June 16th, 2009

Memetic Engineering – Seeing $$$ in Memes

Back in April, I attended Tim Hwang’s XORCon and saw MIT undergrad Colin McSwiggen give a talk called “Is Memetic Engineering Real?“.  Last week at Ignite NYC I started thinking about it again (not to mention, the Xhibit story is pretty amazing).

So.  Is there money to be made from memes?

Rocketboom.com founder Andrew Baron apparently thinks so.  According to newteevee, Baron’s new video venture mag.ma aims to be THE viral video tracker on the web. I love analytics just as much as anyone, so I’m looking forward to all the sweet, sweet data that he claims mag.ma will deliver. I am already  obsessed with bit.ly, and I’d love a more thorough overview of a video’s stats beyond the view count.

I think there are two key ways to capitalize on internet memes:

1.  Leaders and followers. I hear a lot from advertising people about the identification of leaders and followers on the web.  Sure, you can identify leading websites by their traffic and price accordingly.  But the identification of leader and follower personalities in any sort of scalable way is much harder (ie, who’s the most popular girl in this high school that I can give a free pair of jeans to in the hopes of selling lots more?). That is part of the reason why advertising is so hard on social networking sites. Sure, you might have 1000 friends, but how highly do they regard your opinion? How much influence do you really have?

One could suggest that by tracking memes you can identify these “leaders”. Knowing true inflencers in a space as vast and complicated as the web is very valuable data for advertisers.

2.  Collectibles. What’s the difference between a meme and a fad?  I think of fads as physical.  If a concept has proven itself digitally – engineering a crossover to something physical could be pretty powerful.  We’re all waiting for the next slap bracelet.

Seriously though, if you know someone that’s currently working on an Xhibit face magnet for my car, please let me know.