The Difference Between Viral Marketing and The Ideavirus

This was explained in Seth Godin's book, Unleashing The Ideavirus, but I don't think that most people understand the difference between making your product viral, and making your idea spread.

Getting your product to go viral is a way to create a product that people would want to share. Viral marketing is about creating products that are so amazing, people want to talk about them, and share them with their friends and families. The ideavirus helps these evangelists spread the idea faster.

The ideavirus helps people spread the idea more by doing something that makes it easier for people to spread the idea around. The iPod does this by using white headphones. The white headphones is now almost the trademark of music. If you're on an airplane, and you see white headphones, you can almost bet your life that the person listening to the sound is using an iPod. This spreads the idea of the iPod faster, and makes people see what the iPod is about. The white headphones spread Apple's iPod ideavirus.

The ideavirus helps the viral product move along through communities. Creating an ideavirus can be as easy as putting a mark on your products that no one else has, or by placing an "E-mail this to a friend" link at the end of all of your articles.

Ideaviruses make products speed through communities at a faster rate, and make people see what's so unique about the viral product, this is the reason why you can't blame people for not knowing the difference between and ideavirus and a viral product.

Viral products and ideaviruses go hand in hand. If you're product is remarkable enough to use the ideavirus to spread, than it isn't going to spread through communities. You must create a product that's so amazing and remarkable, that people will want to help spread the product, which starts the ideavirus. It starts when people want to spread your product to their friends, and you can thus help them spread it by unleashing your ideavirus. Here's a list of ways that you can make it easier to spread the news about your product:

1. Put a mark on your product to make it easy to recognize (like the white iPod headphones)

2. Help the idea spread by encouraging your customers to unleash the ideavirus

3. Give incentives to the people who do spread your virus to encourage them to spread the product to more people

4. Create slogans that are easy to remember, and catchy enough to make people spread the germs

5. Distribute incentives to people that got the virus to spread the virus

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