What's behind dogecoin's price surge—and why seemingly unrelated brands are capitalizing on its popularity
This is an excerpt from CNBC Make It's weekly newsletter. Subscribe here.

If you've seen a popular tweet about dogecoin, the volatile digital currency based on a meme about a shiba inu, recently, there's a decent chance that the official Slim Jim Twitter account will have a top reply — or have authored the tweet itself.

Slim Jim — yes, the company that sells beef jerky snacks — has made dogecoin central to its recent marketing and social media efforts. And since the company started tweeting about the coin in February, its Twitter presence has grown fivefold, according to Lanie Friedman, a spokeswoman for Slim Jim parent company Conagra Brands (she did not answer whether actual sales have also increased).

You'd be forgiven for not immediately understanding the marketing connection between a cryptocurrency and a beef jerky purveyor. But the dynamic is, to my mind, a perfect encapsulation of the current meme economy: Take some abstract, niche financial product like a joke cryptocurrency, hype it up on social media to the point that thousands of posters are churning out and engaging with free content about it and eventually exchange that hype for tangible cash.

The more absurd the product, and the more ironic and bombastic the discourse around it, the better. And Slim Jim has zeroed in on one of the weirdest and most popular out there, deeming its strategy a "memes and meats'' approach to posting, says Friedman. The social media campaign is not related to the value of dogecoin, she says; rather it works because both companies are "rooted in meme culture" and share "inclusive, positive" communities online.

For its part, dogecoin, which was created in 2013 as a parody of bitcoin, has been trading at record levels these past few weeks thanks, primarily, to the antics of billionaire memelord Elon Musk, according to Mike Bucella, general partner at BlockTower Capital. No joke: Its market capitalization of over $63 billion, as of Wednesday, is bigger than three-quarters of the companies in the S&P 500.

How can that be? A major driver of the meme economy is the desire to "stick it" to the establishment, says Avi Felman, head of trading at BlockTower Capital, noting that dogecoin has a lot in common with the GameStop rally from earlier this year. If the price of something like bitcoin can reach $60,000, or if the government can print trillions of dollars at once, people start questioning what is actually real, he says.