Unleashing the Ideavirus

Unleashing the Ideavirus
91
 www.ideavirus.com
Coors did this with beer years ago. You could only get Coors in Colorado, then you could
only get it west of the Mississippi. By concentrating their marketing dollars, they addressed a
smaller hive. This enabled them to get a larger percentage of the hive to sample the product.
This core group then had a smooth way to spread the word, and it quickly conquered one
state after another.
Without any effort from the Coors people, the virus spread to the East Coast. Coors fielded
thousands of requests from disappointed drinkers who wanted to try this new beer they’d
heard about, but couldn’t.
Coors dominated a hive. Then they went national to try to fulfill the demand created when
their hive spread the word. Unfortunately, the new hive was so large, it turned out to be
difficult to satisfy and dominate.
Compare the powerful, nearly effortless spread of their idea with the challenges they face
today. As a national brand in a stagnant market, growth by any method is hard to come by.
They built their company on a unique virus, but they couldn’t continue to grow their
company the same way.

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Unleashing the Ideavirus
92
 www.ideavirus.com
Velocity
Napster is a worldwide file sharing database that lets Internet users share MP3 files. In
essence, you can listen to the digital record collection of millions of other people. The idea
behind Napster turned into a virus and grew like crazy. Why?
They hit college campuses—a hotbed of communication. A virus can spread across a campus
in a matter of hours. When a dear friend of mine went to Tufts in the late 1970s his
roommate started a rumor that Paul McCartney had died (this was before John Lennon’s
tragic death—they weren’t 
that 
callous). Within an hour, they started hearing the rumor
back—from friends of friends of friends who couldn’t precisely remember where or how
they’d heard it.
Napster was spread the same way. How? Because in addition to being on a college campus,
Napster lives on the Internet. So, instead of being word of mouth as in the Paul McCartney
example, it was digitally augmented word of mouth. On college campuses, everyone has
email, and email is both instantaneous and amplified. You can send an email to thirty or
forty friends as easily as you can write to one. So once a powerful sneezer had tried the
software and confirmed that it worked as advertised, the word spread fast.
Why is velocity so important? Remember, filling a vacuum is far easier than going second. If
the velocity of a virus isn’t fast enough, a competitor may leapfrog past you into a new hive
before you can get there, dominating as the “original” in that market.
This happened with beer, in which regional favorites have long survived the introduction of
nationwide refrigerated delivery. It even happened with the college entrance exams, in which
the ACT is favored in the Midwest, years after the SAT became the standard almost
everywhere else in the world. The only reason this happened is that the ACT got to the
Midwest first.
How does the Net changes our economy so dramatically? Because it dramatically increases
the velocity of viruses in various hives. Where it used to take weeks or months for a

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