DEVELOPING A VISUAL STORYTELLING ROAD MAP: FROM STRATEGY TO IMPLEMENTATION 161 TIPS to Help Companies Embrace Memes 1. Understand memes. Understand what expressed by your buyers but without they are, how they work, and which pushing a solution. Many businesses have memes appeal to which audiences. Think gotten into trouble by publishing memes about whether your audience regularly that don’t gel with the core values of shares content online, and research the their audience (for example, sarcasm and pain points, misconceptions, and common black humor directed at a wholesome issues they experience. audience, or political or racial jokes that 2. Pay attention to the memes that are alienate audience members). popular right now. Look for memes that 5. Make it visible. You can share your meme are just beginning to get popular (hint: on your social media pages—Facebook, memes from movies or TV shows that Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr, or Google+. have a lot of hype or have just been You can also add it to meme sharing sites released). Memes are already viral; so half and encourage your followers to share your work has already been done. It’s just on social bookmarking sites like Reddit. up to you to come up with something Use hashtags associated with your meme funny and relevant that works within the to make your meme easy to find. This is framework of the meme. particularly important on Tumblr because 3. Use humor. Memes are predominantly an tags are the predominant means of entertainment vehicle, so you’d better be searching on that site. If you are creating making your audience laugh. Test your a whole series of memes around a central memes before releasing them to check character, you could even create a blog or that they’re funny enough to work for social media page for that character, as your audience. Home Depot did for Richard the Cat. 4. Ensure that the tone and message of the 6. Use memes to create value-added con- meme jibe with your brand. But don’t tent. If you’re not sure what to share on be so branded that your message can’t your Facebook page, creating and sharing be shared. Memes should express sen- memes related to your customer base or timents that adhere to real pain points products can be great ways to generate (continued)