Unleashing the Ideavirus

Seth Godin argues that ideas travel best when customers pass them to one another, not when companies push them at customers, and he names this customer-to-customer spread the ideavirus. Instead of counting and steering every message, marketers should create conditions in which an idea can copy itself. Godin studies launches by Hotmail, PayPal, GeoCities, Napster and Volkswagen, offers a recipe for starting an ideavirus, and identifies what carries one: influential sneezers, hives, a clear vector and transmission with little friction. Malcolm Gladwell contributed the foreword. The ebook edition was given away free online and spread to more than 250,000 copies, a live test of the idea.

Bogdana Butnar, head of strategy at Poke, put it on her books to read list, which she started for younger people in advertising.