I assumed recognising a famous a snippet was likely to have relatively simple timing/octave, to the extent you could just write it in brackets or something, or use an accent mark (which most people should figure out). ("GGGEb...")

"I think I'm currently leaning more towards audio solutions than musical notation ones, simply because not everybody can read music."

Indeed. Though there's probably some correlation between not recognising stuff and

Have you tried services like http://www.shazam.com/music/ where you ring them up and hum it and they tell you the answer? I've never tried it, but I've heard it's a lot better than I expected.