Unleashing the Ideavirus

Unleashing the Ideavirus
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 www.ideavirus.com
Internet. But they were also unable to imagine a world in which cards didn’t cost money—so
they made the cards they sold online available for a fee.
As a result, no virus emerged from the Hallmark site. If someone was charmed by a card and
came to the site to send a few, they discovered that they’d have to 
pay
to do that. They didn’t
convert. Conversion fell below the 
magic number
and the virus never ignited.
You can compute the magic number by multiplying the number of cards the average user
sends (in the example above, it’s 5) by the percentage of people who convert (50%). In this
case, the magic number is 2.5, which is how much bigger each generation will be than the
one before. Until the magic number exceeds 1.2 or 1.3, it’s hard for a product to get viral fast
enough to beat the competition.
By focusing on smoothness (it’s only three clicks to send a card and it’s free, so go ahead and
try it), Blue Mountain built an amazing conversion machine. As a result, the site grew and
grew until Excite bought it for nearly a billion dollars worth of stock. Whatever Blue
Mountain’s goal—to make a lot of money, to affect a lot of people or to spread their idea far
and wide—they’ve succeeded.
Hallmark and American Greetings have seen the light, and now they, along with Yahoo! and
others, offer free greeting cards. The challenge that they face is that there’s no longer a
vacuum, so their ideavirus can’t spread as fast, and their magic number is far lower than that
which Blue Mountain Arts enjoyed at its peak (the number 
must
go down as the population
of untouched people approaches zero).
Another example of viral marketing worth looking at is Ofoto. Ofoto is an Internet
alternative to Fotomat. Instead of dropping your film off at the corner, you send your digital
camera files to Ofoto and they send back beautiful prints.
This is a compelling story, but there isn’t enough money in the world to communicate it
through traditional marketing means. Kodak spends $100 million a year in advertising (and
has been advertising for a hundred years). On top of the huge amount of noise out there,

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