Unleashing the Ideavirus

Unleashing the Ideavirus
89
 www.ideavirus.com
page after page of the magazine and passing it around the office. The readers even created a
worldwide network of support groups, meeting in cities on a monthly basis, with no help at
all from the magazine.
Fast Company
filled a vacuum. It got viral. It enchanted and connected with a huge legion of
powerful sneezers. All because the editors chose the right hive and created a virusworthy
product.
A few years later, Time Warner launched 
Real Simple 
magazine, inspired by the significant
sales of books about simple living. So they launched a magazine dedicated to simplifying our
lives. Obviously, it’s aimed at a very different hive than that of 
Fast Company
. Alas, the
magazine is off to a slow start.
Why?
Because this hive isn’t the right one at the right time. Because there’s a real lack of aggressive
powerful sneezers. Because the hive doesn’t have a built-in forum for communicating with
each other (it’s not office-centric like 
Fast Compan
y). As a result, the magazine is having a
much harder time going viral.
Choosing your hive
The 
Zagats Guide to New York City Restaurants
is a fascinating document. According to
Zagats, the book is put together by 100,000 reviewers, who ate out an 
average
of four times a
week, spending an average of $40 a person. Do the math. That’s more than $8,000 of mostly
after-tax money spent on eating out every year.
This very special hive of people shares a demographic but is by no means typical of the U.S.
population (which in itself is very different from the world at large). Trying to appeal to
everyone is almost sure to fail, for the simple reason that everyone wants something different!
The reason there isn’t one restaurant in Cincinnati or Indianapolis or Tallahassee that’s as
good as the Union Square Café in New York is not that the population can’t afford the tab.

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