Corporate Blog Memes Rarely Form And They’re Usually Small When They Do

Of course, that depends on how frequent and how big you thought corporate blog memes might be to start with! This is the next post in my series on Fortune 500 blogs and it focuses on the number of consumer blog entries that connect back to corporate blogs to form what have become known as memes.

The vast majority (262 out of 299 or almost 88%) of memes I collected were between two and ten posts in size while the biggest meme reached 56 posts. The chart below shows a frequency distribution of meme size measured by the total number of consumer posts in each meme. As with corporate posts (and as will be shown later in other areas), there was a sharp decline in the frequency of memes as the number of posts increased.

It’s important to point out that I only collected memes where a consumer linked to at least one other consumer. I was trying to measure patterns in sentiment between consumer posts so the only memes that were useful for my study were those with at least one connection between consumers. By extension, it also meant there were at least two posts in each meme by default.

The second chart below breaks out memes of 2-10 posts and reveals 62% of the memes in that category and 55% overall contained the minimum two posts. There were 5,887 corporate blog posts collected in total and only 299 (5%) produced memes of at least two, linked consumer responses meaning it was quite rare for connections to form between individuals.

However, that doesn’t mean there was no consumer blog response to the other 95% of corporate posts, although that was the case for a good number. It was possible that a corporate blog post generated any number of consumer responses but that these linked directly to the corporate blog independently without referencing one another and were not recorded as a result. (This will be explained in more detail in future posts on meme structure.)

I think there is a very good chance that the aggregate patterns for meme size would stand-up upon further study but I also feel the need to reiterate that the data is subject to the limitations of the study methodology and tools. Memes can change over time as links can be broken and posts can be added, updated, hidden or permanently removed. The data represents a snapshot in time.

The meaning that can be drawn from using blog posts to measure meme size is also limited because it is a one-dimensional approach. Other forms of online communication were considered when planning this study, in particular the role of blog comments, but ultimately it was a necessary limitation of a small study with constrained resources to focus on blog posts.

In the past year and even in the last few months, the extent to which online memes are distributed across many social media platforms has only accelerated (I don’t think I need to mention Twitter). Companies need to monitor their corporate reputation and marketing campaigns within the broader social media landscape which I’m sure will continue to provide a moving target.

Posted on July 15, 2009