Unleashing the Ideavirus

Unleashing the Ideavirus
138
 www.ideavirus.com
The good news is that he was invited to speak at a gathering of 100 top chief information
officers from the financial services industry he’s targeting. The bad news is that he was
planning just to give a speech.
What an opportunity! What a chance to talk to all the key sneezers at once and dominate the
hive. We did the math, and it’s clear that even if he needs to buy each one of the attendees a
BMW to get their attention, it’s worth it.
When you have an opportunity to dominate not just a hive, but the sneezers 
in
the hive, you
need to spare no expense to do so. Don’t just give a speech about how your product works
well. Fly in three satisfied customers to tell their stories in person. Don’t just give a speech
and ask for questions. Sponsor a cocktail party afterward so you can meet individuals and
answer their questions. Don’t just give a speech about how your product is safe and secure.
Give each attendee a first aid kit for their car. By focusing on this key moment, by over-
investing, you can lay the foundation for a virus to come later.

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Unleashing the Ideavirus
139
 www.ideavirus.com
How An Ideavirus Can Drive The Stock Market
When you think about it, the stock market is nothing but thousands of ideaviruses. (That’s
right, thousands. An ideavirus doesn’t have to dominate our entire culture to be an
ideavirus… some last for just a few days in a very isolated hive, then disappear.) When you
buy a share of stock, you don’t really get anything—just the right to sell that stock to
someone else tomorrow. So… if a positive virus catches on and the demand for the stock
skyrockets, you win.
The market’s respect for ideavirus thinking starts before the company even goes public.
Choosing an investment bank for your IPO is a first step. Firms like Goldman Sachs and
Alex.Brown are powerful sneezers (even though they can easily be bought off with millions of
dollars in investment banking fees by eager companies looking to go public). If one of these
firms aggressively recommends the stock to institutions, the virus starts off on the right foot.
The alternative—marketing the stock through a smaller, less respected (and perhaps cheaper)
investment bank—is almost certain to lead to a lower return.
The next step is pricing the IPO. The current rage is to underprice the stock being offered to
the public, because that will lead to a huge first day appreciation in the stock. It’s not
unusual for an IPO (like Globe.com, Martha Stewart Omnimedia or Street.com) to
dramatically increase in price on the first day of trading.
Why do this? Why leave all those proceeds on the table so that the folks lucky enough to buy
into your IPO make the money instead of your company? The answer is simple, and it has
two parts:
First, by rewarding the powerful sneezers who are lucky enough to buy into your IPO, you
maximize the chance that they’ll participate and will tell their less powerful (but more
numerous friends) about this exciting new investment.
Second, the rapid rise in the first day of trading allows other powerful sneezers (the news
media and brokers you don’t have direct contact with) to talk with excitement and
amazement to the next group of potential investors. In other words, this is cheap marketing.

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