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Crank linguistics
Pretty much -- I just find it funny that skeptics/rationalists/whatever you want to call them go crazy over vague terms bandied about by pseudoscientists like "toxins" as being unscientific (which is true), but when it comes to memes...well, it doesn't need to be precisely defined, it's a "new way of looking at things," and so on.
The internet is pretty much the only place where completely inelastic memes, which exchange in high-fidelity, exist. Cat pictures, quickmeme.com, viral campaigns and so on.
Elsewhere, I think there is something to be said about "here's an idea", let's watch it move. But only if you realise how malleable an idea "is". That makes a meme as a unit a little problematic because unlike a gene that might stay intact with little to no mutation from generation to generation, a memetic equivalent might get completely hacked apart by the receiver. Or it might not. It's that which makes the gene analogy fall apart because the odds of inheriting a gene from a parent aren't dependent on the gene itself or what you already have.
It's funny that meme has become so synonymous with internet memes, because that seems to be one of the few places it might actually work, esp. due to high fidelity copying. Meme-like concepts have been around for quite a while, e.g., A.O. Lovejoy's "unit idea," which is not really scientific, but he wrote some pretty interesting history.