Unleashing the Ideavirus

Unleashing the Ideavirus
36
 www.ideavirus.com
Ideas Are More Than Just Essays And Books. Everything From New
Technology To New Ways Of Creating To New Products Are Winning Because
Of Intelligent Ideavirus Management By Their Creators.
A manifesto is a carefully organized series of ideas, designed to get someone to come around
to your point of view. But while one way to make a complicated argument is with a book,
you can just as easily (and sometimes more effectively) send it through a song (Bob Dylan
did this for Hurricane Carter) or with something as elegant as an OXO vegetable peeler.
When you first see the OXO, you instantly understand the idea behind it. You just know it
will work better and cut you less often. If you’ve ever peeled a vegetable, 
you want an OXO
.
The design of the OXO is quite simply a manifesto that says, “There’s a smart, comfortable
way to do this annoying task.” Is the OXO going to get viral? Not across the general
population, of course, but if you hang out with a group of people who have arthritis or love
kitchen stuff, it already has. Just take a look at the glowing reviews of this peeler on
Amazon’s kitchen site.

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Unleashing the Ideavirus
37
 www.ideavirus.com
The End Of The Zero Sum Game
Traditional advertising is a game with winners and losers. If your product gets attention from
the targeted consumer, you win “mindshare” and your customer loses time. When a
consumer is foolish enough to listen to an irrelevant ad, she loses time and doesn’t even gain
useful information. It’s an old economy model in which every transaction has someone
taking
something.
Permission marketing and the ideavirus are both very different from this model. These
models create a game in which everyone can win! If there’s a great idea, and it moves through
the hive for free, everyone who touches it wins in several ways.
First, you as the consumer win for recommending it to a friend. This increases your status as
a powerful sneezer (or your compensation as a promiscuous sneezer.) Because you respect
your peers, you’re not suggesting or pitching something that doesn’t make your friends’ lives
better. Violate this respect and your power as a sneezer goes way down.
Definition: SNEEZER Some people are more likely to tell their friends about a great new
idea. These people are at the heart of the ideavirus. Identifying and courting sneezers is a key
success factor for ideamerchants.
Second, the recipient benefits as well. He benefits from the way the idea changes his life, and
he benefits because he now has the ability to sneeze the idea to someone else, thus increasing
his power.
Third, the creator of the idea succeeds because her idea propagates and because she can sell
souvenirs (speeches, consulting, value-added services) to people who are now open and
receptive to her idea.
My friend, Chris Meyer, co-author of 
Blur
, had this to say: “The one thing that distinguishes
effective sneezing campaigns from ineffective ones is RESPECT for the time, attention, and
reputation of the next guy to catch the virus. It’s important to note that the decision to
sneeze is, in general, a distributed one, made by each of us as to whether to clog our friend’s

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