The Salt Bae meme, from Turkish chef Nurs_et​

Think about this. This virus idea just isn’t how media works. There wasn’t some virus that made you share a meme last year, or a song, or a video. If you shared that Salt Bae meme, it was because you wanted people to see it, and you wanted them to see it coming from you. You have human agency when you share things online, and you invest a piece of your identity in everything you share. You also may have strong reasons for sharing content, whether those reasons are personal, social, political, satirical, or all of these.

Why do larger, experienced companies sometimes falter in making their content spreadable while some gestures, phrases, pics, and videos spread in ways even their creators could not predict and maybe didn’t even want? Misunderstandings abound as humans try to make sense of the relatively new world of social media content trends.

Still, in this chapter, we will brave the pitfalls and offer some explanations and strategies for spreading content online. And we look at a few cases of companies and creators who have succeeded in making content spreadable, along with some spectacular failures.

What is spreadability, and why is it important?

The vocabulary used to refer to online sharing trends is unstable, with users adopting and spreading terms by users that may misrepresent what they name. Humans understand new phenomena in the world by comparing them to what we already know – which can be problematic, as the old and new phenomena will not be the same.

Take the word meme, for example. It originated in the work of a biologist (Richard Dawkins, in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene) to describe something that spreads like a gene, only by cultural rather than biological means. But this definition is based on a metaphor rather than on observation of how content spreads. A better definition is one that acknowledges the qualities of memes – for example, noting that users often modify them as they spread them.

So it is with the concept of the media virus. Users and popular media outlets refer incessantly to media “viruses” and “viral” media. But viruses are biological phenomena. Can cultural phenomena really behave the same way?

The theorists Jenkins, Bell, and Green have written critically of the notions behind the concept of “viral media;” what they offer instead is the notion of spreadability. This relates to concepts we began discussing in Chapter 2 of this book, in the section on “The People Formerly Known as the Audience.” In the 20th century, advertising depended on one broadcasting outlet keeping the eyes of audiences directly on that broadcaster’s content. In the age of social media, though, users are not looking at that one broadcaster or television station; they are looking at each other. And with limitless choices and content online vying for their attention, to attract views you have to convince users to share your content with their publics: their families, “friends,” and networked contacts.

One of the crucial points in Spreadable Media is that online cultures work together as agents to make content spread. A company cannot do it alone. Consumers of the media content a company desires to spread must become sharers, and even producers: liking, reposting, sharing with specific publics, meming, creating fanfiction offshoots, and making the content their own. Spreadability is Jenkins, Bell, and Green’s theory of how content spreads online – though spreadability is not a strategy any one agent can control. Indeed, spreadability requires some loss of control of content by the creator.

To begin to understand how to make content spreadable in this way, let’s look at an example of content that spread almost inadvertently – without anyone really even planning for it to explode.

Ken Bone as meme, truce, and unicorn

Ken Bone during the 2016 presidential debate.

During the second presidential debate in 2016, a man named Ken Bone asked a question and became an internet sensation via #BoneZone. Why?

I always speak with my students about social media news. The day the Ken Bone memes exploded, I asked one insightful group I had why. Why did everyone go nuts over Ken Bone? In the discussion that followed, we went over several factors that helped Ken Bone spread so fast. Here are four of them:

1. Ken Bone was easy to meme.

His sweater was red. His face was small. His glasses were neat rectangles. His shape when cut out was roundy like a cloud. Ken Bone was so memeable he was drawn by Disney before his persona was born. With his collar shirt buttoned up all white and snug he appeared to have been lovingly dressed by his mom. In Pictionary, it would take at least 60 seconds to draw most people. Ken Bone, maybe 6 seconds. Instant recognition enables easy imitation, making Ken Bone’s image a very spreadable social object. Plus his name only takes up 7 characters. That’s spreadable.

2. Ken Bone was a regular guy – very unlike both 2016 Presidential candidates.

While their backgrounds were different, candidates Trump and Clinton had both long occupied the high halls of the privileged. Watching them battle one another on stage was like watching Godzilla and Mothra. Fascinating… but where were the humans to be tossed around in their struggle? Election cycles have grown so long, the American public’s attention span for the two candidates had begun to peter out. And then came the human caricature Ken Bone – like switching the channel first to a reality TV show, then a cartoon.

3. Ken Bone was a national ceasefire.

It has been a brutal election battle, with most of the American public in filter bubbles echoing with rage, and occasionally coming into hostile contact with the opposite side. And then came Ken Bone – a Twitter user called him, “a human version of a hug,” which a popular blogger subsequently rephrased as “a hug, personified.” Everyone could like him. He was a safe topic at family gatherings. And maybe he was a messenger dove, cooing in his kind voice that after that awful election, political enemies might eventually be able to talk to each other again.

4. Ken Bone was an undecided voter – a unicorn.

For many, it was difficult to believe any Ken Bones even existed. Viewers marveled when he appeared: There are undecided voters? In this polarizing election? Where do they live? Is it quieter there? Do rivers sparkle with the ether of forgetfulness? Oh my goodness… there’s one now! Bone’s fame only grew when it was discovered that before that pivotal 15 seconds of exposure, he had only 7 Twitter followers – and two were his grandmothers. What a wonderful little public that must be.

The end of Ken Bone’s fame

Of course. the truce between Clinton and Trump supporters could not last. Bone, online searches revealed, had posted things online in the past that not everyone could love. His brand was compromised. If only he’d lasted through Thanksgiving, we might not have needed Adele.

The internet is a dangerous place for unicorns.

Branding on social media

So if you are an advertiser, how do you do what Ken Bone did – combined with what viewers created out of what Ken Bone did – and how do you keep the resulting culture going? How do you make a lasting brand with spreadable content?

One worthwhile analysis of this topic is in Holt’s Branding in the Age of Social Media in the March 2016 Harvard Business Review. Some important terms to understand from the article are branding, crowdcultures, and art worlds.

In the article, Holt explains branding as “a set of techniques designed to generate cultural relevance.” What this means is, branding requires paying attention to cultures online. Cultures are kind of like publics, except cultures have much deeper roots. Cultures are practices, symbols, meanings, and much more shared by people who have coexisted in a place or other site or context. To brand successfully today you have to learn about the cultures you are marketing to: their inside jokes, trends, taboos, and so much that can be hard to understand to cultural outsiders.

Holt writes that much of the internet is based in crowdcultures, which are cultures around certain concepts, including products. Crowdcultures can come from two sources, subcultures or art worlds. These crowdcultures may be subcultures – people who are deeply devoted to these concepts. Or they may come out of art worlds, with people talented in creating online content and making a culture more attractive and resonant even if it’s all very new. Ken Bone grew out of art worlds, with artistic people quickly meming him into videos and images, which attracted a crowdculture that continued to spread him.

How did those initial art world creators know that Ken Bone would spread quickly? Maybe they didn’t. But if they did, they understood some of the beliefs and interests of the American people who spread him. They knew how to read the culture their crowd would come from.

Holt breaks down to five steps the process for reading and marketing to a culture. Below I list each of these steps followed by an explanation. What is important to understand is that your company cannot do it alone; you need the help of users, tastemakers, bloggers, and others to become an internet sensation.

1. Map the cultural orthodoxy.

To read a culture and understand how to market to its members, first ask, “What are the conventions to break from?” If you want to attract the attention of Americans entrenched in pre-election political warfare, you might notice at this point that the cultural orthodoxy around the #debate at that time is intensely negative and partisan.

2. Locate the cultural opportunity.

The cultural opportunity means finding whatever is missing from the current landscape around that culture and seeing how you can fill that gap. If you noticed that election debate viewers are surrounded by negative, partisan media, the cultural opportunity might involve imagining something refreshingly hopeful and nonpartisan.

3. Target the crowdculture.

Once you’ve located the cultural opportunity, you must next locate the tastemakers and hubs for spreading content in that culture. What networks should you plug into once you have content to spread? For example, Buzzfeed found some of the initial user-created Ken Bone memes on social media sites like Twitter and Reddit and then spread them more widely.

4. Diffuse the new ideology.

Your new content piece is the new ideology, and it should “embrace subcultural mythologies” – joining the active conversations already taking place in the networks and cultures you are targeting. Still, you must be careful here to avoid whatever your content is trying not to be. No content mentioning Trump or Clinton spread in the Ken Bone meme. Talk of the candidates had been the orthodoxy, and everyone was tired of them! Referring to previous internet memes, however, might reactivate meming internet cultures.

5. Innovate continually, using cultural flashpoints.

Chipotle – Back to the Start from Nexus Studios on Vimeo.

This is where many brands face challenges for continued success; new flashpoints are essential. Chipotle (as seen in the video embedded above) got the content part right long enough to do very well as a brand of healthy, natural food. But over time they struggled to remain relevant, and several outbreaks of foodborne illnesses drew into question Chipotle’s wholesome branding.

The internet is full of content sensations that never became brands. #BoneZone and many other Ken Bone memes were initially unstoppable! But Ken Bone did not last long as a highly successful brand…which may have been ok with him as he never endeavored to be a brand in the first place. Remaining relevant in the age of social media requires constant monitoring of the cultures you must entice to promote your brand with you. And if you’re a countercultural meme (or even a countercultural brand), you can only last as long as your icon resists being taken over by the mainstream.

Failing at branding: Pepsi’s 2017 “Black Lives Matter” ad

In one of the worst advertising mishaps in recent years, a large company attempted to follow the steps for cultural branding – but severely misread the targeted cultures and their own product. In a 2017 commercial, the Pepsi corporation tried to capitalize on widespread attention to the Black Lives Matter movement (discussed in Chapter 6), while failing to hear all of the demands of the protestors at the center of that culture. Immediate backlash led them to take the ad down within 24 hours.

How could Pepsi, a multinational corporation with decades of marketing experience, have gotten it so wrong?

It is easy to speculate some of what Pepsi was going for. From the imagery in the ad, we can reasonably assume that Pepsi ad executives were inspired by dramatic images of real Black Lives Matter protesters that struck chords with online publics. And Pepsi execs may also have been trying to match the massive success their competitor Coca Cola had achieved with their Hilltop Ad, in which their product idealistically bonds young, attractive people across national, racial, and ethnic boundaries.

But that Hilltop ad was 1971. And those dramatic images of Black Live Matter protestors involved real people putting themselves at risk to address persistent, thorny issues. Black Lives Matter had indeed gathered a formidable crowdculture – but a can of Pepsi had no place in their conversations. Placing a white woman with a Pepsi as the problem solver at the center of an explosive racial issue was deeply insulting to many people. Whichever Pepsi executive dreamed up the 2017 ad, it was a bad idea.

This brings up a more important question: How did such a bad idea make it out of the drawing board room? Eric Thomas, a LinkedIn Brand Specialist, connects what happened in that room to a lack of diversity:

“This is what happens when you don’t have enough people in leadership that reflect the cultures that you represent. Somewhere in the upper levels where this commercial was approved, one of two things happened. Either there was not enough diversity — race, gender, lifestyle, age or otherwise — or worse, there was a culture that made people uncomfortable to express how offensive this video is.”

Internet cultures can dupe also advertisers in multiple ways. First, the level of bias and cultural appropriation online within connected publics may make fool advertisers into seeing widespread acceptance of these culturally insensitive practices. A recent exploration of “digital blackface” by New York Times journalist Amanda Hess captures one example of a common online practice big advertisers would be wise to avoid.

The other misleading quality is that brands today are far more global than in the past, so branding is particularly tricky. Reading cultures well requires teams of people who acknowledge their own biases and think deeply about social issues. The takeaway from Pepsi’s spectacular failure, then, may be this: Diversity is essential in successful branding in the digital age. We have to welcome, listen to, and become all the voices at the table to get it right – or at least avoid spectacular wrongs.

Losing Control of the Narrative: That Polar Bear and the Hot Mess of Spreadable Science Memes

You probably saw it.

From National Geographic’s YouTube Channel

A “viral” video of an emaciated polar bear in 2017 led to significant chatter about climate change on social media. Yet there is another heating climate that has my colleagues and I worried as Information Scientists. Social media is a hotbed for videos, images, and memes about science: not just climate change but news on NASA activities, the EPA, vaccinations, and many other fiery topics for the American public. In this hot mess, our concern was – and remains – how difficult it has become to tell the truth.

Why shouldn’t science be packaged and spread online? In recent years there has been an understandable push by scientists and those who fund our work to make our findings accessible. This has meant moving beyond peer-reviewed journals and science-focused publications, creating flashy media that will interest non-scientists, and unleashing it on social networks. These strategies seem reasonable: Our work is funded by the public, so it should be accessible to the public. More importantly, to fight human-caused phenomena like climate change we need to inspire shifts in human behavior on a massive scale. Social media seem designed for the mass appeal that our mission to educate requires.

The problem arises when we chase public attention at the expense of good science. Yes, it is essential that scientists tell engaging stories – but the stories have to be about our findings, not just our observations. The video of the polar bear filmed by a photographer for SeaLegacy was first spread with no text on the video itself, separating hat project’s observations from deeper analysis.

Was the bear’s sad condition related to climate change? Yes – but in complicated ways that the video did not convey. This lack of analysis invited users and media outlets like National Geographic to omit the initial poster’s description and meme it with their own interpretations on social media. The video and these less-than-scientific interpretations of its meaning spread like wildfire, prompting a mass reckoning over the effects of human behavior on our world – but also legitimate complaints about the accuracy of claims attached to the video. This spark of legitimate debate then quickly ignited across networks of climate change skeptics, playing as evidence that scientists lie.

It is so tempting to package our stories to sell, rather than tell the whole truth. Researchers have found that content based on exaggerations and lies spreads faster on Twitter than content based on truth. The less true a story is, the more it may appear to be breaking news, and the easier it is to make it flashy.

Is it worth it, burning past steps in the scientific method, to spread our message? Even in a warming world, we don’t think so. A 2016 Pew study found that less than a third of Americans believed scientists on the causes of climate change, and under one fifth trusted scientists in general “a great deal.” More than half selected the second-highest option, saying they trusted scientists “a fair amount.” When we allow one video of one bear to take the place of analyzed findings, we trade a fickle public’s attention for the more valuable asset of public trust. In August 2018 National Geographic published an acknowledgment that they “went too far” in reducing the bear’s condition to the effects of climate change.

We estimate that an astonishing 2.5 billion people were reached by our footage. The mission was a success, but there was a problem: We had lost control of the narrative. The first line of the National Geographic video said, “This is what climate change looks like”—with “climate change” highlighted in the brand’s distinctive yellow. ~ SeaLegacy photographer Cristina G. Mittermeier, in the 2018 issue of National Geographic Magazine

Today’s scientists must all be good media producers. We need to understand the climate not only of the Earth we live on, but of the world that receives, spreads, and memes that media. We need to transcend tribalism and understand how our messages spread, to those who trust us and those who do not. Most importantly, we need to apply the same rigor to our media production that we apply to our studies. Seeing a starving polar bear on snowless terrain did make some social media users sweat over their own energy use. But it also burned a little more public trust in scientific research and institutions.

Core Concepts and Questions