While writing this tutorial on memes I read The Cluetrain Manifesto. It prompted me write this ‘memo to CEOs’. The purpose of this memo is to take some thinking time to reflect on the following thoughts:
– Darwinian marketing is a battle of memes, not a battle of products.
– Owning a meme in the customer’s mind, over a longer period of time, is the #1 goal of darwinian marketing.
– Its better to be first in the mind than first in the mass media. It’s better for a meme to be a WOM than an advertisement.– A market is a memepool. A market is a meme exchange among human beings, receiving and transmitting their memes by WOM.
– The internet is a wired memepool. Your company intranet is a wired memepool.
– Wired memepools are faster and therefore smarter than traditional markets.
– The balance of memes in the wired memepool is often the opposite of what appears in the mass media.– No union can organise workers the way the memepool of a company’s intranet allows workers to organise themselves.
– There are two memepools. One inside the company via the intranet. One with the market via the internet. These two memepools eventually spill into each other. Workers talk to customers in their own way.– Via the internet and intranet customers and employees are using WOM to exchange memes in a powerful new way.
– WOM is swapping jokes, opinions, gossip and arguments by human voice. WOM is compelling to other humans in a way which is not possible from vendors in the mass media.
– The memepool has all the memes of all the companies and whether the news is good or bad, they can infect anyone.
– Companies who contribute poorly to the memepool find their markets are often ridiculing their memes.
– Vendors who offer better memes will survive better in smart markets.– The wired memepool, even at its worst, is more compelling than most business meetings or trade shows and certainly more intimate than corporate advertising campaigns.
– To oldsell corporations, the wired memepool may appear chaotic but it is organising much faster than they are with much better tools and more new ideas.
– In darwinian marketing, your reputation as an attractive meme-fountain is everything. It’s your survival advantage in the memepool. Protect it all costs.
– Avoid infection from cheerless and narrow-minded meme-fountains.– In darwinian marketing, attractive bait memes that bring people to you are useful and memes that gain attention are very powerful memes.
– Memes that show generosity are attractive to people and will keep them near to you.– Memes that appeal to the patience or forbearance of humans do not survive as well as memes that appeal to people’s self-interest, to their fantasies.
DFQ TD12:
If you could tell your CEO one thing, what would it be?