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| SECTION 1: Why Ideas
Matter |
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Farms,
Factories And Idea Merchants
Imagine for a second that you're at your business school reunion,
trading lies and bragging about how successful you are and are about
to become. Frank the jock talks about the dot- com company he just
started. Suzie the ex-banker is now focusing her energy on rebuilding
Eastern Europe. And then the group looks at you. With a wry look of
amusement, you answer:
"Well, the future--the really big money--is in owning a farm.
A small one, maybe 100 acres. I intend to invest in a tractor of course,
and expect that in just a few years my husband and I can cash out
and buy ourselves a nice little brownstone in the city."
Ludicrous, no? While owning a farm may bring tremendous lifestyle
benefits, it hasn't been a ticket to wealth for, say, 200 years.
What about owning a factory then? Perhaps the road to riches in the
new economy would be to buy yourself a hot-stamping press and start
turning out steel widgets. Get the UAW to organize your small, dedicated
staff of craftsmen and you're on your way to robber-baron status.
Most of us can agree that the big money went out of owning a factory
about thirty years ago. When you've got high fixed costs and you're
competing against other folks who also know how to produce both quantity
and quality, unseemly profits fly right out the window.
Fact is, the first 100 years of our country's history were about who
could build the biggest, most efficient farm. And the second century
focused on the race to build factories. Welcome to the third century,
folks. The third century is about ideas.
Alas, nobody has a clue how to build a farm for ideas, or even a factory
for ideas. We recognize that ideas are driving the economy, ideas
are making people rich and most important, ideas are changing the
world. Even though we're clueless about how to best organize the production
of ideas, one thing is clear: if you can get people to accept and
embrace and adore and cherish your ideas, you win. You win financially,
you gain power and you change the world in which we live.
So how do you win? What do you need to do to change the status quo
of whatever industry you're in, or, if you're lucky, to change the
world?
If you're a farmer, you want nothing more than a high price for your
soybeans. If you're a manufacturer of consumer goods, you want a display
at the cash register at Wal-Mart. But what if you're an idea merchant?
The holy grail for anyone who trafficks in ideas is this: to unleash
an ideavirus.
An idea that just sits there is worthless. But an idea that moves
and grows and infects everyone it touches... that's an ideavirus.
In
the old days, there was a limit on how many people you could feed
with the corn from your farm or the widgets from your factory. But
ideas not only replicate easily and well, they get more powerful
and more valuable as you deliver them to more people.
How does an ideavirus
manifest itself? Where does it live? What does it look like? It's
useful to think of ideas of every sort as being similar. I call
them manifestos. An idea manifesto is a powerful, logical "essay"
that assembles a bunch of existing ideas and creates a new one.
Sometimes a manifesto is a written essay. But it can be an image,
a song, a cool product or process... the medium doesn't matter.
The message does. By lumping all sorts of ideas--regardless of format--into
the same category (manifestos) it's much easier to think of them
as versions of the same thing. As long as you can use your manifesto
to change the way people think, talk or act... you can create value.
Definition:
MEDIUM In order
to move, an idea has to be encapsulated in a medium. It could be
a picture, a phrase, a written article, a movie, even a mathematical
formula (e=mc<+>2<+>). The Medium used for transmitting
the ideavirus determines how smooth it is as well as the velocity
of its growth. A medium is not a manifesto--every idea is a manifesto,
trying to make its point, and the medium is the substance that the
idea lives in.
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| Not
only is this an essay about ideas and ideaviruses...it's also a manifesto
striving to become an ideavirus! If this manifesto changes your mind
about marketing and ideas, maybe you'll share it with a friend. Or
two. Or with your entire company. If that happens, this idea will
become an ideavirus, and spread and gain in value.
We live in a world
where consumers actively resist marketing. So it's imperative to
stop marketing at people. The idea is to create an environment
where consumers will market to each other.
Is an ideavirus
a form of marketing? Sure it is. And today, marketing is all there
is. You don't win with better shipping or manufacturing or accounts
payable. You win with better marketing, because marketing is about
spreading ideas, and ideas are all you've got left to compete with.
The
future belongs to the people who unleash ideaviruses.
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What's
an ideavirus? It's a big idea that runs amok across the target audience.
It's a fashionable idea that propagates through a section of the population,
teaching and changing and influencing everyone it touches. And in
our rapidly/instantly changing world, the art and science of building,
launching and profiting from ideaviruses is the next frontier.
Have you ever heard of Hotmail? Ever used it? If so, it's not because
Hotmail ran a lot of TV ads (they didn't). It's because the manifesto
of free email got to you. It turned into an ideavirus. Someone you
know and trust infected you with it. What about a Polaroid camera...
was your first exposure (no pun intended!) in a TV ad, or did you
discover it when a friend showed you how cool the idea of an instant
photograph was?
Sometimes it seems like everyone is watching the same TV show as you,
or reading the same book, or talking about the same movie or website.
How does that happen? It usually occurs because the idea spreads on
its own, through an accidental ideavirus, not because the company
behind the product spent a ton of money advertising it or a lot of
time orchestrating a virus. And how the idea spreads, and how to make
it spread faster--that's the idea behind unleashing an ideavirus.
Word of mouth is not
new--it's just different now. There were always ideaviruses--gossip
or ideas or politics that spread like wildfire from person to person.
Without running an ad or buying a billboard, Galileo managed to
upset all of Pisa with his ideas. Today, though, ideaviruses are
more important and more powerful than ever. Ideaviruses are easier
to launch and more effective. Ideaviruses are critical because they're
fast, and speed wins and speed kills--brands and products just don't
have the time to develop the old way. Ideaviruses give us increasing
returns--word of mouth dies out, but ideaviruses get bigger. And
finally, ideaviruses are the currency of the future. While ideaviruses
aren't new, they're important because we're obsessed with the new,
and an ideavirus is always about the new.
Remember the slogan, "Only her hairdresser knows for sure?"
That was classic brand marketing, and it flew in the face of word
of mouth. It was an ad for a product that was supposed to be a secret--a
secret between you, your hairdresser and Clairol.
A few years later, Herbal Essence took a totally different tack...
they tried to encourage you to tell your friends. But while word
of mouth works great among the people who use a product and their
immediate friends--if I love your story or hate your service, I'll
tell a few friends--it dies out fast. There's no chance a friend
of a friend is going to tell you about my horrible experience on
United Airlines or how much I loved flying on Southwest. Word of
mouth fades out after a few exchanges.
But now, aided by the Net and abetted by the incredible clutter
in our universe, ideaviruses are spreading like wildfire. We're
all obsessed with ideas because ideas, not products, are the engine
of our new economy.
I wore Converse sneakers growing up... so did you. But the shareholders
of Converse never profited from the idea of the shoe--they
profited from the manufacture of a decent sneaker. If two sneakers
were for sale, you bought the cheaper one.
It took Converse generations to build a brand and years to amortize
a factory and they were quite happy to extract a modest profit from
every pair of sneakers sold, because Converse knew their factory
would be around tomorrow and the day after that. So sneakers, like
everything else, were priced by how much they cost, and sold one
pair at a time by earnest shoe salesmen who cared about things like
how well the shoes fit.
Converse could take their time. They were in this for the long haul.
Those days are long gone. Twenty years later, it's the idea
of Air Jordan sneakers, not the shoe, that permits Nike to sell
them for more than $100. It's the sizzle, not the fit. The idea
makes Nike outsized profits. And Nike knows that idea won't last
long, so they better hurry--they need another ideavirus, fast.
In the old days, we used to sneer at this and call it a fad. Today,
everything from presidential politics to music to dentistry is driven
by fads--and success belongs to marketers who embrace this fact.
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It
took 40 years for radio to have ten million users. By then, an industry
had grown that could profit from the mass audience. It took 15 years
for TV to have ten million users. It only took 3 years for Netscape
to get to 10 million, and it took Hotmail and Napster less than a
year. By aggregating mass audiences to themselves (and not having
to share them with an entire industry), companies like Netscape and
Hotmail are able to realize huge profits, seemingly overnight. And
they do it by spreading ideaviruses.
Ideas can now be carried in the ether. Because the medium for carrying
ideas is fast and cheap, ideas move faster and cheaper! Whether it's
the image of the new VW Beetle (how long did it take for the idea
of that car to find a place in your brain?) or the words of a new
Stephen King novel (more than 600,000 people read it in the first
week it was available online), the time it takes for an idea to circulate
is approaching zero.
Why should
we care? Why does it matter that ideas can instantly cross international
boundaries, change discussions about politics, crime and justice
or even get us to buy something? Because the currency of our future is ideas, and
the ideavirus mechanism is the way those ideas propagate. And the
science and art of creating ideaviruses and using them for profit
is new and powerful. You don't have to wait for an ideavirus to
happen organically or accidentally. You can plan for it and optimize
for it and make it happen.
Sure, some ideaviruses
are organic. They happen and spread through no overt action or intent
on the part of the person who creates them (the Macarena wasn't
an organized plot... it just happened). Others, though, are the
intentional acts of smart entrepreneurs and politicians who know
that launching and nurturing an ideavirus can help them accomplish
their goals.
In the old days, the
way we sold a product was through interruption marketing. We'd run
ads, interrupt people with unanticipated, impersonal, irrelevant
ads and hope that they'd buy something. And sometimes, it worked.
The advantage of this branding strategy is that the marketer is
in complete and total control. The disadvantage is that it's hard
and expensive. Every time a catalog clothier (Land's End, Eddie
Bauer, you name it) wants to sign up a new customer, they need to
buy a few hundred stamps, send out some carefully designed catalogs
and hope that one person sends them money.
What marketers are searching
for is a way to circumvent the tyranny of cost-per-thousand interruptions.
They need something that ignites, a way to tap into the invisible
currents that run between and among consumers, and they need to
help those currents move in better, faster, more profitable ways.
Instead of always talking to consumers, they have to help
consumers talk to each other.
A beautifully executed
commercial on the Super Bowl is an extraordinarily risky bet. Building
a flashy and snazzy website is almost certain to lead to failure.
Hiring a celebrity spokesperson might work on occasion, but more
often than not, it won't break through the clutter. Whenever advertisers
build their business around the strategy of talking directly to
the customer, they become slaves to the math of interruption marketing.
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In traditional
interruption marketing, the marketer talks directly to as many consumers
as possible, with no intermediary other than the media company.
The goal of the consumer is to avoid hearing from the advertiser.
The goal of the marketer is to spend money buying ads that interrupt
people who don't want to be talked to!
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In creating
an ideavirus, the advertiser creates an environment in which the
idea can replicate and spread. It's the virus that does the work,
not the marketer.
Fortunately,
there are already proven techniques you can use to identify, launch
and profit from ideas that can be turned into viruses. There's a
right and a wrong way to create them, and more important, the care
and feeding of your ideavirus can dramatically affect its potency.
One
of the key elements in launching an ideavirus is concentrating
the message. If just 1% or even 15% of a group is excited about
your idea, it's not enough. You only win when you totally dominate
and amaze the group you've targeted. That's why focusing obsessively
on a geographic or demographic or psychographic group is a common
trait among successful idea merchants.
Why
are new companies launching on the Net so obsessed with traffic
and visitors? Why is a company like GeoCities sold for more than
$2 billion, when it has close to zero revenue and interesting, but
by no means unique, software?
Because
infecting large populations with the ideavirus is the first step
to building a profitable business model. The key steps for Internet
companies looking to build a virus are:
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Create
a noteworthy online experience that's either totally new or
makes the user's life much better. Or make an offline experience
better/faster/cheaper so that switching is worth the hassle.
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Have
the idea behind your online experience go viral, bringing you
a large chunk of the group you're targeting WITHOUT having to
spend a fortune advertising the new service.
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Fill
the vacuum in the marketplace with YOUR version of the idea,
so that competitors now have a very difficult time of unteaching
your virus and starting their own.
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Achieve
"lock in" by creating larger and larger costs to switching
from your service to someone else's.
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Get
permission from users to maintain an ongoing dialogue so you
can turn the original attention into a beneficial experience
for users and an ongoing profit stream for you.
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Why
Are Ideaviruses So Important?
- We
live in a winner-take-almost-all world. (Zipf's law.)
- We
used to focus on making food. We used to make stuff. Now we make
ideas.
- People
are more connected than ever. Not only are we more aware that
our friends have friends but we can connect with them faster and
more frequently.
- There's
a tremendous hunger to understand the new and to remain on the
cutting edge.
- While
early adopters (the nerds who always want to know about the cool
new thing in their field) have always existed, now we've got more
nerds than ever. If you're reading this, you're a nerd!
- The
profit from creating and owning an ideavirus is huge.
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And
Five Things Ideaviruses Have In Common
- The
most successful ideaviruses sometimes appear to be accidents,
but it is possible to dramatically increase the chances your ideavirus
will catch on and spread.
- An
ideavirus adores a vacuum. (This is a big idea. Read on to see
what I mean).
- Once
an ideavirus spreads, it follows a lifecycle. Ignore the lifecycle
and the ideavirus dies out. Feed it properly and you can extend
its useful life and profit from it for a long time.
- Ideaviruses
are more than just essays and books. Everything from new technology
to new ways of creating new products are winning because of intelligent
seeding by their creators.
- Viral
marketing is a special case of an ideavirus. Viral marketing is
an ideavirus in which the carrier of the virus IS the product.
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Seven
Ways An Ideavirus Can Help You:
- When
everyone in town tells ten friends about your amazing ice cream
shop and a line forms out the door (supercharged word of mouth
due to the virus having dominated the town so completely).
- When
your company's new mass storage format catches on and it becomes
the next Zip drive.
- When
an influential sports writer names your daughter as a high school
All-American basketball player and coaches line up outside the
door with scholarships.
- When
Steve Jobs commissions the iMac, which spreads the word about
the Mac faster than any advertising ever could, raising market
share and saving your favorite computer company from bankruptcy.
- When
you write a report for your boss about how your company should
deal with an opportunity in Cuba and it gets passed on, from person
to person, throughout the company, making you a hero and a genius.
- When
the demo recording you made becomes a bestseller on MP3.com and
you get a call from Sony, who wants to give you a recording contract.
- When
you are able to devise a brand-new Internet business plan for
a product that's useful and also embodies viral marketing...growing
from nothing to a million users in a month and making you rich
along the way.
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| The
Sad Decline of Interruption Marketing
When I first
starting writing about Permission Marketing about four years ago,
much of what I said was considered heresy. "What do you mean
TV ads are going to decline in effectiveness?" "How dare
you say anything negative about banner ads--of course they work!"
or "Direct mail has never been healthier!"
History, fortunately for me, has borne out my cries of doom and
gloom about interruption marketing. The TV networks are diversifying
away from their traditional network TV business as fast as they
can. Banner clickthrough rates are down 85% or more. Ads are sprouting
up on the floors of the supermarket, in the elevator of the Hilton
hotel in Chicago and even in urinals. And everywhere you look, unanticipated,
impersonal and irrelevant ads are getting more expensive and less
effective.
There's a crisis in interruption marketing and it's going to get
much worse. It took more than thirty pages to build the case against
this wasteful, costly ($220 billion a year) outmoded expense in
Permission Marketing, so I'll only spend a page on it here.
If you want to read the entire jeremiad, send a note to free@permission.com and
I'll send it to you for free.
Unless you find a more cost-effective way to get
your message out, your business is doomed. You can
no longer survive by interrupting strangers with a message they
don't want to hear, about a product they've never heard of, using
methods that annoy them. Consumers have too little time and too
much power to stand for this any longer.
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We
Live In A Winner-Take-Almost-All World
Quick! Name an oil painting hanging in a museum somewhere in the world.
Did you say, "the Mona Lisa"?
As I walk through the Louvre, arguably one of the top ten most packed-with-high-quality-paintings
museums on the planet, I pass one empty room after another, then come
to an alcove packed with people. Why? Why are these people clawing
all over each other in order to see a painting poorly displayed behind
many inches of bullet-proof glass?
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The
reason the Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world is
that something had to be the most famous painting in the
world and it might as well be the Mona Lisa.
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Busy
people don't have time to look at every painting. They only have room
in their overcrowded, media-hyped brains for a few paintings. And
when you come right down to it, most people would like to see only
the "celebrity" paintings. And just as there can only be
one "My most favorite famous actress" (Julia Roberts) and
one "this site equals the Internet" (Yahoo!), there's only
room for one "most famous painting in the world" and the
safe choice is the Mona Lisa.
There's a name for this effect. It's called Zipf's law, after George
Kingsley Zipf (1902-1950), a philologist and professor at Harvard
University. He discovered that the most popular word in the English
language ("the") is used ten times more than the tenth most
popular word, 100 times more than the 100th most popular
word and 1,000 times more than the 1,000th most popular
word. |
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It's also
been discovered that this same effect applies to market share for
software, soft drinks, automobiles, candy bars, and the frequency
of hits on pages found on a website. The chart above shows actual
visits to the different pages at Sun's website.
In almost every field of endeavor, it's
clear that being #1 is a lot better than being #3 or #10.
There isn't an even distribution of rewards, especially in our networked
world.
On the Net, the stakes are even larger. The market capitalization
of Priceline, eBay and Amazon approaches 95% of the total market
capitalization of every other consumer e-commerce stock combined.
Clearly, there's a lot to be gained by winning.
An ideavirus lets you make something like this happen to your idea,
to your business, to your product. While the benefits of being #1
for a public Internet stock or an oil painting are clear, it's just
as important to small businesses and individuals.
Ideaviruses are faced with a brickwall filter. In electronics, a
brickwall filter wipes out certain frequencies and lets the rest
through. There's no room for second place or extra effort--either
you're in or you're out. Ideaviruses are win/lose propositions.
Either the velocity and smoothness are high enough that it becomes
a bonafide epidemic, or they're not and it dies out. Either your
ideavirus works or it doesn't. Smart propagators know when to quit
if their ideavirus isn't getting through the filter.
Definition:
VELOCITY
The velocity is a measure of how fast the idea spreads from one
party to another. If an idea is going to hit ten people before it
gets to me, the multiplier effect is large indeed--fast steps lead
to more people being infected before it dies out.
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Definition:
SMOOTHNESS
How easy is it for an end user to spread this particular
ideavirus? Can I click one button or mention some magic phrase, or
do I have to go through hoops and risk embarrassment to tell someone
about it?
For example, it's pretty easy to talk about your hairdresser. Someone
tells you you've got a great haircut, and you say, "Yeah, I went
to Bob at Bumble & Bumble." On the other hand, spreading
the word about your reflexology therapist is pretty tricky. You're
not sure when to bring it up, and you really don't have words to describe
it.
The smoothest viruses, like Hotmail, spread themselves. Just the act
of using the product spreads the virus. There's an obvious relationship
between smoothness and catchiness. A product that's easy to recommend
is often a product that's easy to get hooked on. |
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Eric Raymond was a little
known programmer when he wrote an essay called "The Cathedral
and the Bazaar." It was a manifesto--an essay designed to become
an ideavirus--arguing why the open source approach to coding (creating
stuff like Linux) made sense. But instead of having a magazine or
a book publisher bring it to market, he posted the essay online,
in text, postscript and audio form. And he gave it away for free.
Within months, tens of thousands of people had read it. Months after
that, Raymond published this essay with some of his other free essays
in a book. That book became an "instant" bestseller. Of
course, it wasn't instant at all. He had laid the foundation long
before, by building an ideavirus.
So, what has creating an ideavirus done for Raymond's value? Let's
take a crass look at his financial situation: The virus led to increased
demand for his services as a programmer (he can pick his jobs if
he likes), as a consultant, and even as a public speaker. The last
I saw, he had just written an essay about what it was like to make
a fortune during an IPO!
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| The
Traffic Imperative: Why Sites Fail
A site without
traffic doesn't exist.
According to Forrester Research, only 20% of 50 leading online retailers
expect to turn a profit this year. Just 18% more expect to be profitable
next year. It's becoming increasingly obvious that many of these
sites will never turn a profit, and that they're hoping
to last long enough to be acquired or sell their stock.
A recent McKinsey and Co. study found that the vast majority of
online retailers are not only unprofitable, they're actually losing
money on every sale. Without even computing the cost of advertising
and clicks, these sites have discounted their prices so significantly
that the contribution margin from each sale is negative. The average
online drugstore, for example, loses $16.42 on each and every sale,
before computing the cost of traffic.
Why? Many of these sites are confusing low prices with an effective
customer acquisition tool. There's probably no way that's less effective
and more costly than cutting your prices to the point where you
lose money on each sale (for Amazon naysayers--they actually make
a profit of about $5 on the average book order).
Add to this mess the obscene cost of customer acquisition--estimated
by the Boston Consulting Group to be more than $80 a visitor (that's
for visitors, not even customers) for most online merchants.
Now you can see the huge hurdle these sites are going to have to
cross in order to be profitable.
This problem isn't unique to the online world, of course. When I
was enrolled at Tufts University in 1980, there were two homemade
ice cream stores within two miles of campus. One was Joey's, which
made a terrific product (they used Hydrox cookies instead of Oreos,
by the way, so you could avoid the animal fat if you wanted) and
there was never, ever a line.
In the other direction was the now famous Steve's Ice Cream. His
prices were a bit higher than Joey's, but his profits were clearly
much higher. Why? Because there was always a line at Steve's. A
long line. Sometimes you'd wait an hour to get an ice cream cone.
What happened? Why did one ice cream shop go viral and the other
languished at the edge of profitability? It certainly wasn't about
advertising, because neither shop did any. The reason Steve Herrell's
shop did so well is that it was famous for having a line! People
brought folks from out of town to have the experience. Locals came
back because they'd convinced themselves that if the hive liked
it enough to wait an hour for an ice cream cone, well, it must be
worth it. Suddenly, it wasn't about the ice cream. It was about
the experience.
Most online merchants, being risk averse copycats afraid to innovate,
are guaranteeing that there will be no ideavirus created around
their businesses. By paying millions to AOL and Yahoo! for "traffic,"
they're investing in exactly the wrong sort of buzz. The alternative--focusing
on people who can promote your site, affiliate programs, unique
promotions and building wow, zing and magic into the site--is just
too much work for most sites.
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| We
Used To Make Food. We Used To Make Stuff. Now We Make Ideas.
Here are some astonishing
facts you should think about long and hard on your way to work tomorrow:
Twenty years ago, the top 100 companies in the Fortune 500 either
dug something out of the ground or turned a natural resource (steel
or oil) into something you could hold. Today, fewer than half of
the companies on the list do that. The rest make unseemly profits
by trafficking in ideas.
In 1998, there were 30,000 new musical CDs published, including
one from the Pope (his, which I like a lot, features a little rap,
a little techno and a lot of worldbeats).
Ninety-nine percent of Yahoo's market capitalization is due to brand,
sizzle, user loyalty and other "soft" ideas. Only 1% of
the company's value is due to actual unique stuff that you can't
get anywhere else.
Nathan Mhyrvold, former chief scientist at Microsoft, says a great
programmer is worth 10,000 times more than an average one. Why?
Because of the quality of her ideas.
The important takeaway is this: Ideas
aren't a sideshow that make our factory a little more valuable.
Our factory is a sideshow that makes our ideas a little more valuable!
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People
Are More Connected Than They Ever Were Before. We Have Dramatically
More Friends Of Friends And We Can Connect With Them Faster And
More Frequently Than Ever.
Think back. Really far. Ten years ago.
How many people did you have regular telephone contact with ten
years ago? Probably ten or twenty or thirty in your personal life,
and maybe 100 at work?
Now, take a look at your email inbox and your ICQ (the most popular
instant messenger program) buddy list. How many people do you hear
from every week?
We're far more connected than we ever were. And now, we've got second
or third or fourth order connections. There's an email in my box
from someone who is married to someone I went to summer camp with
twenty years ago who got my email address from a third friend.
Another message is from a former employee, telling me about a doctor
who's about to lose his license for trying radical medical treatments,
and how her mother-in-law will suffer if this guy can't practice
any longer.
It's hard for me to imagine either person contacting me if they
had to walk across the village and bang on the door of my hut or
pick up the phone and call me. But the moment you connect to the
Internet, you connect, at some level, to all of us. And the connections
make ideas travel. Fast.
What's
the difference between word of mouth and an ideavirus? Two differences.
First, word of mouth tends to spread slower, be more analog. If
you like a book, you might tell a friend or two. And then your friends
are unlikely to tell someone else until they read it for themselves.
Second, word of mouth dies off. Because the numbers are smaller,
it doesn't take many people who don't participate in the word of
mouth for each generation to be smaller than the one before it.
Here's a schematic of typical word of mouth. Notice how few cycles
there are, and how it drops off over time.
Here's an ideal ideavirus. Note how much more frequently the
cycles occur, and how each cycle sees the virus grow.
With an ideavirus, both principles no longer apply. Ideaviruses
spread fast and they spread far. With word of mouse (word of mouth
augmented by the power of online communication), you can tell 100
friends, or a thousand friends. Because the numbers are larger and
faster, the virus grows instead of slows.
Even before the Net, there were special cases of viruses. In traditional
word of mouth in the book business, someone reads a book and tells
a friend. It's nice, but it's not usually enough. The Bridges
of Madison County, however, became the bestselling novel of
the decade, because booksellers adopted it and told people.
As a bookseller, you've got exposure not just to a few people, but
hundreds of people. So the serendipitous word of mouth that helps
some books is replaced by a rapid, virulent alternative.
On the other hand, most Americans have never had a massage from
a professional masseuse. Why? Because in order to understand the
power of a massage, you have to get one. We don't currently have
the word or picture tools to adequately describe the positive benefits
of a massage, and just as important, there isn't a powerful spokesperson
for massage who has spent the time and energy to develop the ideavirus.
There's no real medium to transmit the message. So the message travels
slowly. So there is no virus around the idea of a massage.
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There's
A Tremendous Hunger To Understand The New And To Remain On The Cutting
Edge.
Jed Clampett discovered that finding oil on his property was a sure
road to riches. Today, the road seems to be paved with awareness.
If you know what's news, if you know what's the latest, hottest, most
impactful new idea, it's much easier to succeed. You can profit in
the stock market, do better in politics, find breakthroughs in science,
or programming or marketing.
Why does this matter? Because in a society where the new isn't valued,
your social standing doesn't increase when you become a nerd. And
because ideaviruses are really nothing but amplified gossip about
new stuff, they can't take root in a culture that doesn't care about
the new.
Take a look at the Top 40 charts in Billboard magazine. Thirty or
forty years ago, a record could easily stay on the list for six months
or more. Today, new records come and go much faster. Why? Because
we are happily saturated in the current hit, and then move on.
Last year, 1,778 business books were published in the U.S. alone.
Every one of them got read by someone, some by an awful lot of people.
Why? Because as
our world changes faster and faster and faster, knowing is
just as important as having. And that makes the population
ready and eager for the next ideavirus.
As the speed of new ideas entering the community has increased, so
has our respect for people who know. And because it's valuable, we're
open to both hearing about the new and telling others about it.
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While
Early Adopters (The Nerds Who Always Want To Know About The Cool New
Thing In Their Field) Have Always Existed, Now We've Got More Nerds
Than Ever Before. If You're Reading This, You're A Nerd!
The Internet turned us all into nerds. AltaVista isn't cool any more--google.com
is. Don't use the Palm, that's passé. Try this Handspring instead.
Suddenly we're ready, willing and able to be at the bleeding edge,
all the time.
The profit from creating and owning an ideavirus is huge, huger than
it ever was before. It used to be that only a few stereotypical nerds
cared about the latest pocket calculator. Today, you'll see people
talking about their handheld computer on the subway. It used to be
that only a few people knew about the latest Salsa hit out of Mexico
or the coolest new chef in Los Angeles. Today, the roles are totally
reversed. Your parents are nerds!
It's not just that our society is rewarding people who are sensitive
enough or smart enough or cool enough to know about the next new thing.
It's that many of us have crossed over a line and gone from being
the vast majority who waited for something to become mainstream--we've
become the early adopters, the folks on the bleeding edge who actually
seek out innovation. The combined circulation of Wired, Fast
Company and PC Magazine is rapidly approaching the total
circulation of Sports Illustrated.
Because the population has shifted, the sweet spot has shifted. Companies
no longer make most of their money harvesting money from the laggards
who finally get around to buying something at K-Mart. They make their
money the first day, the first week, the first month an idea is out
there.
If
something is new and different and exciting and getting buzzed about,
we want to know about it, be part of it. The fashion is now to be
in fashion, and ideas are the way we keep up.
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Ideas
Are More Than Just Essays And Books. Everything From New Technology
To New Ways Of Creating To New Products Are Winning Because Of Intelligent
Ideavirus Management By Their Creators.
A manifesto is a carefully organized series of ideas, designed to
get someone to come around to your point of view. But while one way
to make a complicated argument is with a book, you can just as easily
(and sometimes more effectively) send it through a song (Bob Dylan
did this for Hurricane Carter) or with something as elegant as an
OXO vegetable peeler.
When you first see the
OXO, you instantly understand the idea behind it. You just know
it will work better and cut you less often. If you've ever peeled
a vegetable, you want an OXO. The design of the OXO is
quite simply a manifesto that says, "There's a smart, comfortable
way to do this annoying task." Is the OXO going to get viral?
Not across the general population, of course, but if you hang out
with a group of people who have arthritis or love kitchen stuff,
it already has. Just take a look at the glowing reviews of this
peeler on Amazon's kitchen site.
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The
End Of The Zero Sum Game
Traditional advertising is a game with winners and losers. If your
product gets attention from the targeted consumer, you win "mindshare"
and your customer loses time. When a consumer is foolish enough to
listen to an irrelevant ad, she loses time and doesn't even gain useful
information. It's an old economy model in which every transaction
has someone taking something.
Permission marketing and the ideavirus are both very different from
this model. These models create a game in which everyone can win!
If there's a great idea, and it moves through the hive for free, everyone
who touches it wins in several ways.
First, you as the consumer win for recommending it to a friend. This
increases your status as a powerful sneezer (or your compensation
as a promiscuous sneezer.) Because you respect your peers, you're
not suggesting or pitching something that doesn't make your friends'
lives better. Violate this respect and your power as a sneezer goes
way down.
Definition: SNEEZER Some people are more
likely to tell their friends about a great new idea. These people
are at the heart of the ideavirus. Identifying and courting sneezers
is a key success factor for ideamerchants.
Second, the recipient benefits as well. He benefits from the way the
idea changes his life, and he benefits because he now has the ability
to sneeze the idea to someone else, thus increasing his power.
Third, the creator of the idea succeeds because her idea propagates
and because she can sell souvenirs (speeches, consulting, value-added
services) to people who are now open and receptive to her idea.
My friend, Chris Meyer, co-author of Blur, had this to say:
"The one thing that distinguishes effective sneezing campaigns
from ineffective ones is RESPECT for the time, attention, and reputation
of the next guy to catch the virus. It's important to note that the
decision to sneeze is, in general, a distributed one, made by each
of us as to whether to clog our friend's email or whatever with the
virus in question, because our (local, at least) reputation is at
stake."
This insight goes to the core of why ideaviruses are succeeding and
why traditional marketers don't immediately grasp this approach (or
permission marketing for that matter.) The distributed nature of the
decision is the antithesis of the command-and-control General Patton
approach that marketers have taken previously.
The reason that The Red Herring, The Industry Standard and
other magazines are jammed with ads is not because the ads always
work. They don't. The reason the ads are purchased is that in exchange
for money the marketer gets the illusion that they're in charge of
the conversation, at least for a few seconds.
Bill Bernbach, the dean of American Advertising, was co-founder of
DDB Advertising. He died twenty years ago, but before he left us,
he pointed the way to this "new" way of marketing:
"You
cannot sell a man who isn't listening; word of mouth
is the
best medium of all; and dullness won't sell your
product,
but neither will irrelevant brilliance."
The answer, of course, is to give people a reason to listen and then
create an infrastructure that will amplify their ability to spread
word of mouth. And core to both of those tasks is the new respect
that marketers need to show newly powerful consumers.
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