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Unleashing the Ideavirus
When is a virus a good thing? When it is the model for spreading your ideas and reaching your target market.

In today's rapidly changing market, it can take some lateral thinking to get your business noticed. As the baby boomers reach the height of their earning power and watch their children leave home, they are becoming more and more a revolutionizing force challenging the way sales and marketing professionals think. Famous for creative conceptualizations themselves, the baby boomers are looking for stand out products marketed with distinction and flair.

Marketing consultant and best-selling author Seth Godin has an outstanding idea himself, and he puts it forth in Unleashing the Ideavirus, a fascinating exploration of how marketers can reach more people, more quickly, than they might have imagined. He suggests that, by treating your product or service like a human or computer virus, you can make it spread like one. Set your concept loose among your target market, and – if it is powerful and exciting enough – members will spread it amongst themselves. "Ignite consumer networks and then get out of the way and let them talk," he advises marketers.

Focusing on the internet as a particularly useful way for interested parties to transmit information and generate buzz, Godin illustrates his notion of ideal virus-spreading businesses with numerous case studies. He cites Napster, Blue Mountain Arts e-cards, GeoCities, and Hotmail as examples of the strategy executed right. Elaborating on his basic model, he discusses "hives" (receptive populations), "sneezers" (influential people who pass the "viruses" along), and "smoothness" (the ease with which sneezers can spread viruses to a hive).

As author Malcolm Gladwell writes in his Foreword, "This is a subversive book. It says that the marketer is not – and ought not to be – at the center of successful marketing. The customer should be. Are you ready for that?"

This revolutionary concept will play well with baby boomers, who always err on the side of doubting what they're told. The media landscape is changing: TV commercials, magazine ads, billboards and the like have so proliferated that their effectiveness has significantly diminished. Consumers are becoming more able and inclined to ignore the blare of the messages marketers and advertisers directly transmit; baby boomers in particular have always proved recalcitrant to overbearing messages. Yet they will listen to friends, colleagues and acquaintances who pass information along in the course of daily interactions. Where conventional marketing has attempted to control and measure the flow of information, Godin is discerning enough to perceive that this effort is a losing battle, and not the way of the future.

Any business, large or small, can benefit from the ideavirus brainwave. The first requirement, of course, is a product or service with inherent, strong appeal for its target market. The second is an ingenious way of disseminating the reality of that appeal.Unleashing the Ideavirus is an ideal place to begin.

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