Unleash Your Ideavirus - Part Two

Wear Jeans on Wednesday If You're Gay!

As ideaviruses become more important, old-line companies see more and more clearly that the services that they're used to providing are private in nature. Your friends and acquaintances probably have no idea what brand of PC you have, whether you have gas or oil heat, how often you see the chiropractor, or what your favorite kind of wine is.

Because of the private nature of these relationships, the only way to expand the market for them is for marketers to spend more money and interrupt more people with more junk ads. But if they can figure out how to make these relationships public, if they can figure out how to launch an ideavirus, the whole equation changes.

Here's an example: frequent-flier miles.

American Airlines has made a fortune using frequent-flier miles not only as an inducement to loyalty but also as a currency that they sell to other companies.

But none of your friends knows how many frequent-flier miles you've racked up. You almost never talk about them unless something exceptional happens that you want to brag about ... like when you cash in your miles to buy tickets for your whole family to fly to France.

If American wanted to move miles out of the closet and turn them into an ideavirus, all it would have to do is to make the following announcement at a convention jammed with business travelers:

"If you can find someone at this convention who has precisely the same number of miles as you do, we'll give you both a million miles." Suddenly every person you meet wants to talk to you about your mileage status.

Hakuhodo Inc., one of Japan's largest ad agencies, used a similar approach and turned it into a national craze. It seems that sending New Year's cards is a big deal in Japan -- on par with sending Christmas cards in the West. Most people buy their cards at the post office -- envelope and stamp included. When you send a card, it comes with a lottery ticket that gives you the chance to win a small prize, such as a radio or a bicycle.

Hakuhodo runs its promotion on the Net. And its cards, which go by email, are free to send. But the best part is that if the person you're writing to wins, you win the same prize. The more cards you send, the happier your friends are, and, of course, the happier you are.

Not only did this promotion go viral, it turned into an epidemic. In 1998, 25% of the people with Net access in Japan either sent or received one of Hakuhodo's cards.

Of course, going public doesn't always involve the promotion of a product. When I was in college, the gay-and-lesbian student center ran a campuswide activity that they called "Wear jeans on Wednesday if you're gay." Suddenly, something that had been a private topic was now the topic of discussion among everyone. If you weren't wearing jeans, was that because you were afraid that people would think that you were gay? Was there something wrong with being seen as gay, whether you were or not?

One simple act turned the issue of sexual orientation into an ideavirus and generated thousands of hours of intense discussions about how we all viewed the issue.

The Fashion Moment

Why do open-toe shoes come and go? Bell-bottoms? What about miniskirts? How is it that every year, without consulting with one another in advance, multiple clothing designers introduce similar lines?

Why do some Internet businesses -- group scheduling, free email, health portals -- seem to appear simultaneously, even though it took them months or years to launch?

Answer: It's the fashion moment.

The fashion moment occurs when a respected member of a hive -- call this person a fashion editor -- takes a chance and tries out something new. Chefs, journalists, R&D specialists, record-label executives, and successful venture capitalists -- these are examples of the kinds of people who are great fashion editors.

Clive Davis, president of Arista Records, has been a stellar fashion editor in the music business for generations. Over the course of his career, he has launched dozens of breakthrough acts, from Miles Davis to Bruce Springsteen to Pink Floyd. The only thing that these artists had in common was that they were just right for their time. A month earlier or a month later and they might never have succeeded. But fashion editors aren't infallible, and if they're not careful, they fall into one of two traps:

Trap #1: They lose touch with the hive and fall in love with their own taste. Without the feedback loop that the hive provides, they lose their touch. Warren Buffett is a brilliant stock-market investor with an extraordinary ability to understand what other people are going to want to invest in. But when Internet mania started to hit the stock market, Buffett lost his ability to predict what the hive would do. Buffett left billions of dollars of profit on the table because he refused to believe that the Internet-stock ideavirus would spread throughout the hive of investors.