Memes in corporate communications

For many techies working for global companies, December and early January timeframe will be a bit light in the workload. This is due to some of the counterparts and colleagues taking leave for Christmas. And some others utilizing their unused leaves that will be elapsed at the end of the year. I am one of them with the lighter work load :)

Combine this situation with the situation of having a kid who competes and imitates me in using electronic devices. And more so when it is not my office laptop or personal phone. I end up having only one of the two with me even though there are other devices (laptop and tab) that I had bought for myself :)

Given that I have free time to burn, I ended up spending time looking at Memes, the madness in the current time. The memes carry knowledge on current affairs with fun. I am pretty sure a lot of you out there are also used to funny memes by now. They have become an integral part of social media as were emojis and gifs that made their way earlier. People also use memes that they like in their WhatsApp status messages and stories in other sites.

As I spent time with these memes, I had a thought of why not use these in corporate communications? The memes can be used in various internal and external marketing or other communications. As always, the metrics of how effective this new method of communication will be can be measured very easily in the current age with the technology we have.

Job posts to attract young talent
EDMs for events and product launches/releases
Offer/sale announcements
Poster designs
Attract people for consumer products

When it comes to any corporate, they will be open to use any content or image which is made in-house. However for any content or image that is external, they will be willing to buy it and not use anything for free. They prefer not to risk the possibility of a future conflict by using any specific content or image for free. This is where the sites related to stock images made their way into the market. Designers can create and sell the images they made. Corporates can buy these and use it without any worry.

When it comes to modern memes, it involves a human expression and most likely it is of a celebrity in a movie. It is not something that is designed/created by someone. This is where I think there is a gap and hence an opportunity. Even though someone in a corporate thinks of using a meme in their communications, they will not use any celebrity image as it will not be legally correct for them to use that way. Instead, I think they can look at their internal people to do similar expressions for them or may be there can be a site where people can actually post their own expressions and poses that can be later used in memes. These people can be upcoming artists or anyone who wants to give a try with themselves used in memes. And of course, others buy those images at a cost. They can also post how their expressions or poses can be used by posting sample memes.

As I thought about this idea, I found an app by name MemeChat. Below is a YourStory article on this app. Please note I did not intend to mention this app in this post when I started writing this yesterday night. I just started writing about this thought of Memes and found this today. I am yet to explore this. Try it out if you like though :)

https://yourstory.com/2020/08/memechat-app-creators-brands-aatmanirbhar-bharat-innovation

With so much happening with memes on social media, I am sure they will jump to next level of usage.

About the author

Vishnu Vardhan Chikoti is a co-author for the book "Hands-on Site Reliability Engineering". He is a technology leader with diverse experience in the areas of Application and Database design and development, Micro-services & Micro-frontends, DevOps, Site Reliability Engineering and Machine Learning.