Unleashing the Ideavirus

Unleashing the Ideavirus
65
 www.ideavirus.com
Five Ways To Unleash An Ideavirus
Of the five ways to unleash an ideavirus, the most important element they share is that for
best results 
you must build this thinking in from the very beginning
. If you’ve got an existing
product or service and you’re hoping to build a virus around it, your job will be more
difficult. The ideas behind the lightning fast success stories have all worked because the
ideavirus concept was baked in from the start. That’s one of the reasons more established
companies are having so much trouble competing in the new economy—they’re restricted
because of the standards and systems they built in years ago.
The five techniques, in order of sheer market power, are:
1. Go full viral. The more you use it, the more you market it (whether you want to or not).
In essence, using the product is the same as marketing it.
2. Pay off the promiscuous.
3. Make it smooth for the powerful.
4. Digitally augment word of mouth.
5. Altruism…reward the friends of the promiscuous.
1. Go full viral. This is the holy grail of ideavirus marketing. The beauty of viral marketing is
that if you properly construct the virus, you can grow like a weed and dominate the
market—if you can do it before the competition.
Polaroid and Hotmail are the poster children for viral marketing, but there are a few other
that are worth looking at:
Blue Mountain Arts was a pioneer in creating a virus around the idea of sending electronic
greeting cards. The virus is simple to understand—in order to send a greeting card

---

Unleashing the Ideavirus
66
 www.ideavirus.com
successfully, you’ve got to send it 
to
someone. Of course, once someone receives the card, if
they like the idea, they’re just a click away from sending someone else a card!
Even though the cards featured by Blue Mountain Arts could charitably be called “cheesy,”
the virus caught on. People got the idea that it might be fun to send electronic cards to their
friends… and the idea spread. The company started small, with no real advertising. Just a
few people sent the first batch of cards.
But then the magic of viral marketing kicked in. Let’s assume that each person sends cards to
five people. Let’s also assume that those recipients have a 50% chance of being interested
enough in the concept to go to the site and send cards to five of 
their
friends. If we start with
ten people, the generations look like this:
10 people send 50 cards
which means that 25 people get the virus and send 125 cards
which means that 63 people get the virus and send 315 cards
which means that 162 people get the virus and send 810 cards
which means that 405 people get the virus and send 2025 cards…
Now, that may seem like a slow start, but if you assume that each generation takes three days
to occur (I send out ten cards and within three days, five friends show up and do the same
thing), then you’d have 58 million users in 54 days!
Of course, that doesn’t really happen. It’s unlikely you’ll be able to continue to get a 50%
conversion rate. And it’s certain that you’ll soon hit duplication, with individuals starting to
get cards from different people. But the math is nevertheless stunning.
The key number in the equation is the percentage of people who convert. If you lower it
from 50% in the Blue Mountain Arts example to 30%, the number of users drops from 58
million to less than 10,000. Which is why conversion is so critical.
The battle between Hallmark and Blue Mountain in this space is fascinating. Hallmark and
American Greetings, both old-line card companies, were well aware of the potential of the

---