Genuine humor has serious benefits

Published September 25, 2014 at 8:38 am

Some of the most shared items on the internet are humorous images, videos and articles. However, adding levity to your marketing campaign execution only really works if it’s done genuinely, with a sense of what potential viewers will respond to. With a little effort, companies have the chance to distribute media that is both smart and funny.

The key to humor in the age of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter is finding some way to visually sum it all up, even if it involves more than just a picture. The web has seen a meta-example of this take hold in the case of internet celebrity George Takei.

Takei, a former Star Trek actor, has gained massive amounts of fans on Facebook for his posts and re-posts of images he likes. These aren’t all humorous in nature, but many of them are, and all come with a hint of Takei’s warm, irreverent personality.

Building off of this popular persona, the internet humor site ClickHole recently went even further and published a list article making fun of Takei’s approach to memes. In an interview with FastCompany, site editor Jermaine Affonso described not just the way that the site developed this piece but how they advertised and distributed it online after the fact.

“It was about George Takei, but we wanted to have a lot of fun with how we would keep poking him,” he said. “So throughout the day, we constantly called him out. We changed our profile picture so that it only displayed his head. And it just became this big fun thing that we tried to get the community involved in.”

With a direct marketing system, small businesses have the chance to promote their own material and connect it to others to help boost its presence.