to manage the tradeoff between the seeding budget and the contagiousness budget is beyond the scope of this article - but hopefully these graphs will help people to understand the basics of the dynamics involved.
The advert used fear of the end of the world to promote the
presidential campaign of Lyndon Johnson. Johnson won a landslide victory - and
the advert made marketing history - for its controversial use of fear as an
incentive.
You can watch the Daisy Ad here:
Religions make use of fear as a motivator by threatening helfire and damnation. Chain letters use the same trick - by threatening unspecified bad luck if you break the chain. However, the use of fear in a political marketing campaign seems rather underhand.
These days, some derivative adverts have appeared. Here we will present a few
of them - and consider how they fit into the terminological framework of
memetics. The first one is probably the best one.
These adverts use a kind of
memetic hitchhiking on the original advert, via its title.
They exhibit memetic linkage to the original ad - in the namespace of video titles.
They use search magnet techniques to show up in searches for the original advert.
Memetics has access to a plethora of negative words to describe the spread of ideas.
"Viral", "contagion" and "epidemic" are some of the most commonly-used terms.
These draw on the language of epidemiology. There are also words to describe rapid growth sometimes exhibited by these systems: "explosion", "boom", "ignition" and "wildfire". These terms are associated with fires and explosions.
Unfortunately, a lot of these terms are pretty negative. This is unfortunate - since we know that ideas were - on average - positive among our ancestors - since humans have idea-collecting and spreading adaptations.
Marketers would probably prefer not to use such negative terms. After all,
they are typically trying to hook consumers up with producers in win-win deals
- and not trying to infect them with some kind of deadly plague.
So: what positive terms are there out there? Not so many, alas. After
surveying the positive terms for growth: "branching", "budding", "sprouting",
the most appropriate positive term I managed to find was "bloom" - as in
"algal bloom".
So, perhaps in the future, positive marketing campaigns will bloom - and then bear fruit.
"Search magnet" is a conventional term in internet marketing. It refers to
a co-meme which is effective at attracting the attention of those searching.
If using
Hofstadter's terminology, a "search magnet" is a co-meme
that attracts the attention of searchers to the scheme's bait.
On the internet most searches are textual searches - so search
magnets are often textual. Sometimes searches have a visual component - for example, where multiple items are presented to the user and they select one. So, we also have:
Text search magnets - uses commonly-searched-for keywords;
Usually the prime function of the search magnetco-meme is to attract attention. However, it can do double duty - and be combined with the bait, or other co-memes.
Case studies
Will it Blend is a classic use of search magnets.
Blendtec's Will It Blend?viral videos combined many popular consumer electronics products with the Blendtec Total Blender in a novel way - by "blending" them. The show features the Blendtec founder, Tom Dickson, attempting to blend unusual items to help him show off the power of his blender.
The full story is here - but for our purposes note that the result was a large number of short videos with names featuring popular consumer-electronics products.
The videos were placed on the internet in early November. Within just a few short days, we had millions of views. The campaign took off almost instantly. We have definitely felt an impact in sales. Will it Blend has had an amazing impact to our commercial and our retail products.
A commonly-used marketing and advertising technique involves forming a link between a common phrase - or a catchy song - and your product. I call this product triggering, or sometimes just triggering. Famous examples of the technique include:
“Have a break... Have a Kit Kat.”
“Happiness... is a cigar called Hamlet.”
“There are some things money can’t buy. For everything else, there’s MasterCard.”
The link is formed via observational learning, and then pattern-completion mechanisms complete the catchphrase when presented with the trigger.
Some catchphrases manage without including the product name - e.g.:
“Eat Fresh.”
“Because I'm worth it.”
“Think Different.”
“Once you pop, you can't stop.”
Many catchphrases receive special legal protection from trademark law - to allow those who register and pay a government office a legally-enforced monopoly over the catchphrase. For example, the phrase "Where do you want to go today?" is "owned" by Microsoft.
For the most part, triggering is not really a form of viral marketing. It does not normally rely on repetition of the advertising slogan by consumers, but rather works through conventional display advertising.
The slogans are carefully crafted memes, though - and surely have some potential for spreading between consumers.
Triggering is closely related to the concept of
memetic hitchhiking.
A self-help video that deals with the topic:
I go to a lot of social media conferences and read a lot of social media advice and most of it is what I call 'unicorns and rainbows.' Stuff like 'engage in the conversation' or 'hug your followers.' It's good-sounding advice, and hard to disagree with – I'm not going to tell you to punch your customers in the face. The problem is that it's not based on anything more substantial than what 'feels right' typically. I like to get beyond the unicorns and rainbows into the real data, the real science of social media about why people behave the way they do online and how we as marketers can leverage that behavior to engineer contagious ideas.
Genetic hitchhiking is a well-known and well-understood effect in organic biology - where a gene spreads by virtue of linkage to another gene which is subject to favourable selection.
Memetic hitchhiking is a key marketing concept. It typically involves taking some viral content, and attaching some payload material to it. The viral content spreads naturally, dragging the payload material along for the ride in the process.
The viral content can come from practically anywhere.
Payload removal
Payload removal is a real problem. For example, this viral video is an IKEA advert - showing an elderly lady activating a man's car air bag by hitting his car with her handbag. It has been replicated countless times (here, here, here, here and here) on YouTube - and
on most occasions the trailing advert has been stripped off.
Interleaving
Rather than just appending or prepending the payload to the viral content, a more sophisticated technique is to interleave the two. For example, here is a video of Google's Chrome interleaved with gay pride as a delivery mechanism.
Memetic linkage
Memetic hitchhiking depends on the idea of memetic linkage - which describes how memes can come to be linked together in various ways.
A closely-related technique involves forming a link between a common phrase - or a catchy song - and your product. I call that triggering - and cover it in a separate post.
Bait and hook
The favoured content normally contains what Hofstadter described as the bait and hook. The bait is what attracts people in the first place, and the hook is what makes them spread the idea. Between them, these do much of the work of propagating the content.
Anyone who has ever attached a picture of a pretty lady to their article or product is essentially using memetic hitchhiking for marketing purposes.
Of course, I genuinely needed a picture of a female hitchhiker for this article. The pretty girl is the favoured content. The payload that comes along for the ride is her boyfriend - who was hiding off-camera at the time the above photograph was taken.
Hitchhiking towards extinction
While hitchhiking with positively-selected memes leads to success, hitchhiking with unsuccessful memes leads towards extinction. It really matters which memes are used as hitchhiking partners.
Criticism
Memetic hitchhiking has been one of the targets of critics of memetics. Here is Massimo Pigliucci:
Yes, the analogy transfers, not the theory. For instance, you simply cannot apply the population genetic terms "hitchhiking" and "recombination" to memes while retaining their technical meaning. You can do so only by analogy, which is the whole problem with memetics. It's a metaphor.
As you can see from this page this criticism is technically mistaken. Hitchhiking (in the technical sense) applies to memes just as it does to genes.
Examples
Microsoft used memetic hitchhiking using the double-rainbow video. Here is the original video:
...and here is the Microsoft version:
Others have made spin-off versions of the video, attaching their own distinctive elements to the original in various ways. For example here is an actress performing a double-rainbow monologue.
Memetic hitchhiking is used by parodies. It is used by cover versions. Fan fiction uses it. It is used by many mashups.
Another advertising example would be this viral Bruce Lee footage:
Here, though, there is some risk that the viral part of the video could become separated from the Nokia advert "payload". Another example is the T-Mobile Royal Wedding:
Again, little besides copyright law prevents the viral content being separated from the advert - payload removal.
Another example of memetic hitchhiking is Volkswagen's Piano stairs / fun theory advert. Note that in this case, the advert is relatively inconspicuous. Only a few would care enough to bother with payload removal.
I have noticed that quite a few online RSS readers pass animated GIFs through - including popular ones like Netvibes. Many common blog feeds pass them through as well. However, so far, I haven't seen too many people using animated GIFs in my RSS news feeds.
They are probably pretty attention grabbing. Advertisers have a long history of using them - and using animation has been shown to attract a larger percentage of user clicks. So maybe more people will be using them to promote their content via RSS feeds in the future.
For most of this year, this page has been one of the most popular pages on this blog. Since there isn't very much here - besides that animated GIF - that seems to add support to the hypothesis.
What people search for varies over time. Copying results in large scale swings in search query popularity due to herd behavior.
These days there's a fair amount of pop memetics out there.
Marketers have gone meme crazy over the last few years. Here's a sample of articles on the topic published in November 2013:
Social media marketing departments must decide how to allocate their budget between making content that will spread - and distributing that content.
Memetics has access to a plethora of negative words to describe the spread of ideas.
A commonly-used marketing and advertising technique involves forming a link between a common phrase - or a catchy song - and your product. I call this product triggering, or sometimes just triggering. Famous examples of the technique include:
Congratulations to Dan and Alsion Zarella on the launch of 
I have noticed that quite a few online RSS readers pass animated GIFs through - including popular ones like 
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