BOOM...Virus Spreads

Lately I’ve been reading from a marketing strategy book called “Unleashing the Idea Virus” by Seth Godin. I had a lot of time to read it while I was in the hospital with Kim before and after the birth of our son just over a week ago. This is by far, one of the most helpful books I’ve ever read. It’s not the type of book that everyone would find helpful or even interesting. I think that I find it interesting in the same way that my programmer, Rob, finds his text books on Java script interesting. I’m really into marketing right now and so this book as come at a very fortuitous time for me. Just about every concept and principle I learn is directly applicable to what I’m doing and it's all written in lay man's terms.

One of the concepts that this book discusses is the strategy of making a new idea easy to spread. To illustrate this point, they use the examples of Hotmail, and Blue Mountain E-cards. Both of these “idea viruses,” as they call them, ignited fast. REALLY fast. They did so because of how easy they were for the user to spread them. Think about it. In order for Hotmail to even work, one has to email someone else while USING it. In other words, using it means promoting it. The same thing is true with Blue Mountain E-cards. Once a person receives one, and they think it’s cool, they want to send one to someone else. Just by using the idea, the idea is being spread around. And it is simple to do so. No multi-step processes, just a typed message and a click to send. Amazing! It’s not rocket science, and yet it's incredibly smart. Then again, some of the most simplistic things can be amazing to me. Until I started reading this book, I had never thought about the genius behind the marketing and strategies of these ideas. I took them completely for granted until they were pointed out and broken down for me. That’s how good they really were! Another “idea virus” that I had never even heard of is explained this way in the book;

“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 your youth), insert some coins and it takes your picture. But instead of giving you four shots on a strip, it prints out 16 little tiny on-square-inch on stickers. Now, what are you going to do with 16 pictures of yourself on stickers? 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 developed 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 dominated 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 [idea] 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.”

“Boom”, indeed. To me, this is high impact stuff. So why am I so interested in this particular marketing strategy? Simply stated…LittleLDS needs the lift-off thrust described here. After reading this excerpt I immediately had a really great idea. Surprise, surprise….I know. The idea is to create some sort of sharable medium. I can employ the LittleLDS brand to create a new type of coloring page that can only be “really fun” when it’s being shared with another child. After all, two coloring children are better than one. So, you get one child excited enough about the idea that they bring the pages to another child to share. The two friends share an experience that begs to be repeated. The second friend takes the pages to another friend to reproduce the experience, and... Boom. Virus spreads.