When teaching Marketing and Social Media at McMaster University in Hamilton, I was often asked: “What makes Social Media a success?”
They’d ask if technology makes the solution: it does, and it doesn’t.
If technical skill were responsible for social success, then why do geeks and nerds often have the worst social-life in school?
Sure, it’s true they built the web — but the rest of the world made it social.
Successful Social Media websites engage visitors as active participants in the web experience.
Remember, “The best tool is often not the most advanced or the most clever — but the tool that’s understood and used daily.”
Successful Social Media sites are also like engines: they need a spark to start them — and continuous content to keep them running.
But is that all a successful social media site needs: people, content and some cool technology?
No.
The single most important factor is much older and simpler, buried deep within the shadowy past of our primitive nature.
Social Media’s success is contained within something called a meme, or if you prefer a more dramatic image, a “mind virus.”
Richard Dawkins introduced the concept of the “meme” and “memetics” in his book ‘The Selfish Gene’ referring to the imitative process whereby humans transmit ideas, values, beliefs, and practices to each other.
The memes that catch-on are conditioned by repetition and continued by subsequent generations.
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches.
Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by a process similar to how an infection spreads – hence the name, mind virus.
The most successful social sites leverage our oldest, most ancient memes as well as our newest, and this allows us to embrace these darker, base natures in a socially acceptable, and even productive fashion.
Consider how many social sites pander to aspects of our nature — that as children we were discouraged from participating in: gossiping, time-wasting, forming cliques and more.
Of course I’m not saying all social sites succeed because we want to express our darker nature, but the sites that gain the most traction and momentum have done so by allowing us free rein over our basic human nature.
Something to consider isn’t it.
So why do certain memes, or mind viruses, survive — and others do not?
Why is it that some have been with us for thousands of years?
I believe it’s because they have value to us as a species.
“Bad News” – or even the cautionary tale — like children’s fables — carry survival value for us as a species.
Good news might make you feel all warm and fuzzy, but it won’t save you from being eaten by hairy creature with teeth that lives in the cave nearby.
Sharing stories is what keeps us alive and while some ideas need encouragement to move from person to person (like the low value “popular tune” memes) , bad news (high survival value) meme transmission is encoded into our very DNA.
And for those of us old enough to remember the first Wall Street movie, I’ll para-phrase Gordon Gecko – “Gossip is good.” We just can’t help ourselves.
It’s like our fascination with “rubber necking” on the highway, watching the Bachelor (or Bachelor-et reality TV show) or any other activity where we can indulge our somewhat morbid sense of fascination with other people’s lives.
“If it bleeds, it leads” is the mantra for many news outlets.
Gruesome but true.
Controversy and conflict – it makes compelling content.
And in many cases it carries intrinsic value both personally and for us as a species.
Social Media is not new.
In fact the Romans were crowd sourcing and socially voting thousands of years ago at the amphitheaters: Lions 1 – Gladiators 0 (gesture with your thumbs)
And this popular gesture {thumbs up} has survived the test of time! Just check the user interface of many a popular social media platform. Facebook anyone?
So the next time you’re planning a successful Social Media campaign, try to leverage our encoded DNA survival instincts and link your message to a high value meme.
