Unleashing the Ideavirus

Unleashing the Ideavirus
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 www.ideavirus.com
Torvald, Paul Newman, Ruth Reichl, Randall Rothenberg, Andy Hertzfeld, Chuck Close,
Spike Lee, Bill Taylor, Don Peppers, Peter Mayles, Alan Greenspan and Yo-Yo Ma. You may
not know all of these names, and there are plenty of hive-based sneezers I’ve never heard of,
but what they all have in common is that they’re perceived as insightful and altruistic. Once
people think they can be bought off, their power plummets.
[selfish benefit to promiscuous sneezer of recommending virus]
As we saw in the Amazon affiliate example, if you can make the benefit to the individual
both significant and easy to achieve, people will respond to it. Amazon signed up hundreds
of thousands of affiliates with a simple offer (get a percentage kickback on everything you
recommend) and backed it up with a two-minute procedure for qualifying and actually
getting started.
[smoothness of sharing the virus with a friend]
Once I want to tell someone about your idea, how do I do it? If it’s got a dumb, hard-to-say
name, or an embarrassing implication, I’ll probably pass. On the other hand, Hotmail is
smooth indeed, because every time I send email I’m talking about the idea.
The Polaroid camera used this smoothness brilliantly. After all, the only reason to take a
picture is to show it to other people, and if you can make the showing (and the waiting) turn
into a discussion of the idea, so much the better.
The beauty of Vindigo is similar. In order to tell you about Vindigo, I’m going to pull my
Palm out of my pocket and show it to you. But once I show it to you, I’m only one button
away from actually 
giving
it to you. The thing I want to show you is how easy it is to give
you, so the virus self-reinforces.
Ideally, you’ll figure out not only what a sneezer should say to someone when they talk about
your idea, you’ll also make it easy and automatic for them to do so.
[power of the amplifier used to spread positive word of mouth]
The mother of a friend of mine was runner up for Miss America in the early 1960s. I think
she lost to Anita Bryant. Alas, coming in second did very little for her career. Anita, on the

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