Unleashing Your Own Ideavirus

Get it free.

“The idea is to create an environment where consumers will market to each other.” If, as the cluetrain manifesto claims, markets are conversations, this idea should work. An ideavirus (an ambitious word with awful connotation) is basically an idea or product or service that takes hold in a major way of a specific population. Ideaviruses can be intentional or unintentional, but clearly author Seth Godin believes intentional ideaviruses are superior. Unleashing The Ideavirus serves as a how-to guide to make your idea figuratively explode.

Getting your idea to explode involves many variables, but the most important are as follows:

CREATE AN IDEA THAT FACILITATES COMMUNICATION BETWEEN CONSUMERS. Hotmail is one of the most successful and literal examples of this, embedding an advertisement for free e-mail at the footer of every message you send someone. Polaroid is another example, as is anything that you can say, “hey- look at this, this is cool” to someone else, and they’ll want to try it.

TARGET SPECIFIC AUDIENCES. You’d think companies would have jumped on this a long time ago, but advertising continues to be a massive waste of money because the message is incoherent. Specific “hives” like specific things. Don’t market tech products to the technologically-impaired, for example. Market to the nerds.

WORK FAST. In today’s go!go!go! society, products quickly die (especially those in the technological realm). Money is to be made at the launch of an idea, because nerds who have money to spend tend to want the newest thing. You also want to be the innovator,

EMPLOY INFLUENTIAL MERCENARIES. Known as “sneezers,” and purloined from Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, these people have the power to move products simply by suggestion. Perhaps we can call them “guerilla advertisers.”

MILK YOUR IDEA WHILE YOU CAN; LET IT DIE WHEN IT GETS SICK. Don’t “jump the shark.”

MAKE IT EASY TO SPREAD THE VIRUS. Put a little “e-mail to a friend” button somewhere. Similarly, MAKE IT CHEAP (OR FREE), at least at first. Building a buzz now can lead to profits later.

Simple, eh?

"Bringing Down Business as Usual"

“Real authority is based on respect for knowledge.”
Go tell that to my high-school history professor from Texas. Named Kirby. Who hated Californians.




Written as a dialogue between web advocates and oblivious corporations, the cluetrain manfesto (no capitalization necessary) posits that the marketplace is a series of conversations, turning the notion of technological determinism on its head. With tired, redundant analogies, the manifesto lent itself to the view that people just want to talk to each other, and through these interactions can shake up the order of businesses or fix a software glitch or point a loyal Saturn customer to a cheaper oil change. Corporations that can utilize web conversation skills are much more likely to succeed in the new (technological) conversation market.

The internet is awe-inspiring. The web is us, but even we don’t know exactly what it is or what it’s for. We just know it’s cool. And we know it’s highly insubordinate.

It can’t be controlled by businesses, and it cannot become a mass market. “Because the Net connects people to each other, and impassions and empowers through those connections, the media dream of the Web as another acquiescent mass-consumer market is a figment and a fantasy…The Internet is inherently seditious.”

The internet subverts the hierarchy of corporations as it advances. The “panopticon” view of the internet is reversed, where many can see in but no one is in the center, in control.

If marketing is a one-way conversation, the internet changes the nature of marketing. Scratch that, it destroys marketing and paves the way for new advertisement: the corporation cares. And the corporation can show it cares through customer interaction.

Metcalfe’s Law, an overused but nonetheless vital axiom of CCT studies, states that “the value of a network increases as the square of the number of users connected to it—connections multiply value exponentially.” It paves the way for mass market’s revenge: as more users become connected and start talking (and further, start thinking), they realize that the internet has the power to turn corporations into “replaceable merchants” after being “replaceable consumers” or “replaceable workers” for so long.

Here’s where I have a problem with the manifesto. Though I know manifestos are not, by definition, supposed to be rational or coherent in any way, cluetrain begins to contradict itself and widely known facts.

The authors claim that as markets become larger (markets of scale), choice increases. Well, not in this corporate climate. What about telecommunications companies increasingly monopolizing? What about Microsoft?

The authors also claim businesses are based on individuals, after spending pages upon pages trying to convince us otherwise. If that were the case, then why do companies need to humanize and talk to people in order to succeed? Wouldn’t they already be doing that?

The authors assume we talk to each other. If we’re headed to an “economy of voice,” then why do we feel even less connected to the people at the top or the people sitting next to us on the bus?

I suppose this is what you get when multiple people compose a “revolutionary” book.