Internet at its funniest
Wikipedia defines term "internet meme" as a "catchphrase or concept that spreads rapidly from person to person via the Internet, largely through Internet-based email, blogs, forums, social networking sites and instant messaging."
The most famous example of an internet meme is probably Lolcats; I bet everybody has seen at least a few images of cute little kittens in funny settings. However, my all time favourite memes include:
- Advice dog and its especially genious spin-off called Philosoraptor (a raptor that questions everything),
- “This is relevant to my interests” (a catch-phrase meme popularized through lolcats)
- Einstein blackboard - a board full of everything but physics,
- jokes around Google search suggestions,
- the infamous fails,
- bizarre Three Wolf Moon t-shirts,
- lolgraphs> - statistics at its best,
- parodies on Xzibit's (the host of the MTV show Pimp My Ride) "Yo Dawg" language,
- recent Bzzzz jokes on Vuvuzelas
- and of course all kinds of demotivational posters
Internet memes are usually spread via popular, user-based/social networking web sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Digg and Tumblr. However, there are plenty of not-so-geeky people who don't spend most of there life online to be able to track the memes in "real-time", but still want to know about the most popular ones. For those, there are two great websites with large data-bases of memes: Know Your Meme and Internet Meme Timeline. They also offer some very interesting data on each memes' explanation, origines and popularity stats.
Nevertheless, I assume you already know everything about the memes and where to find them. I actually only wanted to ask you the following question:
Do you think a brand can enter the beautiful world of internet memes and not ruin it?
The only well-done example I can think of is the remake of a viral Youtube video named "Cigo": Beotel, Serbian internet provider, put the first Yugoslavian Youtube star ("Cigo") in its TV commercial and uploaded it to Youtube as a response to the original video. The commercial now has 518,168 views on Youtube, which is more than the original (353,062).
