Ba-na-na-na-na-na-na-na…Shark Meme!

I recently read a great post by Dr. Chris Parsons for Southern Fried Science entitled “How to NOT get ahead in advertising – what many conservation NGOs are doing wrong”. This post contains a wealth of information from the International Congress for Conservation Biology’s symposium on conservation marketing.

One of the major take home messages from this symposium was that, to help modify human behaviour to bring about positive change for biodiversity, conservation NGOs need to spend more time effectively engaging with the general public. Asking for money and publishing informational leaflets just isn’t going to cut it in the fast paced, web-based, information rich world we live in. If you can’t easily scroll through it, no one is going to read it.

If you want to be successful in getting your messages across, you can’t have “boring”, unbalanced communication with your target audience!

SO! One of SharkStuff’s primary objectives is to enhance shark conservation by making the public perception of sharks more favourable – you aren’t going to want to help conserve animals you don’t like! We have this website, a SharkStuff Facebook page and Twitter account. How are we going to use these to help spread useful shark information? I give you…Shark Meme!

Everyone loves a good meme. Visual, succinct, often funny and, occasionally informative. What’s not to love? SharkStuff will be running weekly shark memes for the next three months, recording public engagement and comparing meme-generated engagement with non-meme material.

You can help by sending us your shark memes! There are LOADS of meme generators out there (e.g. https://memegenerator.net) or you can make your own, maybe you can put to use any awesome shark pictures that you have taken. Any memes sent to us will be credited to the sender

Couple of pointers:

• If you use an image that isn’t your own, please do send the picture credit details or we won’t be able to use it!
• Keep it clean people – no swears or indecent images please!
• Make it informative but light – it can be ANYTHING that you think will help people to understand sharks better – a fact about a specific species, a correction to a false perception, anything!

Send your shark memes as a jpeg or png files to the SharkStuff Facebook page or georgia.c.a.french@gmail.com