Strongest Memes of 2010 (So Far).
A key part of marketing to the web is knowing what your audience is thinking. This is basic to any marketing, really. Consider a television commercial for beer. It might be a funny commercial. Fosters (we’re sorry to bring them up) advertises in America with a series called “How to speak Australian” featuring jokes based on colliding perceptions. The point is, they wouldn’t be funny if they didn’t know something about the target audience and how they think.
So, without further ado:
- Keyboard cat – Example here. A cat that plays the organ. With help. Everybody thinks it’s hilarious. Usage: “Play him off, Keyboard Cat!”
- Chatroulette – Site here. Chat Roulette matches you up randomly with another visitor, and both of you interact through webcams and text chat. Crazy shenanigans occur here daily.
- Triforce – This is a mystic symbol originally from the Nintendo “Legend of Zelda” games. It has become a meme after it was discovered that one could enter some Unicode characters to compose a similar symbol, but it’s easy to get wrong. So being able to “triforce” is a sign that you’re an expert user. Usage: “Newbies can’t triforce!”
- tl;dr – It’s stronger than ever. “tl;dr” stands for “too long; didn’t read” and is the canonical response to any long ramble of text in a forum. Users are now including the summarized version at the end of a long story. Usage: “Does anyone have the tl;dr version?”
- Look At My Horse – This one is not safe for work! Basically there’s a viral Flash cartoon out there called “Amazing Horse” which is this year’s hot web obsession. Be warned, it is tasteless and vulgar.
- Death Note – A manga (Japanese comic book series). Rapidly becoming the greatest dramatic manga series ever made. Death Note is about a shinigami (Japanese angel of death) who drops his notebook on Earth just to see what will happen. The book has the power to cause the death of anybody whose name you write in it! An A+ student picks it up and decides to use it to fight crime, but the power goes to his head and it becomes a battle of wits between him and the world. It gets even crazier from there! Hugely popular everywhere.
There they are! Use them how you see fit in your next ad campaign.
How To Use Passion In Web Marketing
When we spotted the post In Praise of Passion over at Boing-Boing, it got us thinking. As Internet marketers, we all know that our digital strategy should include website design, search engine optimization, advertising, and so on. But how many of us think about whether we’re inspiring passion?
Some ideas for generating passion around your business:
If your service solves a problem, state how devoted to solving that problem you are. Talk about it a lot! Explain how it’s the central driving force for you being in business. If you run a graphic design agency, you can make your motto something like “Ending Ugly Web Design, One Graphic At A Time!”
Your business does good with a blog. A blog is a place where you can be looser and casual. You can be funny or you can whinge a little! Most of all, you can dump your soul into sharing your passion with the world. It’s not just a business, it’s a mission, and you’re the general inspiring the troops…
Your advertising, marketing, and email newsletter can be designed to convey just a touch more drama. Remember, your audience is exposed to more media content than it can digest every day; to stand out, you need to grab some attention!