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Please check us out at www.memeticbrand.com.

The eBook is available there too!

thank you,
Michael

Another Great Michael Wesch Video

55 minutes … long but worthwhile …

This prior one, less than 5 minutes, is one of my all time favourites …

Check out his blog post on “Context Collapse” here.

UPDATE:  June over at Network Weaving is lovin’ Michael Wesch too: http://www.networkweaving.com/blog/2008/08/web-20-and-network-weaving.html

Teenage Beer Drinking Party … Shibboleths

For one entire year in high school, at least once a week, I calmly walked into our Principal’s office, was offered the use of the PA system with a smile and I announced the time and location of a teenage beer drinking party that was broadcast throughout the entire high school. Eventually most of the kids from two different high schools made it out to one of the parties. I never got caught. Ferris Bueller eat your heart out.

Of course I did not actually announce, “Hey everyone! They will serve us booze at Daniel’s Restaurant! See you there at 7 pm tonight!” I spoke in code …

“There will be a Break Dance Club meeting at Danny’s at 7 pm tonight. Members are reminded to arrive promptly and dress appropriately.”

This was long before the “flash-parties” that are the terror of today’s parents, where news of a private “parents away!” party can spread by text message like wild fire and quickly escalate into a swarm of dangerous strangers wrecking and looting a home. That is an entirely different communication effect with its own memetic qualities.

“Break Dance Club” became a “shibboleth” for some of the teen community in my home town. The idea of a Break Dance Club seemed innocent enough to our teachers and parents in a context where a moon walking Michael Jackson was a mass communication pop culture hit. To us the idea of a “Break Dance Club” was an immediate attention getter. Our party music came from Canadian punk rock bands like Teenage Head and the raging guitars of April Wine.

Who are the goofs in this “Break Dance Club”? (murmurred explanation) Ahhhh … ok, I “get it”. I’m “in”. See you there. Hey – are you going to the Break Dance Club meeting? Wha? And so on …

What are your brand “shibboleths”?

Do you know the “shibboleths” of your competitors?

I wonder what Chip & Dan Heath would say about the structural factors that make effective shibboleths? I am reading their book about the memetics of ideas, “Made to Stick“. It is great! But it is focused on how to achieve mass viral success. So far I have not seen them elaborate on how a memetic brand can also have elements that are exclusive – maybe to your employees, perhaps to only your most important customers.

I have been thinking of “Social Capital Value Add” as a sort of shibboleth that will resonate with disciples of value based management, economic profit/economic value add and brand valuation. I am not going after a mass viral “Tipping Point” hit. I am trying to bring a message to a small but potent group of executives within a framework that brings them meaning both in terms of how to understand what is happening and what to do about it.

Is that the right approach?

Anywhoo – thank you to my friend Doug Ireland for explaining to me what I am thinking.

A Worthy Request: Signal of Altruistic Type

Check out this post by Collin please.  You should do this because he is a great guy and his sister is doing something cool.

From a memetic branding stand point, you might want to think about how altruism is important to everthing that you do in this new era that we live in.

“Economic theory suggests at least three mechanisms which induce the decision-maker to treat the partner more generously when there is a prospect of future interaction. First, the decision-maker can grant favors because she expects the partner to repay these in the future (enforced reciprocity)… Second, the possibility of future interaction gives incentives for the decision-maker to signal her altruistic type to the partner (Benabou and Tirole 2006). Third, psychological game theory has modeled preference-based reciprocity where decision-makers behave generously because they expect the partner to behave kindly towards them in some future interaction, and because they derive utility from rewarding kind behavior (Rabin 1993, Dufwenberg and Kirchsteiger 2004)” (Leider, Stephen, Mobius, Markus, Rosenblat, Tanya and Do, Quoc-Anh, “How Much is a Friend Worth? Directed Altruism and Enforced Reciprocity in Social Networks” p.1, October 2007)

The definition of social surplus that most “iPod killer” strategies employ is greater “utility.” They seek to beat iPod by building a better mousetrap with better product features and better design. Rebate strategies and typical loyalty programs (earning points for rewards) are also widely tried methods.

It is a social surplus defined as greater signal of altruistic type that may be the most interesting to study further as the link between social capital and corporate earnings comes to be accepted. There is some evidence that social Causes are the kind of maxim behind which business may align their activities as they develop memetic brands. For example just the top 5 causes on the Causes application on Facebook reach about 7.5 million people.

It brings with it the possibility of new motives for corporate social responsibility. Not only will the corporation be asked to be more accountable for its actions, perhaps the corporation can be encouraged to invest in ways for its social connections – consumers, suppliers, employees, investors, owners, analysts and value added resellers – to move beyond feel-good CSR tactics towards a relationship in which the opportunity is seized by each forging identities based upon greater social contribution.

Please check out the cross-post over at http://socialcapitalvalueadd.wordpress.com/2008/07/28/signal-of-altruistic-type-and-corporate-motivations/ for the corporate implications beyond memetic branding of this thinking.

Memetic Naming: A Boy Named Sue – Johnny Cash

Check out this link to find a pretty good overview of traditional brand thinking when it comes to brand naming:

What makes a winning brand name? A name that requires no introduction, no explanation and very little advertising to give it clout.

Here is great new thinking about naming from Seth Godin:

A long time ago, the goal of a name was to capture the essence of your positioning. To deliver a USP, so you could establish supremacy in your space just with your name. International Business Machines and Shredded Wheat were good efforts at this approach.

It quickly became clear, though, that descriptive names were too generic, so the goal was to coin a defensible word that could acquire secondary meaning and that you could own for the ages. That’s why “Jet Blue” is a much better name than “Southwest” and why “Starbucks” is so much better than “Dunkin Donuts”.

“Naming companies” flourished, charging clients hundreds of thousands of dollars to coin made up words like Altria.

And here is a something that made me think – hey!  a memetic brand name! 

What do you think?  Life ain’t easy for a boy named sue, but its that name that had memetic qualities and implications far beyond any traditional notion of market positioning.

UPDATE: Doug added a great comment below: “I think one person who has used his memetic name quite well is Om Malik, of GigaOm.com – the homonymic relation to ohm gives it a tech luster while keeping the sense of the personal perspective of a curator of information.”

Are relationships memetic?

Here is a quote from one of my forum discussions:

Michael, you state,”Of course relationships can be controlled by third parties and varying environmental contexts. Ask any pair of siblings who have been separated by the border between North and South Korea or the Berlin Wall. Ask Facebook, who at first did not let you in unless you were a student. Or Google, who knows what they are up to?”

That’s true for “physical restraints/boundaries” but not “mental/motivational states” which are the essence of relationships.

So I agree. Perhaps “influence” is a better word to use than control when it comes to describing relationships. But I am not trying to be politically correct here. I am concerned that the potential exists for corporations to get so far ahead in managing and exploiting social networks that their “influence” will amount to “control” for many.

In any event, this exchange provoked some new thinking for me. Perhaps the “memetic brand” idea is worth exploring for a reason that I have not previously directly addressed?

Relationships are memetic.

Broadband powered individuals are the emerging dominant media platform.

If we ponder what makes relationships evolve or become extinct, which we all have a well developed instinct for, then we will have moved a great distance towards understanding how brands live or die beyond the broadcast era.

Susan Blackmore TED talk, released June 8

A few memetic brand reflections that occur while watching:

Susan Blackmore Tedtalk

- good introduction to the foundations of memetics,
- we are the meme machines,
- what are the keys to selection? Variation is a key to selection. Mutation/variation is key to the survival and the spread of an idea, key to memetic branding but contradicts the traditional brand mantras of consistency, continuity and conformity … hmm,
- “don’t think intelligence”, “think replicators” … this would seem to point us as brand strategists, towards investing a lot more time and money on understanding and developing relationships with broadband empowered uploaders, we over invest in campaign creative and broadcast “push” because it is easier,
- “spreading memes is dangerous” but economic network theory (UPDATE: Just came across this related paper: http://econ-www.mit.edu/files/2756, it’s new!) makes us hopeful that not only will we observe and replicate the behavour of our neighbors, there will be sufficient optimism to spur experiments, so that we will settle on optimum behaviours … hope matters. Elections like this one in the USA, matter …

Launch the video and please jot down your thoughts as they occur below …

Follow Me, Follow You on Twitter

memeticbrand

That’s my twitter handle.  Despite the technical problems that Twitter has been having, I finally took the plunge at MESH08.  I promised to monitor the “back channel” for a few of the panelists on www.twemes.com and I just could not stand being a fly on the wall any longer.

I must say that being live in one session and monitoring the tweets from two other sessions brought an incredible FULL ON level of engagement that I could not image before Twitter and Twemes.

But my main motive for joining Twitter is not to monitor back channel.  My real reason is that I want to tell you all about what I ate for dinner – NOT. 

My real reason is because I definitely think that it is a new medium that is particularly suited for memetic branding purposes. 

Firstly, there is still a relatively small group of people on twitter (even less following me!).  They are the early adoptors and in most cases, they publish blogs and other web content, so they are endowed with scaled up forms of social capital.

Perhaps more importantly, I think Twitter is a medium that is involved in the genesis of shared perception.  From a memetic branding stand point, that is worth exploring.

Finally, over the years I have lived in different parts of Asia, Europe and North America.  My personal network is stretched by time and geography.  So far, only a few of my contacts are on Twitter, but I can really see how this is going to make the value of these global relationships present in each moment, in a much more tangible and immediate way.

I can only describe my initial impressions of Twitter as - prescience.

15hrs ago – “I am brushing my teeth”.  Can’t you see the potential!

Vote SCVA! The dog buttons …

A few weeks ago, after receiving a reviewers version of “Introducing Social Capital Value Add” one of the founders of www.changethis.com suggested that I propose SCVA as a ChangeThis manifesto.   

This afternoon I received a phone call and email confirming that the Editorial Board at www.changethis.com has accepted my proposal.  It should be posted for voting on their site tomorrow (May 20).

Distributing the SCVA idea through ChangeThis would be a great way to obtain the next round of feedback required to improve it.  Tom Peters, Chris Anderson, Gladwell, Seth Godin, Toronto’s recently attracted Richard Florida and many more have instigated some great ideas through www.changethis.com. 

The hitch is that getting a proposal up on the site is only the first step.  Now I need people to vote to have the proposal published as a full manifesto. 

I have made a concscience effort to cultivate my social capital over the years volunteering for alumni groups, doing the business, Facebook and LinkedIn networking thing, so I am hopeful that I’ll get by with a little help from my friends.

Nevertheless, the fact is that we’ll need support from far beyond my personal networks to rise through the changethis ranks, so a couple of phone calls ensued today (it being a national holiday in Canada) with my partners at Context and voila!  A little word of mouth campaign was hatched.

As fate would have it there are some key events coming up in Toronto this week.  As I mentioned over at www.socialcapitalvalueadd.com Joseph Thornley has put together a great panel on Tuesday night who will discuss the issue of measuring social media.  And then there is MESH.

So hopefully we will have a few VOTE SCVA at www.changethis.com buttons to hand out at the event but don’t wait!  Please grab the button and link above. Vote and pass, vote and pass at: http://www.changethis.com/proposals/1279

 

Evolutionary, Organic … inherent mutation

This TED talk by Kevin Kelly is not focused on brand, but it interesting how these ideas can be applied to technology, biology, culture and … brands.

As you watch or listen, please keep the comments section below open and jot down thoughts related to brands that pop up for you …