Unleashing the Ideavirus

Unleashing the Ideavirus
50
 www.ideavirus.com
All hell broke loose. The very best sneezers started sneezing 
against
the company. The growth
rate hiccupped. Bad news. They’ll survive, and they might even continue their record
growth. But far better to have run the numbers in advance and had a payment schedule they
could live with forever.
Don’t view the relationship as an expense
It’s so easy to move your relationship with promiscuous sneezers from investment to expense.
After all, at the beginning it’s great because these people are dramatically cutting your
acquisition costs and helping you grow. But once you do grow, it’s easy to assume your
growth might be able to continue without the “high cost” of paying your sneezers.
In practice, there are two terrible side effects. The first is that you’ll inevitably try to trim the
benefits you offer your sneezers as well as the effort you put into keeping them happy. Better
to just cancel the program outright than to start disappointing these critical allies (remember,
an unhappy promiscuous sneezer can quickly become an angry powerful sneezer).
Second, you’ll find yourself trying to grow using techniques that you haven’t evolved, tested,
measured or practiced. And more often than not, that means failure.
A better strategy is to put a cap on your new sneezer acquisition efforts at the same time you
love and reward your existing sneezers. During this interregnum period, get really good at
tapping other ways to grow. Only after you’re confident that you’ve got the transition
working should you start to phase out the sneezers who got you there in the first place.

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Unleashing the Ideavirus
51
 www.ideavirus.com
It’s More Than Just Word Of Mouth
Marketers have been pursuing word of mouth for years. There are five important principles
that someone unleashing an ideavirus should understand—principles that marketers
pursuing old-fashioned word of mouth didn’t use:
1. An idea merchant understands that creating the virus is the single most important part of
her job. So she’ll spend all her time and money on creating a product and environment that
feeds the virus.
2. An idea merchant understands that by manipulating the key elements of idea
propagation—the velocity, the vector, the smoothness, the persistence and the identification
of sneezers—she can dramatically alter a virus’s success.
Definition: PERSISTENCE Some ideas stick around a long time with each person,
influencing them (and those they sneeze on) for months or years to come. Others have a
much shorter half-life before they fade out.
Definition: VECTOR As an ideavirus moves through a population, it usually follows a
vector. It could be a movement toward a certain geographic or demographic audience, for
example. Sometimes an ideavirus starts in a sub-group and then breaks through that niche
into the public consciousness. Other times, it works its way through a group and then just
stops. Napster vectored straight to college kids. Why? Because they combined the three
things necessary for the virus to catch on: fast connection, spare time and an obsession with
new music.
3. The idea merchant remembers that digital word of mouth is a permanent written record
online, a legacy that will follow the product, for good or for ill, forever.
4. An idea merchant realizes that the primary goal of a product or service is not just to satisfy
the needs of one user. It has to deliver so much wow, be so cool, so neat and so productive
that the user tells five friends. 
Products market themselves by creating and reinforcing
ideaviruses.
5. An idea merchant knows that the ideavirus follows a lifecycle and decides at which
moment to shift from paying to spread it, to charging the user and profiting from it.

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