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People like us who understand social media, or pretend to, often spend all our time with other people like us. Which means that we often forget that we are part of a very niche sub-culture and most other people are not like us, and don’t understand the references we often take for granted.
I was reminded of this reality when I was reading chapter 11 of Chris Anderson’s brilliant book ‘The Long Tail‘. To prove the point that snippets of culture that are ubiquitous to us are often obscure to everyone else, Chris lists down 10 famous Internet viral memes and wonders how many people have heard of them. I had heard of 4 out of 10, but could be sure about only 2.
- Ellen Feiss
- The Star Wars Kid (original video)
- Dancing Baby
- Bert is Evil
- Bonzai Kitten
- Tourist Guy
- MC Hawking (website)
- 1337
- Subservient Chicken (website)
- First Post
Do leave a comment and let me know how many you have heard of. I suspect that most of you would have heard of less than 5, and it won’t be the same 5 either.
Chris says that in The Long Tail world, we will be mistaken to assume that other people understand our cultural references -
What does this show? It shows that my tribe is not always your tribe, even if we work together, play together, and otherwise live in the same world.
When mass culture breaks apart, it doesn’t re-form into a different mass. Instead, it turns into millions of micro-cultures.
- including the meaning of The Long Tail itself, if I may add. 
The point is that most marketers in India haven’t heard of the Subservient Chicken. They also haven’t heard of landing pages, or context sensitive ads, or (gasp!) even user generated content. What’s more, most agencies who are asking marketers to move to digital media, haven’t either - not in any meaningful way, at least.
In my last post, I wrote about what marketers in India should not do on digital media. When I start my series on what marketers in India should do on digital media, I’ll start from the assumption that they don’t know what I’m talking about.
Which reminds me of a Hugh McLeod post I read the other day:
None of this stuff is rocket science. And sadly for folks working in the social software industry, “The people who get it, don’t need us. And the people who need us, don’t get it.” Which is why being a “blog consultant” or whatever is a lot less lucrative and rewarding than people often think.
Comments (2)
Here ya go.. All of them. In one video.
http://www.break.com/index/we-didnt-start-the-viral.html
Got only one of them - the dancing baby - and that too only because of Ms. Ally McBeal
But then again, I’m not one of you lot. I’m one of my lot, who your lot think it’s necessary to condescendingly explain Long Tails by starting out “Do you know what an X and Y axis is?”