Currently I'm not convinced that the memetic analogy has done more to clarify than to occlude cultural evolution/opinion dynamics. That's not to say that work in genetics is useless, but I think that the terminology has taken precedence above what the actual concepts mean, and I read a lot of conversations that feel like people just trading the information that they read The Selfish Gene 40 years ago.

There's certainly scope for an applied "memetics" but it's really crying out for a good predictive (even if simplistic) model.