Unleash Your Ideavirus

We Interrupt This Article

In the old days, interruption marketing sold products. We ran ads, interrupting people with unanticipated, impersonal, irrelevant messages, and hoped that they'd buy something. Sometimes, it even worked.

But even when interruption marketing didn't work, it did have one advantage: The marketer was in complete and total control. Of course, the disadvantages were that it was very difficult, very expensive, and very ineffective. But people persist: Every time a catalog clothier -- Eddie Bauer, Lands' End, you name it -- wants to sign up a new customer, it needs to buy a few hundred stamps, send out some carefully designed catalogs, and hope that one person will send it some money.

It doesn't matter what form interruption marketing takes; it always works -- or doesn't work -- the same way. The goal of the marketer is to spend money buying ads that interrupt people who don't want to be bothered. The goal of the consumer is to avoid hearing from the advertiser whenever possible. A beautifully executed commercial aired during the Super Bowl is an extraordinarily risky bet. Building a flashy and snazzy Web site is almost certain to lead to failure. Whenever advertisers build their business around the strategy of talking directly to the customer, they become slaves to the math of interruption marketing.

What marketers are now on the lookout for -- and we're all marketers now -- is something that taps into the invisible currents that run between and among consumers. Instead of talking to -- or at -- consumers, we have to help consumers talk to one another.

In creating an ideavirus, we aren't buying space -- we're producing an environment, one where an idea can replicate and spread. It's the virus that does the work, not the marketer.

Ideavirus Tip #1: Concentrate!

Fortunately, there are already proven techniques that you can use to identify, launch, and profit from ideas that can be turned into viruses. There's a right way and a wrong way to create them, and, more importantly, the care and feeding of your ideavirus can dramatically affect its ability to spread.

One of the key elements in launching an ideavirus: Concentrate the message. If just 1% of a group is excited about your idea, it's not enough. It's still not enough if that percentage hits 15%. You only win when you dominate and amaze the group that you have targeted. That's why focusing obsessively on a geographic, demographic, or psychographic group is a common practice among successful idea merchants.

Why are new Net companies so obsessed with generating Web traffic and attracting visitors? Why does a company like GeoCities get sold for more than $2 billion, when it has close to zero revenue and features software that, though interesting, is by no means unique? Because infecting large populations with an ideavirus is the first step to building a profitable online business.

Here are the six key steps for Internet companies looking to build an online virus:

1. Create an online experience that offers your users something completely new, something they can't get offline. Or create an online experience that duplicates an offline experience, but does it so much faster, cheaper, and better that switching is worth the hassle.
2. Have the idea behind your online experience go viral, bringing you a large chunk of the group that you're targeting without your having to spend a fortune advertising your new service.
3. Fill the vacuum in the marketplace with your version of the idea so completely that competitors will first have to unteach your virus before they can unleash one of their own.
4. Achieve "lock-in" by making it more and more costly to switch from your service to someone else's.
5. Get permission from users to maintain an ongoing dialogue with them so that you can build a relationship that gives them a beneficial experience and gives you a profit stream.
6. Continue creating noteworthy online experiences to spread new viruses. Always begin by infecting your core audience of sneezers.

We Live in a Winner-Take-Almost-All World

Quick! Name an oil painting that hangs in an art museum somewhere in the world.

Did you say, "The Mona Lisa"?

As I walk through the Louvre, arguably one of the ten most-packed-with-high-quality-paintings museums on the planet, I pass through one empty room after another. Then I come to an alcove that is jammed with people. Why are all of these people crawling on top of each other in order to catch a fleeting glimpse of this one painting -- a painting that is, by the way, roped off and poorly displayed behind many inches of bulletproof glass? Why is Mona the most famous painting in the world?

Because something had to be the most famous painting in the world -- and it might as well be this one.