28 THE POWER OF VISUAL STORYTELLING WORD PHOTOS From traditional text to quotes and stats, there are many options for using words to enhance the visual story of an image. But what happens if the word is in fact the image? With the help of a few useful tools, like WordFoto, an app for iPhone and iPad Touch, or WordCam Pro for Android, your company’s name or tagline, plus key buzzwords, can be turned into an eye-catching visual image. MEMES Memes are concepts and ideas that spread from person to person, and they serve as signifiers of the spread of cultural information. In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins created the term meme from the 4 Greek word “mimeme,” which means “an imitated thing.” In the 1870s, English photographer Harry Frees started taking photographs of his cats and printing them on the covers of greeting cards, accompanied by humorous text.5 These cards are the first examples of LOLcats (the most popular and enduring Internet meme—where humorous captions are placed over pictures of cats). “I can has cheezburger,” “Success Kid,” “Hipster Ariel,” “Bachelor Frog”—these sound like children’s superheroes, but they are in fact memes—jokes, phrases, concepts, images, videos, and cultural phenom- ena repeated and shared at an alarming rate. Thanks to the Internet and social media, visual memes can spread globally in a matter of hours. Often nonsensical, usually hilarious, 90% likely to contain an image of a cat, memes are the cultural glue holding the Internet together. These days, memes appear everywhere, and they spread so fast it is often impossible to discover their source (although you could try www .knowyourmeme.com, which maintains a database on the origins of spe- cific memes). In the last several years brands have focused on the meme as a tool for awareness and social proof. Home Depot created its own version of the popular cat meme when it launched “Richard the Cat, a.k.a. Pundit of People,” in spring 2013.