Unleashing the Ideavirus

Unleashing the Ideavirus
87
 www.ideavirus.com
The story of 
The Bridges of Madison County
is a great example of this. Warner Books, the
publisher, realized that most other publishers were doing very little to market to the
independent bookstores, and that if he could court them and give them something to sell
that made them feel special, it would translate into a bestseller.
Of course, as soon as the legions of independent booksellers succeeded in turning 
Bridges
into a phenomenon, they were assaulted by dozens of other less imaginative publishers, all
trying to rush in and use the same strategy. Too late. It got cluttered. They got busy. No one
else ever repeated the focused, obvious success of this approach.
Remember, an ideavirus adores a vacuum, and 
Bridges
filled that vacuum. As other book
marketers rushed in, no one was able ever again to persuade a critical mass of booksellers to
support just one book.
Does this mean Warner was doomed never to be able to repeat this process again? Is that all
there is—just one new gimmick after another? No! Instead, Warner needed to gain
permission from this critical sneezer audience and use that permission to promote the next
book and the next through a channel they were clever enough to build.

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Unleashing the Ideavirus
88
 www.ideavirus.com
Hive
Winning with an ideavirus begins with the choice of hive. And this choice is so important,
I’d suggest the following: choose your hive first, 
then
build the idea.
Traditionally, marketers start with a problem, or a factory, and go from there. I’ve got a great
widget, and now I need a way to take it to market. Or, we’ve got this excess plant
capacity—let’s find a way to fill it. But that’s not what works today. Choose your market by
identifying a hive that has a problem 
and
has the right concentration of sneezers, the right
amplified networking, the right high velocity of communication and, most of all, an
appropriate vacuum.
Success will come to marketers who attack small but intimate hives. Yes, Yahoo! and eBay hit
huge home runs, but they’re remarkable precisely because success across such a large hive is
rare indeed. We can learn a more relevant lesson from magazines.
Fast Company
is one of the fastest-growing (and most profitable) magazines ever. Why? Well
it certainly helps that it’s a great magazine. It also helps that the Internet created a huge
demand for this sort of advertising space. But the real success came in the hive that the
editors selected.
Turns out there are hundreds of thousands of people in mid-sized to large companies who
are eager to do a great job, but feel frustrated at the slow pace and mind-numbing
bureaucracy they face every day. Until 
Fast Company, 
the members of this hive didn’t even
know there were others just like them. They didn’t have a tool they could use to reach their
peers.
Fast Company
became the identity, the bible, the badge of honor for this new hive. It gave
them a way to communicate, to learn and to have confidence in themselves. By every
measure, the magazine was virusworthy.
Just about every reader of 
Fast Company
became a powerful sneezer. With no compensation
and very little encouragement, they started signing up co-workers for subscriptions, Xeroxing

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