Unleashing the Ideavirus

Unleashing the Ideavirus
93
 www.ideavirus.com
contractor to talk with suppliers before building an office tower, he can now do it in just a
day using the Net.
This increase in velocity fundamentally changes the dynamic of a virus. Something
newsworthy might have 20 or 30 or 100 cycles of communications before the issue itself
becomes boring. In the days before the Net, if each cycle only touched one or two or three
people, the virus would die before it got old. Today, these cycles allow the virus to mutate
and evolve as it touches millions of people.

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Unleashing the Ideavirus
94
 www.ideavirus.com
Vector
Richard Dawkins, a brilliant evolutionary theorist, had his own word for the phenomenon
I’m calling ideaviruses: 
memes
. He pointed out that a meme was like a living organism,
surviving not in the real world, but in our world of ideas.
Like a real organism, memes could live and die, and more important, they could evolve.
Every time a meme is passed from person to person, it gets touched, changed
and—sometimes—improved.
Once a meme has been passed around enough, it ceases to evolve as quickly and just becomes
a building block for future memes. Pop singers are experts at stringing together memes and
turning them into concise snapshots of our lives. (Paul Simon is a favorite—Graceland,
Kodachrome, the pop charts… you get the idea).
One of the behaviors noticed by Dawkins and practiced by anyone who markets with
ideaviruses is that memes follow a vector. An idea doesn’t spread evenly and nicely through a
population. Instead, people are more likely to send it in one direction instead of another.
At college, there was always someone who knew where the good parties were (and which
ones to avoid). In your town, there’s someone who just seems to have the inside buzz on
which restaurants are hot. On the Internet, some people seem to be on the vector of the
latest email joke, while others—even in the same company or the same cliques—just don’t
seem to get touched as often.
When you create an idea and lay the groundwork for it to become a virus, it pays to study
the vector you’d like it to follow. Why? Because there’s plenty you can do to influence its
vector, and the vector you choose will have a lot to do with who “gets” the virus. The vector
controls the hives through which the idea flows.
If you’re on the Net, for example, the barriers you erect will influence your vector. If your
site needs Shockwave and Flash and a high-bandwidth connection, you’re not likely to vector
straight into the heart of the AOL user universe, regardless of where you start. If your goal is

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