Twitter, as a social messaging service, allows real-time conversations in 140 characters or less.

You sign up and from your cell phone, laptop or desktop begin telling the world what you’re doing, thinking, eating, planning, regretting, giving, taking, programming, marketing, wasting… you name it – it’s your Twitter. It’s your conversation.

But what if you wanted to make it a global conversation? What if you wanted to know what ever became of your original conversation? Would you know if your idea took flight and became popular? How can you track your ideas, tweets about your products or conversations about your company? Why, you’d use Twitter Memes!

If Twitter is completely new to you, check out this easy-to-read Twitter primer from Amazon.

Before we talk about memes or even Twitter memes, it’s helpful to understand the value of social messaging and the value of Twitter as a business tool.

Using Twitter in Your Business

Think about this: Imagine you could put your finger on the pulse of conversations worldwide, gleaning the most popular ideas and topics from the sum of all topics. Imagine you could find and connect immediately with people around the globe who share your passion for a particular idea or topic.

How Would it Help You to Know What People are Saying About Your Business, Your products or Services?

Before Twitter, if we wanted to know what the gist of the worldwide conversation about our business was, we’d have to wait for a search engine to index a blog post, comment, web page or forum post.

By that time, you could be doing major damage control! And even that, should you choose to act transparently, would take time to show up in the search engines.

Understanding that Twitter conversations are happening in real time, right now, from mobile phones, laptops and desktops worldwide, gives you an immediate, bird’s eye view of the ideas near and dear to people’s hearts. Twitter gives you the power to understand and connect with the people discussing those ideas. Right now. In real time.

And it gives you the power to respond. Right now. In real time.

What is a Meme?

My introduction to memes came in 1997 while reading the documentation for a Perl-based shopping cart unceremoniously called, “Web Store.” A Selena Sol and Gunter Birznieks application, you can still find it in its original form at Extropia.com. In the copyright info at the top of the cgi file was the following statement,

“This application was written by Selena Sol and Gunther Birznieks… Feel free to copy, cite, reference, sample, borrow, resell or plagiarize the contents. However, if you don’t mind, please let Selena know where it goes so that we can at least watch and take part in the development of the memes. Information wants to be free, support public domain freeware.”

I remember reading that word, “meme” and grabbing my dictionary. My next thought was, “What does this have to do with a Web Store?” Hindsight and the growth of Open Source software says, “Everything!” Selena Sol planted the seed of an idea – a meme – we now refer to as Open Source Software.

Essentially, the request was, “Hey, take this free perl application, build it out, change it, do whatever you want with it, but let us know where this idea, this meme, goes, so we can track its growth and its offspring.”

Selena Sol presented Glenn Grant’s formal definition of a meme with this:

“… a meme is nothing more than a pattern of information, one that happens to have evolved a form which induces people to repeat that pattern. Typical memes include individual slogan, ideas, catch-phrases, melodies, icons, inventions and fashions.”

Specific Examples of a Meme

We know now that memes are ideas or constructs – even cultural values. Following are specific examples of memes because the gestalt of memes is, well, always best understood with an example!

• “A mother’s love” is a cultural meme representing the idea of a boundless love.
• “Open Source” is another meme representing the idea that the code for software applications can be accessible, changeable and mutatable as oposed to closed and unavailable. Note the depth and breadth of the first meme relative to the fairly recent open source meme. We might say one meme has more “reach” than another.
• “Spread the word” and “Spread The Word” are also memes; both represent a call to action with the former being very general and the latter rather specific. When we say, “spread the word,” we want people to pass on to others what we have just told them. When someone says, “Spread The Word,” they specifically want you to pass on the Judeo-Christian idea of forgiveness and acceptance through recognition of Jesus Christ as The Saviour promised by the Judeo-Christian God.

  Both phrases represent ideas that are culturally well-recognized.

What is a Twitter Meme?

A meme on Twitter is the same as a meme in the “real” world. It is an idea, phrase, cultural value or even a news item.

Memes on Twitter are represented by a pound sign (“#”), called a “hash tag.” The hash tag or pound sign, creates a group out of the characters that follow the hash. While characters or groupings of characters can be searched for by a program written to search for a group of characters, the intent of the user cannot be ascertained.

On Twitter, when we precede a word or phrase (with no spaces) by a hash, we are establishing intent, we are “calling out the meme.”

Putting that hash tag in front of a word is akin to saying,

“Hey, the idea represented by these characters, this word or words, it deserves recognition as an idea not just some phrase in my tweet but as a meme and it is my intention to recognize it as such. If you think the word or words deserve recognition as an idea or meme, well, then, you do the same: put a hash tag in front of those characters in your tweets!”

Put more simply, the combination of #somewordorphrase represents an #idea or #meme that you want to #trackoranalyze.

For an overview of hashtags, visit twitter.pbwiki.com/Hashtags. As a side note, some sites refer to memes as “tags.”

How Do I Create a Meme on Twitter?

On Twitter, you create or pass on a meme in a tweet by placing the pound sign in front of the word or words representing the idea.

But, if you want to track the spread of your meme, you’ll want to go about it step-by-step. Start by checking if the meme already exists; then you can group your tweets into an existing meme.

How Do You Find Out If a Twitter Meme Already Exists?

You can use Twitter Search to find out how many other people have tagged the meme you are considering. Or, you can use Hashtags.org or Twemes.com.

How Do I Search Twitter?

Searching Twitter is easy. Follow these steps to find the popularity of your meme:

1. Log into your Twitter account.
2. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the “Search” link. Alternatively, you can simply type http://search.twitter.com into your browser.
3. To search Twitter for your meme, enter the pound sign first (remember, we call this a “hash”) followed by the word or phrase with no spaces in between.
4. Click search!

How Do I Search for a Meme using Hashtags.org?

I like hashtags.org because the site has a running display of the most popular tags (memes), the newest tags, the most recent tags, the most updated tags, ALL tags and People tags. The memes are listed on the left with the Tweeter and tweet listed on the right. Underneath the hashtag is the number of times the meme has been called out.

When you hover over the tweet, hashtags.org displays a line graph representing the growth and decline in the popularity of the meme along with a tooltip displaying the time of the last update.

At Hashtags.org, there is a big search bar in the upper right corner. Type your meme without the hash and click “Search.” If the response from hashtags.org times out, try again in a few minutes.

How Do I Search for a Meme using Twemes.com?

I love their name, a portmanteau of “twitter” and “meme!” You’ll find a twitter meme cloud, a “Tweme Cloud” in the right sidebar of the site. Select a timeframe (1 hour, 24 hours, 7 days, 30 days or one year) and a heat map or tag cloud representing the most popular memes during that time will appear. The main portion of the page displays the twemes that have been updated in the past few minutes.

To search for your meme (tweme!), enter your meme in the search bar in the upper right corner. It is not as prominent as the search bar on hashtags.org, but it functions similarly. Do not use the hash tag (no pound sign) in front of your meme.

What Does it All Meme?

If you searches return results, find the group or meme that is most closely aligned with your meme. Then use the already defined hash tag. If none of the search results fit your idea, create a new meme!

If there are no search results, you’ve got yourself a spanking-new, fresh meme! If you want to use Hashtags.org to track your meme, first Follow @hashtags on Twitter; then use your meme. You may have to wait several hours for your meme to appear on Hashtags.org. Almost immediate results are provided by Twitter’s search function.

Memes are ideas, cultural values, slogans, melodies, inventions and more that take up residence in people’s psyche begging for dissemination. The phrase, “spread the word” is an example of a meme; the idea of passing along information, of communicating, is, in itself, passed along and communicated, thus making the idea a meme.

You can use Twitter to promulgate or spread your own memes. And you can use Hashtags.org, Twemes and Twitter Search to tap into the most popular memes expressed by those with access to the internet! Broaden your twitter experience, expand your social circle and use Twitter for better internet marketing!

If you enjoyed this overview, want more or have questions, please leave a comment and follow Spread the Word on Twitter.

Thank you for reading and Happy Tweeming!