Unleashing the Ideavirus

Unleashing the Ideavirus
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 www.ideavirus.com
The answer is pretty simple: Each one of these devices creates long-term profits for its
inventor but is spread at a relatively low cost. And the reason it spreads? Because of viral
marketing.
Communication products demand viral marketing because they’re worthless without
someone at the other end. Metcalfe’s law tells us that the value of a network increases with
the square of the number of people using it. So when there are 10 fax machines in the world,
that’s 25 times better than when there were just 2.
Once I buy a communications device, two things happen. First, I become a powerful sneezer,
telling all my friends to buy one so I can send them stuff. And second, provided it’s a tool
that uses and existing channel (like FedEx or Hotmail), every time I send someone a
message, it’s selling the medium.
The story of Post-It notes is so good it ought to be apocryphal but it’s actually true. Nobody
was buying them. 3M was going to cancel the whole program. Then the brand manager of
the product persuaded the secretary of the chairman of 3M to send a case of Post-Its to the
secretaries of the chairmen of the other 499 Fortune 500 companies.
Suddenly, the most powerful sneezers in the most powerful companies in the country were
sending around memos, all containing comments scrawled on Post-Its. It took just a few
months after that for it to become yet another successful business communication device. A
classic ideavirus.
When I was in business school, a classmate spent a year working on a secret project he
wouldn’t tell anyone about. Turns out he was working to launch MCI Mail, the first
commercial email system. It’s a shame he couldn’t tell anyone, because a bunch of us would
have been happy to tell him what we knew, even 20 years ago: An email system isn’t going to
work if there isn’t anyone to send email to!
MCI was charging about $100 to set you up, and another $20 or so a month, plus usage, for
this new service. Big mistake! They inserted friction early in the process, ensuring that people
would never try it, especially so early in the virus’s life.

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