How do you create a resonant voice in a fragmented culture that’s evolving in three-second sprints? How do you solidify a brand identity in the midst of the daily creation of an average of 402.74 million terabytes of data (Statista)?
The term for this ephemeral reality is “meme culture.” For our purposes, this is a catch-all for our “here one moment, gone the next,” trend-chasing societal ecosystem. It’s simultaneously the result and catalyst of information overload, apathy, fodder for Bo Burnham’s next existential comedy music album, and fewer widely comprehensive pop culture references (hopefully you got that one, oops). It’s a major contributor to surface-level interactions and the lack of authenticity behind every click. It’s the basis for people feeling hounded by intense marketing ploys at every intersection of our lives (and streets). It’s the stimulus for a growing antipathy toward the “en-shittification” of all things digital.
That’s not to say we haven’t gained anything. After all, the up-and-coming generation communicates almost entirely in memes — an ever-evolving, nonverbal language isn’t something to sneeze at. Even in B2B marketing, memes are a cost-effective way to garner attention, provided you use them aptly and are willing to be self-deprecating. They’re harmless fun if your interest is offering an endorphin hit and temporary social connections.
But if you want to build trust, authority, and long-term loyalty, the futility of attempting to stay relevant by matching the frantic pace, output, and reactionary nature of meme culture needs to fall by the wayside.
That still leaves us the meme-age question: How do you prioritize when to speak from your own (brand) voice versus when to adapt it to platform norms or trends? Instead of prescribing catch-all answers, here are (more nuanced) questions to guide you toward an answer specific to you:
The 7 Questions to Answer for a Solid B2B Social Strategy
1. Who are you?
If your brand were a person, how would you describe them? Their personality. The stuff they love and dislike. The topics they won’t shut up about and the subject they won’t touch with a ten-foot pole. Do you have internal agreement about the identity your brand is wrapped in?
2. What’s your aim?
Take out the tactics. Strip down your strategy. Ignore everything that sounds good but isn’t relevant. What is it you are trying to accomplish with a social presence?
3. Who are you trying to speak to?
If you were, hypothetically, a fast-food franchise that wanted to gain a rabid following while ignoring flailing revenue, then your audience is anybody who will give you attention. In a sense, you’re creating for yourself — the campaign is virality. Cue rampant, mindless jokes.
But if you’re a global power technology leader, and your primary aim is establishing yourself as a stronger player in the gen set space, specific to oil & gas and healthcare industries, your audience is decisionmakers down to end users in those arenas. Impressing random social passersby with your meme prowess will have to be a personal project.
4. Where are you trying to show up?
First and foremost, your desired audience should be there, actively. And they should also be willing to digest the type of content you’re going to make. Are users supremely suspicious of — even outraged by — brand promotion on your platform of choice (e.g., Reddit)? Then showing up and simply dropping a bit of thought leadership would be unwise. Are users eager for more tutorial-like content that immediately puts them in the driver’s seat (e.g., YouTube)? Then sharing your knowledge in a succinct, peer-to-peer fashion is more likely to perform well.
5. How can you build authority?
To answer this question, consider asking yourself more: What does your audience need help with? What do they wish someone would tell them? What are the major industry problems other brands ignore at their peril? What gaps and serial frustrations do sales calls and VOC reveal? What resources would help them with demanding anything? What are your best-kept secrets? How can you guide your audience without presuming to demand their allegiance?
6. How can you establish yourself beyond a “brand”?
This includes everything from speaking the language of end users via influencer engagements to broadening your content to adjacent topics to showing up through your team members versus just a brand page. How do you speak less about the brand and more about the people you’re serving and the realities they’re facing? How do you own your story in resonant, human-centric ways? Cummins is a great example of a brand doing all of this, simultaneously building authority while working in humor, the human element, and directly helpful information.
7. How can you use playful participation as a tool without abandoning your goals, identity, or audience?
Answering this question will take honesty, intentionality, and regular check-ins. If a trend supports what you’re trying to do, use it. But chasing provocative trends that relate to a tiny fraction of your audience for a fragment of time is a poor use of your time. Thoughtfully setting standards for how to chase after what you really want gives you a much greater chance of creating those large cultural moments and movements that we all miss anyway.
You could sum up all these questions with “Set guardrails.”
Meme Culture Makes Dependable Voices Even More Powerful
The intention here isn’t to scare your business away from participating in the ever-evolving language that allows you to “speak internet.” If you want to cash in on trends, become thought leaders, solidify and adapt your voice, avoid sending the wrong message, and prevent going viral for all the wrong reasons, you need to establish these guardrails and understand what the implications of them are. They’ll protect you from obvious danger as well as the insidious risk of playing it safe. (After all, there has to be some incentive for people to follow you online. And memes won’t cut it in B2B.)
Meme culture is the newest name we’ve given to the online pitfalls we’ve always face-planted into. The antidote is always the same: back to the basics. Back to meeting people’s real needs. Back to our identity. Back to knowledge. Back to being honest about wasted effort and the benefits of consistency. It’s a reorienting we’ll always be accountable for, no matter the tech or culture or type of marketing.
In a digital society where “culture” comes and dissipates in hours instead of decades, offer something much more substantial and enduring: truth.
