From the Publisher
Counter to traditional marketing wisdom, which tries to count, measure, and manipulate the spread of information, Seth Godin argues that information can spread most effectively from customer to customer, rather than from business to customer. Godin calls this powerful customer-to-customer dialogue the ideavirus.
In Unleashing the Ideavirus, Godin examines how companies like Napster and Hotmail have successfuly launched ideaviruses. He offers a recipe for creating your own ideavirus, and shows how businesses can use ideavirus marketing to succeed in a world that doesn't want to hear it anymore from traditional marketers.
Guy Kawasaki
This is the only (idea virus that will save you time and make you money.
Chris Meyer
Seth Godin has unique clarity about what's going on in marketing — the futility of mass, the importance of contagion, the central role of permission. Unleashing the IdeaVirus informs, instructs, and entertains, offering the reader both roadmap and owner's manual for the car.
Alan M. Webber
If you're lucky, whatever Seth is selling is catching — and if you spend time with him, you'll come down with it.
Booknews
A marketer with the zeal of a missionary advocates the idea that information about a product is spread most effectively from customer to customer. He argues that the public doesn't want to hear from traditional marketers anymore, shows how companies such as Napster, Hotmail, and GeoCities have successfully launched "idea viruses," and identifies successful techniques for propagating them. Distributed by Dearborn Publishing. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Michelle V. Rafter
The Internet industry has been enamored of buzz-based marketing ever since venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson coined the phrase "viral marketing" in 1997 to describe Hotmail's strategy of tagging every e-mail message with a promotion for its service. The self-replicating promotion helped the company achieve an epidemic growth rate of zero to 12 million users in a mere 18 months. Since then, viral marketing has propelled everything from Napster to The Blair Witch Project to legendary success.
Even with all the buzz about buzz, though, many Internet companies still pour the bulk of their marketing budgets into ill-conceived TV advertising (who could forget January's orgy of dot-com expenditures on Super Bowl ads?) and other ineffective channels, like banner ads. Depending on whose numbers you use, last year online and offline companies spent $3.5 billion to $4.6 billion on Net ads. Yet, according to Nielsen NetRatings, average click-through rates for banner ads have fallen to a pitiful half a percent.
There has to be a better way. With investors increasingly focusing on profits, the time is right to do more than just talk about viral marketing. And here to lead the rally are two new primers on the subject - Seth Godin's flashy Unleashing the Ideavirus and Emanuel Rosen's more pedantic but meatier The Anatomy of Buzz.
Both agree on the basic tenets. Instead of blindly (and expensively) advertising to mass audiences, companies should focus on creating buzz among key potential customers - early adopters - and let them market to everybody else.
Godin, who fills his book with infectious analogies, calls these folks "sneezers," whereas Rosen dubs them "network hubs." They could be celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, influential members of a particular industry or ordinary people involved in their neighborhoods, schools, church groups or companies who consciously and consistently spread the word about new things they encounter.
The trick is to reward such efforts. Give away samples or discounts. Create affiliate programs a la Amazon or run promotions that reward early customers for signing up new users. Post testimonials from happy customers on your Web site. All simple stuff, but according to Godin, "too much work for most sites."
Both authors warn that none of these efforts will work with a lousy product. Hotmail, Polaroid's iZone camera, the new Volkswagen Beetle and the Palm are all top-notch products - they're simple to understand and use, they work and look great - that benefited from good buzz. Godin, who founded an online promotions company he sold to Yahoo and authored last year's Permission Marketing;, calls these killer products "ideaviruses" because they're easy to launch and spread quickly from person to person until they're ubiquitous, like Napster or The Sopranos.
If you have a great product, give buzz a boost by first giving it away or selling it dirt cheap, a lesson many Net companies already apply. As Rosen relates, the publisher of Cold Mountain gave away 4,000 galley copies to bookstore owners and others to help make the Civil War novel an unexpected hit that eventually sold 1.6 million hardcover copies. Microsoft gave away 450,000 copies of Windows 95 before the software was commercially available.
Of course, you can't give away everything. So how to make money? Aim low. Pick a small market with no established leader and use buzz to dominate it before anybody else does. "If you can fill a vacuum aggressively and permanently, it is far easier to extract money," Godin writes. The jury is still out, however, on whether that theory will fly with standalone online retailers and companies such as Napster that don't charge for their services.
Because the Net speeds up communication exponentially, dot-com companies have come to rely solely on online means for creating buzz. Big mistake, Rosen says. For buzz to work, companies need a multichannel strategy. Cisco, he points out, prides itself on connecting with customers online, but also arranges 1,000 offline seminars a year for potential customers, holds even more events for current customers and attends dozens of trade shows.
Likewise, don't rest on your laurels. Once you've successfully used buzz to launch a product or service, leverage it to launch your next big thing.
There may be no such thing as bad publicity, Rosen cautions, but negative buzz can be lethal. Apple was vilified for the Newton, as was long-dead company Momenta for its early '90s pen computer - the device was so buggy that people who got free demo units ditched them, something even a $40 million marketing budget couldn't rectify. For that reason, both authors suggest that companies actively track what people are saying about their products through all media, including on consumer feedback Web sites such as PlanetFeedback.com or Epinions.com.
Both Godin and Rosen also pay homage to Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary theorist who first came up with the concept of the meme, an idea that replicates itself like a living organism, growing and evolving as it passes from one person to another.
But while they cover much of the same intellectual territory, they diverge radically in execution. Godin, an unabashed self-promoter and online marketing industry fixture, offers, hands down, the faster, sexier read, with pictures, to-do lists and up-to-the-minute examples. But he fails to provide much historical perspective. He calls his slim, 197-page book a "manifesto," penned a cover story about it for Fast Company's August issue and made it available on the Web a month before its September publication date. In notices posted between pages of the online version, he encourages readers to "Steal This Idea" by downloading the text file and circulating it to friends. As of mid-August, Godin claimed more than 400,000 copies had been downloaded.
If Godin's Ideavirus is fast food, Rosen's tome is an eight-course meal. Rosen stuffs his 303-page book, due in October, with examples of good and bad buzz taken from 40 years of innovations inside and outside the technology industry, and offers copious scientific research to back up his assumptions and conclusions. He includes extensive interview footnotes for each chapter and a lengthy bibliography.
Such an approach is not surprising coming from the former marketing VP who helped launch EndNote, a program that helps academics compile the bibliographic material found at the end of scholarly papers. (It eventually sold 200,000 copies - mainly by word of mouth.) Though Rosen's is the better researched and structured of the two books, it's a drier read that would have benefited from a dash of Godin's peppy prose style.
Together, both books make a convincing case for viral marketing - just keep in mind that no amount of buzz-building will turn a dog into a winner. And tell a friend.
What People Are Saying
Jay Levinson
Jay Levinson, author of Guerrilla Marketing:
Take Leo Burnett, David Ogilvy, Bill Bernbach and Mark Twain. Combine their brains and shave their heads. What's left? Seth Godin.
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