# Unleashing the Ideavirus

- Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/books/unleashing-the-ideavirus/
- Published: 2001-10-01T20:32:00+01:00
- Author: Howard Lake

**Stop Marketing at People! Turn Your Ideas into Epidemics by Helping Your Customers
Do the Marketing for You**

Counter to traditional marketing wisdom, which tries to count, measure, and manipulate
the spread of information, Seth Godin argues that the 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, and cheerfully 
eggs marketers on to create an environment where their ideas can replicate and spread.

In lively detail, Godin looks at the ways companies such as PayPal, Hotmail, GeoCities,
even Volkswagen have successfully launched ideaviruses. He offers a “recipe” for
creating your own ideavirus, identifies the key factors in the successful spread
of an ideavirus (powerful sneezers, hives, a clear vector, a smooth, friction-free
transmission), and shows how any business, large or small, can use ideavirus marketing
to succeed in a world that just doesn’t want to hear it anymore from the traditional
marketers.