The next time a friend asks for advice on whether to continue dating a terrible person, we have the perfect link for you to send her in response. From the people who brought the internet the ever-popular “Yo, Is This Racist?” comes the latest single-serving Tumblr craze, this time full of brutally honest relationship advice. Yo, Should I Dump This Asshole? accepts anonymous questions to help lovelorn people figure out what to do with their horrible partners. The answers are hilarious, and though the conclusion is nearly always “yes, you should dump that asshole” the site is still a wickedly addictive read.

Filed Under:  Attention Grabber

We often browse Etsy to find trends.  It’s a great resource for gauging if a trend has caught on or is oversaturating the marketplace.  There are sellers that prove to be great curators through their dependably desirable offerings but also through their product displays.  I came across a seller today that is right on the money with her collection and her branding.  Yard 666 Sale is waist deep in the 90’s fashion trend but also is creating psychedelic meme-like imagery to stand out from her competition.  Sellers like this know it’s not only what you sell, it’s how you sell it.  Gen Ys look for and appreciate quirky marketing that makes a brand feel personal.  

Upcoming film 21 Jump Street has jumped on the “what I really do” meme bandwagon and created an edition of the Facebook viral for the stars of the film. Pretty smart! 

I’ve been seeing memes like the one above circulating around Facebook and I thought I’d explain how they work. I’m sorry if I’m bursting any bubbles by explaining this, but no—your cell phone doesn’t really have a name. 

The secret to the meme is a little hack in Facebook’s commenting and reply system. When normally tagging someone in a Facebook post, the user types “@Firstname Lastname” to find the user. This little trick—and others like it—instructs Facebook to look up the user mentioned in the @reply by a profile’s identification number, resulting in the name of a random Facebook user when you type in the code. 

Thanks to a variety of factors the presence of all kinds of memes has exploded on Facebook—if you’ve noticed an upswing in cute baby animal pictures, politically charged sentiments and funny gags on your feed, you’re not alone nor are you going crazy. Facebook has become a place where media can go viral. It’s a departure from the way Facebook photos and photo albums were used when the service first started—it’s definitely not solely for baby pictures and college exploits anymore. 

This dramatic “re-enactment” is a word-for-word interpretation of a conversation that took place on a 7th grader’s Facebook page. High drama. Highly viral.

SH*T OSCARPRGIRL SAYS from Oscar de la Renta on Vimeo.  

In the complete and utter takeover that has been the Shit _____ Say meme run, only two brands we know of so far have created their own memes following the style of Shit _____Say: the Wedding Channel in collaboration with The Knot with Shit Brides Say, and the above Shit Oscar PR Girl Says. Hosted on their vimeo feed, Oscar PR Girl has produced a parody of herself that is unbelievably funny and dead on.

Not only has the Oscar de la Renta camp signaled that they are paying attention to viral media culture, but also that they can roast themselves on their idiosyncrasies. Almost tempting enough to make a Shit Trend Forecasters Say. Almost.

Thank you internet. THIS is what we’re trying to protect. 

FILED UNDER: I MISS MY MODEM

And there you have it folks, in a matter of days we have the simultaneous antithesis and apex of the shit people say meme! 

Sesame Street did a Glee bit, and the internet had a great day because of it. 

FILED UNDER: MEMES AND MORE

Intelligent discourse and the idea of the “meme” wouldn’t appear to naturally go hand-in-hand. What can really be said about these bits of Internet trash that float through our minds and our Facebook feeds, that come up in casual conversation after work at the bar—Rebecca Black’s “Friday” was so awful, wasn’t it? Yet the Smithsonian has dared to go there, in a recent piece by James Gleick titled “What Defines A Meme?”.

Gleick gives us a basic lesson in memetics—the study of the meme. He provides an interesting look of the history of the meme and also discusses how technology has given memes new life of their own. He writes:

Most of the biosphere cannot see the infosphere; it is invisible, a parallel universe humming with ghostly inhabitants. But they are not ghosts to us—not anymore. We humans, alone among the earth’s organic creatures, live in both worlds at once. It is as though, having long coexisted with the unseen, we have begun to develop the needed extrasensory perception. We are aware of the many species of information. We name their types sardonically, as though to reassure ourselves that we understand: urban myths and zombie lies. We keep them alive in air-conditioned server farms. But we cannot own them. When a jingle lingers in our ears, or a fad turns fashion upside down, or a hoax dominates the global chatter for months and vanishes as swiftly as it came, who is master and who is slave?

It’s an important for marketers to be mindful of memetics as they try to create successful memes of their own. In an industry where rules and brand standards are king, you must sacrifice some control to create a great meme. As a meme-generator you act as Dr. Frankenstein, creating your own meme monster with a life of its own, one that may not proceed perfectly to plan.

The freedom required to create a good meme is evidenced in the creative process of The Old Spice Guy, a wildly successful series of viral videos that took the web by storm. Ian Tait of Wieden + Kennedy, the agency behind the ads, said:

“Old Spice’s parent company Procter & Gamble exhibited incredible bravery in allowing [our] team to write marketing content in real time, with little to no supervision.

There is such great trust [between the companies], but we are being very responsible. They have given us a set of guidelines and if we get close to the edges we contact them.”

As we move into a world that continues to be dominated by technology, the instant and the now, the importance of the meme will also grow. Be prepared!

Read the full text of James Gleick’s “What Defines A Meme?” from Smithsonian Magazine here.

A few years ago a close friend and I created what we were sure would become the summer of 2007’s hot dance. Leaning back had already come and gone and the door was wide open to be replaced by out zombie dance. To do the dance guys hold their arms out, head slumped and swaying back and forth like a ‘90’s Lollapalooza show. And the girls’ just have their arms at thier sides like they’re holding weights. The dance was a huge craze hitting dance floors by the 100s 10s.

Now I come to find that a new dance craze has slightly altered the zombie- calling it the Do It Like Bernie dance, a nice little Weekend At Bernie’s homage. I will say though that the dance is amazing, I love any dance where you’re supposed to move like a smooth dead person, and the fact that it originates from Louisiana rapper ISA (Infinity So Awesome, duh). I have to give ISA all the credit; to promote the song he created a dance contest, where the best dancers who submit Bernie videos on YouTube will make it into his official video. This one little viral contest has sparked an underground movement of people of all backgrounds doing the Bernie. The dance trend has gotten so hot that all throughout March Madness you could catch someone on the bench doing the Bernie in celebration of a huge shot. 

The array of people/creatures doing the Bernie is my favorite part of this Internet meme. There’s the 4-year-old boy, NFL running back Ray Rice doing it in the Stealers end-zone, and oh, yes drunk Teletubbies.