Unleashing the Ideavirus

Unleashing the Ideavirus
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 www.ideavirus.com
Online, the rules are very different. There is no physical world to bump into. Instead (and
even better for the statistician in each of us), there are actual digital counters and accurate, up
to the minute bestseller lists. No guessing. No inferences. The real scoop.
Amazon.com has a bestseller list more than a million titles long. Visit any title and you can
see where it stands compared to every single other title in the world. Wow. Now we instantly
understand what’s hot and what’s not.
MP3.com has done the same thing with music. As a track gets played more and more often,
it moves up their digital bestseller list. And yes, Zipf’s law works here too—the topmost
tunes are downloaded far often more than those just below them.
We use the same math when we look at the MediaMetrix list of the most visited websites, or
Variety’s tally of the weekly box office numbers (some people saw “Titanic” just because it
seemed that everyone else was). Various organizations also track bestselling cars, bestselling
vodka and highest-paid executives.
One of the best ways to facilitate adoption of your ideavirus is to find a bestseller list that
makes sense and then dominate it. If that’s impossible, figure out how to create your own
bestseller list and popularize that!
This isn’t just conjecture. A breakthrough paper by Stanford Business School professor Kirk
Hanson demonstrated this in a really profound way. His team artificially boosted the
bestseller status of files for download on the web (they downloaded one file over and over
again, increasing the counter of how often it had been downloaded). The result? Heavily
downloaded files get downloaded more often! Nothing was changed but the counter, but
users were more interested in seeing the most popular files. Simple, but true.
Want to launch a new drink using your company’s chi-chi liquer? Why not identify the right
bar, frequented by powerful sneezers in the hive you’re targeting. Then pay the bar to post a
“bestselling drinks list.” Now, bribe enough folks to go in and buy themselves a drink. Soon,
you’ll see your drink climbing the bestselling drinks list, and this alone ought to be enough
to get other—less easily bribed drinkers—to give it a try.

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