Making a Meme: Insights & Takeaways Tracking the Neil DeGrasse Tyson Dandelion Meme Through Cyberspace.
We recently published a meme (above) that went incredibly viral & we thought we’d share some crucial moments and learnings from behind the scenes. Check it out:
If you’re like “whaaaat,” Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist and for all intents and purposes the current face of science education. He’s most well-known for hosting the 2014 Fox reboot of Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” television series. Tyson’s show has achieved sustained popularity on Netflix, and the man himself is frequently seen on late night television and news channels.
This meme takes footage from the “Cosmos” series and, well, makes it completely insane. It started blowing up across the internet when someone reposted our original upload to imgur. That repost, by grizzzzzly, got 144,000 views in two hours. Elsewhere, ASAP Science, a Facebook blog with two million followers, posted the .GIF and raked in 15,000 shares and 10,000 likes. This, little did we know, was only the beginning.
Once the image started going nuts I campaigned across the internet to get the meme to Neil DeGrasse Tyson himself. Posts flooded his Facebook page and Twitter account throughout the week. He ended up posting it late on Feb. 13 with the caption, “Cool.”
“Cool.” - we nearly died. His post alone garnered 67,000 likes and 17,000 more shares, but getting HIM to post it, holy shit! As of February 22, 52.4K people have shared the .GIF on Facebook. An ifunny.co has 114K likes, and several Instagram posts of the meme have over 10,000 likes.
Tracking the true extent of a meme’s virality is difficult and time-consuming, but we’ve estimated that this single image has over 100,000 shares and half a million likes alone. These aren’t Pewdiepie numbers, but they’re huge for a project that took three hours to make on a drunken Friday night.
What’s more is that, where many memes go viral haphazardly, we designed this meme to take off and carefully stoked the meme fire post-launch. Here are a few insights and learnings that drove our process, in no particular order:
Craft matters: Craft is often overlooked in meme culture (the prevailing design aesthetic is that of 12-year old boys typesetting in Impact) but part of the absurdity of this meme is that it is as well made as it is, considering how weird it is.
Design a meme that can live on its own: viral memes are inherently community property. The easier it is for individuals and groups to customize and remix your work, the more successful it will be. Some of the most successful versions of this meme came with added text - usually quotes from #ndgt.
Design a flexible meme that can comfortably live as a video, .GIF, .JPEG. Our original work was actually a 30 second video that we posted on YouTube. We then tweaked that piece to become a .GIF and a .JPEG. Those are what took off, not the video.
Design knowing that each variation of your meme needs to be further optimized each platform: tumblr, Facebook, and GIPHY all have different limitations on the size, duration, and hosting of .GIFs, so not only did we need to make our 30 second video work as a looping animation, we needed to make sure it worked at low resolution, under 60 frames, in a square crop, etc.
Don’t give up on tracking, get creative! .GIFs and .JPEGs don’t have tracking pixels or cookies, so it’s hard to track their spread - especially when they hop platforms. We used subtle tweaks in timing and sizing as trackers to better understand where the most successful posts came from.
Stoke the fire: track memes as best you can as they start to gain attention, then make moves to help them spread. Early on I had seen that Facebook science blogs were reposting the meme constantly, so I made a list of the top blogs and made sure they all had the meme. Those posts led directly to Neil DeGrasse Tyson reposting the meme on his social media accounts.
Give yourself an end-point. Meme virality is unpredictable. Posts can simmer for a long time before suddenly boiling over, or they can catch fire and flame out quickly… and then go nuts again years later. It can be difficult to understand when to ease off promoting your meme if you don’t have a marker for success. In our case we called it quits after Neil DeGrasse Tyson reposted the meme. I was comfortable tallying up our shares and likes at that point even though the data suggests the the meme is still gaining popularity.
That’s it for now. Now let’s get weird.
pixelskylines
gummygunk
discoholicmusic
vaporwave
2087
izzy806
