Please note that you cannot fully grasp the ideas described here unless you read Seth Godins's Unleashing the Ideavirus. Hence this text is just a teaser & amplifier for his virus. Thank you Seth for sharing your thoughts and spreading your word around.
For those who don't have time, this article revolves around the following key points:
An idea that moves and grows and infects everyone it touches is an ideavirus.
In traditional interruption marketing, the goal of the consumer is to avoid hearing from the advertiser; and the goal of the marketer is to spend money buying ads to interrupt people who don't want to be talked to. However this is an entirely wrong approach.
We live in a world where consumers actively resist marketing.
We're obsessed with the new, and ideavirus is always about the new.
Word of mouth fades after a few exchanges.
The time it takes for an idea to circulate is approaching zero.
The currency of future is ideas.
Don't talk to customers, instead enable customers talk to each other.
Ignite consumer networks and then get out of the way and let them talk.
Wrong : "Use us, because we kick ass."
Correct: "Use us, because we want YOU to kick ass."
Consumers have too little time and too much power.
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 to annoy them.
(!) An ideavirus adores a vacuum.
Create an environment in which the idea can replicate and spread.
Create a noteworthy online experience, either totally new or makes the users' life much better.
1% or even 15% of a group excited about your idea is not enough. You only win when you totally dominate and amaze the group you've targeted.
Let us examine the process step by step:
We live in a winner-takes-almost-all world (Zipf's law).
Being #1 is far far a lot better than being #3 or being #10 (corollary).
There's a tremendous hunger to understand the new and to remain on the cutting edge.
Ideavirus has a lifecycle. Feed it before it dies out.
Viral Marketing is an ideavirus in which the carrier of the virus is the product.
"Something" had to be the most famous painting in the world, and it might as well be the "Mona Lisa".
Viral marketing is an ideavirus, where the idea is the amplifier.
Every time you send a note, you spread the virus. The magic of viral marketing is that the product carries the message.
Viral marketing requires the product you're using to be communications-focused or very public.
Either the velocity and smoothness are high enough that your idea becomes an epidemic, or they're not and it dies out (Brickwall filter).
It's not about the ice cream, it's about the experience.
Only 1% of Yahoo! 's value is due to actual unique stuff where you cannot get anywhere else.
We are far more connected than we ever were.
With word of mouse, you can tell 100 friends or 1000 friends.
As the speed of new ideas entering the community has increase, so has our respect for people who know. And because it's valuable, we're both open to hearing about the new and telling others about it.
We're ready, willing and able to be at the bleeding edge, at any time.
Knowing is just as important as "having".
Know and be aware:
... then it's much easier to succed.
Ideaviruses can only grow in a culture that care about the new.
If something is new, and different and exciting and getting buzzed about; we want to know about it. We want to be a part of it.
The fashion is now to be in fashion. And ideas are the way we keep up.
If there's a great idea and it moves through the hive for free, everyone who touches it wins in several ways.
Some folks are dead-ends, while others will enable and amplify your ideavirus.
Dullness won't sell your product.
But neither will irrelevant brilliance: Therefore, give people a reason to listen. Then create an infrastructure that'll amplify their ability to spread the word.
People are more likely to listen to someone who's spreading a virus for non-personal gain.
The first sneezers are the most difficult to get an individual to perform.
Don't view the releationship as an expense.
An unhappy promiscuous sneezer can quickly become an angry powerful sneezer.
Creating the virus is the single and most important part of your job.
The product has to deliver so much wow, be so cool, so neat and so productive that the user tells five friends.
There are vacuums in your industry – but not for long.
Nobody spreads an ideavirus as a favor to you. They do it because it's
In today's winner-takes-all world there's no room for a me-too offerings or worse boring products and services. If it's not compelling, it will never lead to an ideavirus.
Be
Being brave and bold in the creation of ideas is the only reason to go to work today.
Plan a method that takes people from where they are to where you want them to go. And while you're at it work on the product because
product makes your job 100 times easier.
How big should I launch?
How smooth is my product?
How can I turn trial into persisence (!) ?
You have to make your idea smooth. Make it easier for the virus to spread.
Building a virus takes insight, talent and most of all patience.
One of the dumbest things marketers do is to put artificial barriers in the way of trial. It's like charging $100 to take a test drive before buying a car.
Make as many supporting manifestos available as possible, in whatever forms necessary, to turn consumers from skeptics into converts. Display:
Provide a multitude of tell-a-friend tools, as well overt rewards for becoming a sneezer.
Do we have resources and time to dominate this hive before others rush in to fill the vacuum?
Full Viral: The more you use it, the more you market it – whether you want it or not.
MAGIC NUMBER == (# invitations a user sends) x (conversion rate)
Magic number should be >= 1.2 for viral effect.
Make it as easy as possible for the powerful members of the hive to tell each other about an ideavirus.
Viral Marketing is not an afterthought. It's the core of your marketing campaign.
Keep in mind:
Focus on how to make people communicate to each other, without giving up simplicity.
Less powerful sneezer: Individuals or organizations that have something to gain by endorsing your idea but aren't so out there that they are tagged as promiscuous sneezers.
Choose your hive first, then build your idea.
Trying to appeal everyone is almost sure to fail, for the simple reason that everyone wants something different.
If the hive doesn't want it then you picked up the wrong hive. Select a hive that respects the core value of your virus.
Your product is not for everyone, and anyone cannot benefit from it (even if it's true there's little chance a virus will spread in a hive that big).
Far better, pick smaller hives and conquer them one at a time.
A virus can spread in a college campus in a matter of hours.
ideavirus = meme
Study the vector you'd like your ideavirus to follow. The vector you choose will have a lot to do with who gets the virus.
Vector is about
I'm not likely to spread the idea if the recipient does not have the technology, energy or resources to get engaged with it (and the converse is also true).
The act of using the medium should teach others about the idea. While you can aspire to make your product more medussa-like, it's a mistake spending all your time wishing for it to happen.
The longer it takes someone to get the basic concept behind your idea, the less medussa-like it is. So try to maintain simplicity as much as you can.
But there's a catch in here: Don't try to over-simplify things. Often some level of complexity is a good thing. Real change (and profit) comes from unsettling ideas that significantly alter the way people interact with each other. And those ideas aren't as smooth and easy to grasp as some others.
Create a system that allows positive word-of-mouth to be amplified (and negative to be damped).
Don't lose touch with the hive and fall in love with your own taste. Remember, you are a fashion editor – not a fashion-maker.
None of us is as smart as all of us (or none of us is as dumb as all of us).
Create your own best-seller list and popularize that.
The very best cover images are like a cold glass of water thrown in your face. They break one or more rules of graphic design. They are different in a vital and more important way. They are loud, they attract the eye but also hold it. And most of all they intrigue us enough that we need to understand what's inside.
Answer these:
When you have an opportunity to dominate not just the hive, but also the sneezers in the hive, you need to spare no expense to do it.
The sooner you ask for money, the less you'll make.
If you are asking "Heck, how the hell I'm gonna make money out of it?" then you're in big trouble.
If people are willing to sneeze on your behalf because they are proud of you, our your product and their association with it then YOU ARE IN !
People are hesitant to be the first:
Their advice will make your product heavy, hard to use, awkward and difficult to understand.
Identify and use pre-chasm sneezers but do not let them use you. They are the most likely people to spread around your idea.
The value of network increases with the square of # of people using it (Metcalfe's Law).
If you can somehow convert your idea into a virus that has to do with communication, it's easier to make it go viral.
Find powerful sneezers and beg / cajole / bribe them to use your new tool.
The challange of an ideamerchant is to turn the virus into an asset. And this can only be done if you ask the user for permission to follow up directly.
You can't do what created buzz yesterday. Because there's no way that's going to create more buzz today.
In general ideaviruses adore a vacuum. But there do exists special cases:
Sometimes after being sensitized (like a bee sting) by one ideavirus, the market is more susceptible to a new one, especially if uncertainity and risk is involved in the original idea. The second Thai restaurant in a town is more likely to be successful than the first one.
linkibol, for the time being, is a beta web application for rating, tagging and bookmarking online content. The primary language of the application is Turkish, and it initially targets Turkish audience.
There are some caveats in front of it, preventing the application being fully viral. In this addendum we will try to analyze those issues one by one, and try to devise solutions to those problems.
Social bookmarking although labeled "social" is a private experience. You organize your data and your life. And you are not natuarally inclined to spread the word.
Solution: Make it dead easy to share your bookmarks and other stuff.
Don't get me wrong. Social tagging and social bookmarking are not new concepts, but the concept is relatively new (at most 5-6 months old) in Turkish market. And this makes it hard to conceptualize for the target audience.
It's awfully difficult to describe what social bookmarking does.
Solution:
There is no existing amplifier.
Solution: Feature your most satisfied users.
The virus is not a natural monopoly.
Solution: Use the same communication tools that made it go viral to support its position as a monopoly.
May be getting big fast is not the right idea.
A holistic organic virus growth instead of a forced viral growth will enable to perfect our business model. Plus it will decrease our fixed costs (we will spend far less money).
Delight one user at a time. But look around carefully.
Enable users talk to each other:
linkibol: save, share and explore your links.
A real web2.0 social bookmarking service, specially aimed for the active information-seeker, trend-follower Turkish internet users.
Along with many other things, AJAX is a competitive advantage for us:
As the creator and developer of sardalya, we can develop AJAX applications more reliable, more robust, more lightweight and faster (in terms of execution speed and development time) than anyone else in the market.
Almost without exception, every single win on the consumer side of the internet has been due to marketing. And the most effective part of that marketing is about the ideavirus.
We hope, this quick - fast forward snap shot of Godin's book; and the brief summary of our strategical decisions in the light of it will be as beneficial to the community as it is to us.