Meme Lifecycle Semantics and Organizational Knowledge Creation

The paper proposes and describes an application model for managing meme life cycle semantics, enveloped in a control system for monitoring and adjusting the output of the proposed model. Although Richard Dawkins' meme theory is an informal speculation with some empirical background rather than a mature, rigorous scientific theory, several endeavours in the literature are trying to define formalization and methodologies for it, one of those being the meme life cycle or meme mapping. We are investigating how we can formalize memes' lifecycle by considering Nonaka's SECI model for knowledge creation in business environment. We consider that the Semantic Social Web provides the environment for meme manifestation and a formalization context for what is more rigorously named "emergent knowledge", with evolution patterns that may prove beneficial for social networking marketing strategies acting as control leverage. By analogy, memes and organizational knowledge can benefit from each other: 1) memes can take advantage of the proven theories and already formalized models given by the knowledge management field 2) knowledge creation discipline can employ ready to use case studies that could lead to conceptualizing a particular situation to a general concept. Therefore, another important issue that is analyzed in this paper is regarding how memes contribute to the creation of organizational knowledge such that will enable businesses to obtain the required competitive advantage. Marketing strategies may profit from timely identifying and predicting meme channels and incorporate them with their advertising systems. Social networking information systems can supply particular situations concerning marketing campaigns and their outcome. Circulation and life cycle of concepts can be tractable in social networking applications thus providing an empirical base for experiments and research both in the field of memetics and organizational knowledge creation for sustainability of the business. Our application model makes use of a control system therefore not only that we can monitor the memes life cycle and their spreading process but also we can influence meme/knowledge assimilations because of the recommendations made.