Meme commercialisation sweetspot

Memes (in the world wide web sense) have proven a valuable tool for marketers, both where the organisation makes reference to or uses an existing meme, or where the organisation creates their own content that goes viral.

To make best use of existing memes, timing is key. An organisation's marketing effort will fall flat if the meme has become stale by the time they use it. To avoid this, two factors are needed: firstly, a lean organisational approach that allows rapid response; and secondly good data to model the life of a meme.

Meme data would include the following (based on average for all previous memes):

• Meme life expectancy per age
• Reach over time
• etc

The above data could be collected per category, to allow better prediction. It should be possible to determine a sweetspot through analysis of data: memes established enough to have a high likelihood of continuing, but young enough to still be fresh.

There is an opportunity here for an organisation to collect this data (from messageboards, social networks, link sharing sites, etc) and sell this to organisations' marketing teams. The customer would approach the organisation looking for fresh memes to be commercialised, or the organisation could proactively recommend relevant memes to its customers (based on their requirements) that are reaching the sweetspot.