Meme cycle is here!
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All posts for the month September, 2012
Just something I’ve been thinking about for the past week. Meme cycle will be up shortly.
Article can be found here.
The article provides several tools for web developers. It allows you to check Google page ranks right from the page. However, it also provides the code so you can add the same tool to your own websites. It explains clearly what it does, and offers more code to implement if you want to easily click and check your own website’s page rank right from your home page.
These tools are really cool. The code is simple and easy to implement, and the usefulness of the tools is very high. As we’ll be checking on our meme’s success throughout this class, this will be invaluable to determining if our meme is bringing people back to our website after discovering it, if that’s even our goal. I would love to use this little tool in other websites I make as well. Maybe not applicable with all sites, but certainly something I will be using in this class and others down the road.
The link to the article can be found here.
The article talks about a study that was done through researchers at West Point to see how many people it takes to make an influence in a social network. The results they found were less than 1% of the network population could “initiate a social cascade” in roughly three and half hours. They took they’re research from 31 different social networks, though the example they site is Friendster.
This is very important towards our meme work because it brings in data that confirm that the term patient zero does have real world input. Less than 1% of a network can spread my meme in meer hours after its inception. The question this article brings up is who is this less than 1%? And how do I get them to spread my meme? That’s what I’ll have to figure out.
Sorry for the inconvenience folks, but seeing as my illustrator’s trial has expired I will have to outline the meme cycle for my idea in text for today. I will try and be as clear and concise as can be, in hopes that you’ll be able to visualize what I’m trying to accomplish this semester. Here is the Meme Cycle.
The idea for my meme came form a friend of mine who I’ve worked with recently. He is doing some truly incredible things with his life, and is still living at home. What I would like to do is help him get recognized for all of the hard work that he does, mostly due to his own motivation and inspiration.
My friend is Kyle Edgerley. He’s has worked with video most of his life, both directing and editing short little films when we were 10 to the larger scale projects that he does now. His work has improved dramatically over the years, and he’s recently expanded into a teaching role for younger kids who want to learn like he did. He’s very involved in the home school crowd as his whole family has been home schooled, and draws his actors and contributors from this community.
My mission is to help Kyle get to the next level. I would like to increase the awareness of the work he is doing and the videos he has done previously. He’s working this year to make as much money as he can for college, so I’d love to help him build an online persona that could help improve his chances of getting into the best colleges. I would also like to try and get actors to come to him, as he’s had to use anyone he can get for many years. It would be great to have actors coming in and auditioning to work with him, because the amount of work he has done to get to where he is now is incredible.
My plan is this; The payload will be his Youtube channel, Reel Havoc. The channel has all of his work that he wants to be available to the public, so this is the perfect link for those to check out what kind of work he’s capable of.
The circulation system will start off with blogs. I’m thinking of starting with a local Montessori school teacher who teaches young kids in a daycare like setting. She has a blog called “Montessori Mama” that is well followed amongst parents who’s kids participate in this teaching method. This would be an excellent vehicle for bringing in parents who could send their kids to the camps that Kyle runs. Facebook and Twitter will also be good circulation systems, as the videos are short enough that they would be watchable in either medium. This will promote more of his work than his teaching, which is the real focus. The teaching blogs will help get his name out there and get people interested. I will also be posting in this blog, including my facebook and twitter, about new movies or updates that Kyle has been working on, including some plans for the future or calls for actors and other interested parties. This will put his name out there more and increase the buzz.
The direction will be towards schools and actors. Schools will be able to see the merit of having Kyle attend their school, and actors will see the benefit to being apart of whatever project Kyle wants to work on.
I would like Kyle’s name to be recognized locally (midcoast Maine) as a young director who is doing some incredible things and is definitely someone to help or to talk about. I don’t think colleges will come into the picture until he begins applying later on in the year, and possibly next year, but local recognition would be a great start in getting Kyle’s work out there in the world. And he deserves every bit of recognition he can get.
Article can be found here: http://simplifierlab.com/mt/archives/2006/02/drunk-driving-ad-campaign.php
All that is in the article is one picture that shows a handicapped parking spot with this script painted on the asphalt: “Every 48 seconds, a drunk driver makes another person eligible to park here.” The image is vivid, no words or explanation to supplement the image. It makes the message even clearer.
A good example of a picture is worth a thousand words. The simplicity helps add to the horror of the fact, the realization of the frequency of such an awful thing happening so often. It is also a thousand times more effective than any PSA that the government could have written. The originality helps the piece and makes it stronger, more relatable and memorable, all factors that strengthen the image.
Article can be found here: http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/050614glaser/
This article talks about a contest that was held to see which website could get the most traffic or technocrati links between May 19 and June 9. What they found was the winners didn’t have short catchy names, or most of the things you’ll see big corporations trying to create in today’s viral advertising world. They were funny, controversial, meant to shock and awe. Many of them had long unwieldy names like http://forgetmenotpanties.contagiousmedia.org and came out in the top.
What’s important to take from this article is the trends that are appearing in contagious media now and for the future. Short, hip domain names are no longer important. Something that will stick in the brain is of the upmost importance, whether it comes from your content or your domain name. As long as you can make an impression, good or bad, you will get traffic. As they say, “there is no good or bad press; only press.”
Image can be found here: http://assets0.ordienetworks.com/images/user_photos/1285387/3b218f7e6eca95e1d1e6f2c77f1e7be7_width_600x.png
This post is especially interesting to me. When you first look at the image, it’s just an empty chair done in the style of the classic “hope” poster President Obama used in his campaign in 2008. It’s referencing Clint Eastwood’s speech at the Republican national convention held recently in which he had a dialogue with an empty chair, pretending to speak with an invisible Obama. The image was created directly after the convention and spread like wild fire. The humor that the viewer takes from the image depends on they’re political views. A democrat will find different humor in the image than a republican would.
The lesson to take from this meme is simplicity works. The image is extremely clever, and it’s power and cleverness derive from it’s simplicity.
Article can be found here: http://sproutsocial.com/insights/2012/07/avoid-twitter-mistakes-brands/
In this article author Anna Washenko writes about four general mistakes that are important to avoid if you use twitter as a tool for your brand. For each mistake she provides an example of how a brand misused, misunderstood, or misjudged the rules and options available with Twitter. The mistakes include tweeting from the wrong account, tweeting rather than direct messaging, spamming rather than promoting, and hashtags going viral for the wrong reasons.
The mistakes these companies and brands made are ones to avoid when I introduce my meme to the world. All the mistakes Washenko mentions are easy to do if you aren’t careful, and since twitter is new territory for me they are all things I will need to watch out for when I begin the meme process.
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