Unleashing the Ideavirus

Unleashing the Ideavirus
175
 www.ideavirus.com
Same is true with Stevie Wonder. You bought “Innervisions” because you heard it at a
friend’s house, or on the radio, not because you saw an ad. Yet when Stevie comes out with a
new album, his record label has to start all over again, interrupting you using mass media.
Both Stevie and his label waste a huge asset every single time you buy an album. They have
no idea who you are, and worse, they don’t have permission to contact you again.
The challenge of the idea merchant is to turn the virus into an asset. And you turn the virus
into an asset when you ask the user for permission to follow up directly!
This is probably the biggest mistake that ideavirus marketers have made to date. They launch
a virus—a website, a book, a record, a software program, a food—and enjoy the fruits of the
virus while it lasts, but fail to gain a long term asset. And without that asset, they can’t
launch new products or leverage their existing ones without long lag times and the high costs
associated with contacting the users they’ve already converted.

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Unleashing the Ideavirus
176
 www.ideavirus.com
How A Virus And Permission Team Up To Find Aliens
Turns out that the best way to find alien life somewhere in the universe is to listen.
Specifically, to use powerful supercomputers to scan the spectrums for anomalous sounds.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a supercomputer available that’s powerful enough to get the job
done in our lifetime. Which is why the SETI built the largest distributed computer network
in the world. More than 2,000,000 computers are working, in their spare time, to process
these huge chunks of data.
The mechanics of the system are elegant. Whenever your computer has some downtime, a
screensaver pops up, and behind the scenes, your Pentium processor starts cranking through
data that the computer downloads through the web. But what’s really neat is the fact that all
2,000,000 computers in the network signed up without any advertising or financial
inducement.
Instead, the SETI project launched an ideavirus. Word spread among nerds the world over
that they could help find alien intelligence by having their computers participate in the
network. It’s a classic ideavirus, propagated by some powerful sneezers.
The power of the network, though, comes from the fact that they don’t have to relaunch the
thing every week. That it’s incredibly persistent, of course (once you set it up, it stays set up
until you take the initiative to turn it off), but even better, they have permission to
communicate to their users.
This permission is an asset. You can measure it. You can leverage it. You could turn it into
cash if you wanted to.
Let’s take one more look at the sequence:
1. Invent a virusworthy idea.
2. Make it smooth and persistent.
3. Incent powerful sneezers.
4. Get their permission to follow up.

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