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About Seth Godin

Permission Marketing

1. Sneezers
2. Hive
3. Velocity
4. Vector
5. Medium
6. Smoothness
7. Persistence
8. Amplifier

Sneezers

As described earlier, there are two kinds of sneezers: Powerful and Promiscuous. While all eight elements of the formula are critical, this is the area where many brand marketers have the most control, and thus the most influence.

Choose your sneezers--don't let them choose you. By focusing obsessively on who you're choosing to sneeze on your behalf, you build the foundation for your virus.

Powerful sneezers are certainly the most seductive, in that the right word from the right sneezer can make all the difference to your virus. If David Letterman visits your diner on television, or the New Yorker writes a twenty-page rave about your website, or if you win a MacArthur Fellowship Grant, well, you've really made it.

Oprah Winfrey is quite possibly the most successful sneezer of our generation. She has single-handledly turned more than a dozen books into national bestsellers. She has launched a magazine that already has more than half a million subscribers. She can influence millions of the most powerful consumers in America, just by uttering a few sentences.

It's interesting to see how effectively Oprah and her brandmate Martha Stewart have successfully monetized their position as powerful sneezers. If they trip and get perceived as promiscuous sneezers, as sneezers for hire, their effectiveness is quite reduced. But if they can maintain their position at the same time they sell books and magazines or sheets and towels, they've effectively leveraged their fame.

But few of us are that lucky. Most times, you're going to have to focus on powerful but less influential sneezers--individuals or organizations that have something to gain by endorsing your idea but aren't so out there that they're tagged as promiscous sneezers.

Some powerful sneezers are very prominent and thus very hard to reach. The challenge for most marketers is to find the second tier of sneezer--the approachable, interested sneezer who can do almost as much for you as Oprah or Martha, but with whom you have a far greater chance of making an impact.

The story of The Bridges of Madison County is a great example of this. Warner Books, the publisher, realized that most other publishers were doing very little to market to the independent bookstores, and that if he could court them and give them something to sell that made them feel special, it would translate into a bestseller.

Of course, as soon as the legions of independent booksellers succeeded in turning Bridges into a phenomenon, they were assaulted by dozens of other less imaginative publishers, all trying to rush in and use the same strategy. Too late. It got cluttered. They got busy. No one else ever repeated the focused, obvious success of this approach.

Remember, an ideavirus adores a vacuum, and Bridges filled that vacuum. As other book marketers rushed in, no one was able ever again to persuade a critical mass of booksellers to support just one book.

Does this mean Warner was doomed never to be able to repeat this process again? Is that all there is--just one new gimmick after another? No! Instead, Warner needed to gain permission from this critical sneezer audience and use that permission to promote the next book and the next through a channel they were clever enough to build.


Hive

Winning with an ideavirus begins with the choice of hive. And this choice is so important, I'd suggest the following: choose your hive first, then build the idea.

Traditionally, marketers start with a problem, or a factory, and go from there. I've got a great widget, and now I need a way to take it to market. Or, we've got this excess plant capacity--let's find a way to fill it. But that's not what works today. Choose your market by identifying a hive that has a problem and has the right concentration of sneezers, the right amplified networking, the right high velocity of communication and, most of all, an appropriate vacuum.

Success will come to marketers who attack small but intimate hives. Yes, Yahoo! and eBay hit huge home runs, but they're remarkable precisely because success across such a large hive is rare indeed. We can learn a more relevant lesson from magazines.

Fast Company is one of the fastest-growing (and most profitable) magazines ever. Why? Well it certainly helps that it's a great magazine. It also helps that the Internet created a huge demand for this sort of advertising space. But the real success came in the hive that the editors selected.

Turns out there are hundreds of thousands of people in mid-sized to large companies who are eager to do a great job, but feel frustrated at the slow pace and mind-numbing bureaucracy they face every day. Until Fast Company, the members of this hive didn't even know there were others just like them. They didn't have a tool they could use to reach their peers.

Fast Company became the identity, the bible, the badge of honor for this new hive. It gave them a way to communicate, to learn and to have confidence in themselves. By every measure, the magazine was virusworthy.

Just about every reader of Fast Company became a powerful sneezer. With no compensation and very little encouragement, they started signing up co-workers for subscriptions, Xeroxing 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 Company). 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. There's certainly enough money in those towns to keep the seats filled in several restaurants of this ilk. It's simply that the hive that can afford these restaurants don't have a high velocity way to get the word out fast enough to keep the restaurateur happy. And it's not clear that they'd persist. In other words, eating in a New York-style fancy restaurant probably isn't the way these "out-of-town" hives choose to spend their time and money. Same's thing true for a New York hive that wouldn't reward a French restaurant that might do just great in Paris. All of which is a very fancy way of saying, "If the hive doesn't want it, you picked the wrong hive."

Selecting a hive that respects the core value of your virus is a critical first step in laying the foundation for promoting the idea. College students want something different from gardeners, who are quite different from computer geeks. Targeting everyone is a sure path to failure.

Of course, the real reason you want to pick the right hive is not because their values match the benefits of your product. It's because when you pick the right hive (and a small enough hive) you have a chance of overwhelming it--of pumping so much positive juice into your digital word of mouth that you really do dominate, that so many sneezers are recommending you to the rest of the hive that the majority surrenders and the entire hive converts.

Once your idea starts coursing through a hive again and again and again, you'll have a piling on effect. People will want to be exposed to your idea just because everyone else in the hive they respect is talking about it.

The mistake that's so easy to make is to get greedy as you choose your hive, to say, "this product is for everyone" or "anyone can benefit from this idea." Well, there are seven billion people on the planet, so it's unlikely your comment is correct; even if it is, there's little chance that a virus would spread across a hive that big.

Far better to pick smaller hives and conquer them a few at a time. Far better to identify consumers when they're grouped in bunches (at a trade show, say, or geographically) and then allow the concentrated essence of your virus spread to other hives.

Coors did this with beer years ago. You could only get Coors in Colorado, then you could only get it west of the Mississippi. By concentrating their marketing dollars, they addressed a smaller hive. This enabled them to get a larger percentage of the hive to sample the product. This core group then had a smooth way to spread the word, and it quickly conquered one state after another.

Without any effort from the Coors people, the virus spread to the East Coast. Coors fielded thousands of requests from disappointed drinkers who wanted to try this new beer they'd heard about, but couldn't.

Coors dominated a hive. Then they went national to try to fulfill the demand created when their hive spread the word. Unfortunately, the new hive was so large, it turned out to be difficult to satisfy and dominate.

Compare the powerful, nearly effortless spread of their idea with the challenges they face today. As a national brand in a stagnant market, growth by any method is hard to come by. They built their company on a unique virus, but they couldn't continue to grow their company the same way.


Velocity

Napster is a worldwide file sharing database that lets Internet users share MP3 files. In essence, you can listen to the digital record collection of millions of other people. The idea behind Napster turned into a virus and grew like crazy. Why?

They hit college campuses--a hotbed of communication. A virus can spread across a campus in a matter of hours. When a dear friend of mine went to Tufts in the late 1970s his roommate started a rumor that Paul McCartney had died (this was before John Lennon's tragic death--they weren't that callous). Within an hour, they started hearing the rumor back--from friends of friends of friends who couldn't precisely remember where or how they'd heard it.

Napster was spread the same way. How? Because in addition to being on a college campus, Napster lives on the Internet. So, instead of being word of mouth as in the Paul McCartney example, it was digitally augmented word of mouth. On college campuses, everyone has email, and email is both instantaneous and amplified. You can send an email to thirty or forty friends as easily as you can write to one. So once a powerful sneezer had tried the software and confirmed that it worked as advertised, the word spread fast.

Why is velocity so important? Remember, filling a vacuum is far easier than going second. If the velocity of a virus isn't fast enough, a competitor may leapfrog past you into a new hive before you can get there, dominating as the "original" in that market.

This happened with beer, in which regional favorites have long survived the introduction of nationwide refrigerated delivery. It even happened with the college entrance exams, in which the ACT is favored in the Midwest, years after the SAT became the standard almost everywhere else in the world. The only reason this happened is that the ACT got to the Midwest first.

How does the Net changes our economy so dramatically? Because it dramatically increases the velocity of viruses in various hives. Where it used to take weeks or months for a contractor to talk with suppliers before building an office tower, he can now do it in just a day using the Net.

This increase in velocity fundamentally changes the dynamic of a virus. Something newsworthy might have 20 or 30 or 100 cycles of communications before the issue itself becomes boring. In the days before the Net, if each cycle only touched one or two or three people, the virus would die before it got old. Today, these cycles allow the virus to mutate and evolve as it touches millions of people.

Vector

Richard Dawkins, a brilliant evolutionary theorist, had his own word for the phenomenon I'm calling ideaviruses: memes. He pointed out that a meme was like a living organism, surviving not in the real world, but in our world of ideas.

Like a real organism, memes could live and die, and more important, they could evolve. Every time a meme is passed from person to person, it gets touched, changed and--sometimes--improved.

Once a meme has been passed around enough, it ceases to evolve as quickly and just becomes a building block for future memes. Pop singers are experts at stringing together memes and turning them into concise snapshots of our lives. (Paul Simon is a favorite--Graceland, Kodachrome, the pop charts... you get the idea).

One of the behaviors noticed by Dawkins and practiced by anyone who markets with ideaviruses is that memes follow a vector. An idea doesn't spread evenly and nicely through a population. Instead, people are more likely to send it in one direction instead of another.

At college, there was always someone who knew where the good parties were (and which ones to avoid). In your town, there's someone who just seems to have the inside buzz on which restaurants are hot. On the Internet, some people seem to be on the vector of the latest email joke, while others--even in the same company or the same cliques--just don't seem to get touched as often.

When you create an idea and lay the groundwork for it to become a virus, it pays to study the vector you'd like it to follow. Why? Because there's plenty you can do to influence its vector, and the vector you choose will have a lot to do with who "gets" the virus. The vector controls the hives through which the idea flows.

If you're on the Net, for example, the barriers you erect will influence your vector. If your site needs Shockwave and Flash and a high-bandwidth connection, you're not likely to vector straight into the heart of the AOL user universe, regardless of where you start. If your goal is to create a trading card mania among third graders, launching a series of cards available only at liquor stores isn't going to enhance the vector, even if you seed the virus by handing the cards out at the local elementary school.

But this is about more than simple access. Remember, the goal is to market to people and then get out of the way. So an email joke (which almost anyone with a job in this country could access at home, at work or at the library) will still find its vector. How? There are three factors:

1. Who it starts with. Often, the way we decide which direction to send an idea is based on where it came from. It's hard, for example, to bring home a joke from the office. Instead, we're more likely to send it straight back into the quadrant of life from which it came.
2. Who it resonates with. An idea has to have impact to be worth sharing at all, and we're much more likely to share that idea with someone whom we believe it will impact as well. After all, if we spread ideas that don't go viral, it hurts our reputation as powerful sneezers. This encompasses the idea of access... I'm not likely to spread an idea if the recipient doesn't have the energy or the technology or the resources to get engaged with it.
3. What's easy. The medium drives the spread of ideas more than you might imagine. If I have to print something out, put it in an envelope and mail it to someone, that virus is going to stop right there. That's why TV and the Internet have proven to be such powerful media for the spread of viruses--they're easy.

Medium

Scientists wasted hundreds of years looking for the medium by which light traveled. They knew it was making it through the vacuum of space, through water and through air, but without a medium, they couldn't figure out how it worked.

The medium is probably the most overlooked part of ideavirus planning and construction. It's so obvious, we often don't see it.

In Japan, teenage schoolgirls started and built a craze to billion-dollar proportions. They continue to line up to use a special kind of photo booth. Here's how it works: You enter the photo booth (similar to the old Polaroid ones of our youth), insert a some coins and it takes your picture.

But, instead of giving you four shots on a strip, it prints out 16 little tiny one-square-inch images on stickers.

Now, what are you going to do with 16 pictures of yourself on stickers? Obvious--share them with your friends! As a result, every popular Japanese schoolgirl has an autograph book loaded with dozens or hundreds of these stickers. Sort of like your high school yearbook signing ceremony, but on steroids.

A friend of mine, Sam Attenberg, developed and patented this technology in the States. And while it never became a full-fledged virus in the U.S., it did develop pockets of intense activity in certain hives. Some machines were turning $70 an hour in sticker business, every hour on the hour for weeks at a time. In Japan, two companies dominate a multi-billion-dollar industry in Sticker Stations.

So what's the medium? It's the person-to-person exchange of stickers. The medium is the key to the entire virus. Once the first person got the sheet of stickers, the only way she could use them was by sharing them with 15 friends. But in sharing them, in using the medium provided, she had to explain where she got them. Boom. Virus spreads.

PayPal.com is another example of an extremely virulent idea that spread because the medium was so powerful. PayPal.com is an online service that allows customers of eBay--and other auction site--customers to transfer money online safely and securely. Now, when you pay for something you buy on eBay, you can just PayPal.com your money to the person.

Here, the medium is the money. People care a lot about money, and since, in this case, it solves a time-consuming problem (sending checks and waiting for them to clear), it's particularly welcome. And, just as we saw in the Sticker Station example, the act of using the medium causes us to teach others about the idea.

In both cases, a focus on the medium led to the ultimate success of the virus.

SMOOTHNESS: It Would All Be Easy If We Had Gorgons

The goal, of course, is to have an ideavirus so smooth that once someone is exposed to it, they are instantly hooked. A virus so powerful that all it takes is one guitar lick on the radio, one phrase in a book review, one glimpse of a website and you completely and totally "get it." And not only do you get it, but you want it. Now and forever.

One of the talents of the great Steve Jobs is that he knows how to design Medusa-like products. While every Macintosh model has had flaws (some more than others), most of them have had a sexiness and a design sensibility that has turned many consumers into instant converts. Macintosh owners upgrade far more often than most computer users for precisely this reason. We have to own that new flat panel display. We must have the new color of iBook.

Vindigo is Medusa-like in the way the virus spreads so smoothly. It only takes one look at a friend's Palm in order to get hooked (and one file beaming to get it forever). The Nextel phone has that power, and so (for some people) does Britney Spears.

Alas, it's not going to happen for you. While you can aspire to make your product more Medusa-like, it's a mistake to spend all your time wishing for it to happen. The odds are long indeed, especially if your product is not groundbreaking. The longer it takes someone to get the basic concept behind your idea, the less Medusa-like it is. But often, that's a good thing. Real change, and the profit that goes with it, often comes from unsettling ideas that significantly alter the way people interact with each other and with your company. And those ideas aren't as smooth as some others.

Persistence

In our quest for the quick hit, the easy way to start a business or just to increase our power as sneezers, there's a real desire for a shallow virus. A joke. A gimmick. A neat new technology geegaw that won't be around tomorrow.

Laser pointers are a fine example. I was in a meeting last month where the presenter used a laser pointer to highlight various things on his deathly boring Powerpoint slides. Unfortunately for me, not only was the presentation boring, but he kept aiming the laser at the TV monitor, which reflected this highly focused electromagnetic radiation right at my face, hitting me in the eye a few times. I finally got him to turn the thing off, but not without considerable struggle.

Other than this unfortunate incident, I can't remember how many years ago it was that I saw someone actually using one of these pointers.

What happened was that the pointer came out, and for a few early adopters, it felt marvelous. It touched a Jungian need in us (especially men, I think) to have a magic stick that could project our thoughts on the wall. Of course, the best place to use one was in a meeting of other nerds. And all the other nerds noticed the laser pointer and a virus was spread.

But after we all went out and bought laser pointers, we discovered that they weren't particularly useful. After all, how much information could one really have to present that we needed a high-tech device to point out the good stuff from the bad?

So the lasers ended up in a drawer.

In other words, the virus wasn't persistent. Those who resisted the initial temptation to rush out and buy a laser pointer stopped being exposed to them, and the virus died off.

Compare this to the Palm virus. Every day, somebody else marches into your office, declaring their undying love and devotion to his new pocket wonder. And unlike laser pointers, people who love them keep using them. They persist.

In Gladwell's terms, the Palm has now tipped in certain hives. So many people are using it so often that you're constantly reminded that unless you get one, you're a loser. It's the persistence of the Palm more than any other viral factor that has led to its success.

Amplifier

Word of mouth by itself isn't enough. As discussed earlier, unamplified word of mouth dies off too soon to be much good to the average business. The goal of a marketer creating an ideavirus is to create a system that allows the positive word of mouth to be amplified (and the negative to be damped!).

This simple idea is behind the success of Planetfeedback.com. It's impossible for me to understand why any business invited by Planetfeedback to participate would hesitate for even a moment before signing up.

If a consumer has a complaint or a compliment about a company, she can go to Planetfeedback and turn it into a letter to the company. Then, with a click, she can have a copy of the email go to the relevant congressmen, media and regulatory agencies. Another click can send a copy of the letter to the consumer's ten closest friends and co-workers.

Instant amplification.

Now, if your company is the target of a complaint, which course of action makes sense? You could either proactively grab the opportunity to stamp out a negative virus, to turn the complainer from an angry reporter of bad news into a now-satisfied witness to how much your company cares, or you could ignore them and hope they'll go away. Of course, they won't go away. They--and the people already infected--will continue to amplify the message.

Planetfeedback is providing a great service to all parties involved. By taking previously invisible word of mouth and aggregating it, they're making it far easier for companies to understand the viruses that are already being spread, and they're giving them an opportunity to do something about them. And yes, they are viruses--ideas that are running amok, being passed from person to person. At the same time, Planetfeedback gives consumers far more power, and makes it easier for them to get attention.

Of course, you don't have to sponsor Planetfeedback. Some day they may offer a different program... or your competitors can pay to talk to your unhappy customers instead of you.

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