Web Directions

Sleeveface — Amusing Flickr Meme

• In: Blog
• By:Maxine
• April 23, 2008
• Leave a response

OK, the pur­pose of this exer­cise isn’t really to show you this meme, which you’ve prob­a­bly seen any­way: Sleeveface.

What I’m pon­der­ing here, for my own rea­sons is, why do some memes work and oth­ers do not? With about 1300 entries (a lot of them from the same peo­ple), I’d hardly say Sleeveface was a run­away suc­cess, but, it’s still respectable. A lot more so than Fridgets — which was pro­moted on the Flickr blog at the time Flickr video was launched, so passed before the eyes of a very large audi­ence — and yet has only received 51 entries.

The obvi­ous answer is that the amount of trou­ble one needs to go to in order to con­tribute to the meme will impact on its suc­cess. But it’s clearly not the only fac­tor, nor a deal breaker: look at Post Secret.

The last obvi­ous answer I’ll put for­ward is “it needs to be amus­ing or engag­ing in some way”. But I’m going to call that a non-​​answer to the ques­tion. I believe there’s some sort of par­tic­u­lar fash­ion in which some­thing needs to be amus­ing or engag­ing, or some sort of reward that peo­ple get out of con­tribut­ing, for a meme to be suc­cess­ful. Can I work out what that is?

Please don’t tell me to go and read this, I already have…

One response to “Sleeveface — Amusing Flickr Meme”:

1. • By:john Allsopp
   • April 27th, 2008
   

   Some ran­dom thoughts as I have noth­ing else to do ;-)

   So, Flickr memes spread dif­fer­ently from blog memes. Blog memes tend to work by a form of “sham­ing”. You nom­i­nate 1 or more peo­ple as the meme car­rier (in a sense you infect them with the meme).
   It would be inter­est­ing to know how the suc­cess of a meme spread in this way (all else being equal) is a func­tion of that num­ber. Too low and a small num­ber of folks opt­ing out kills the meme, too high, and you aren’t “spe­cial” enough when nom­i­nated, so like­li­hood of the meme being spread is also low.

   Now, as I spec­u­lated, I think things like Flickr memes spread dif­fer­ently. The car­rier isn’t peo­ple, it’s the idea itself. So, fac­tors which affect the spread of these kinds of memes would be things like

   1. how easy or dif­fi­cult it is to do (frigelets require you to setup a video cam­era, even just your phone one)
   2. how cool the result­ing work is. A really cool result mer­its a lot of work. A really lame result mer­its lit­tle if any work
   3. How much effort the viewer has to go to.

   Yes, sleeve­face requires a fair bit of work. But, the result, no mat­ter how often you see it, is arrest­ing (when done well).

   With frigelets, the viewer has to go to some effort. By watch­ing a video (I think there’s a lot of psy­cho­log­i­cal resis­tance to video espe­cially by long time web users, because even if your down­load speeds are now great, they didn’t use to be, so we learned to avoid them), and also by spend­ing the 90 sec­onds or so for the pay off — whereas with sleeve­face, the pay­off is instant.

   Just some ran­dom thoughts

Your opinion: