Have you seen Flight of the Conchords on HBO?  It’s a new show about a New Zealand folk duo trying to make it in The Big Apple.  I love it.  It’s like Curb Your Enthusiasm meets The Odd Couple meets Forrest Gump meets The Royal Tenenbaums.  Here’s a video blurb from the show to show you what I mean:

It’s certainly not for everyone, but if you like your humor on the quirky side, you’ll probably like it.

But I’m not here to talk about television.  I’m here to talk about marketing.  Flight of the Conchords is a great example of thoroughly executing Step 3 of my three-part recipe for Creating Infectious Action.  Here are those steps again:

1. Create something remarkable  (viz the video above)
2. Weave a sticky message around it (Tenacious Dundee)
3. Design the system to spread it

If you point your browser to the Show Your Love section of the Flight of Conchords website, you’ll see a comprehensive set of spread tools kindly provided by HBO for your maven pleasure.  There’s a full set of embedable video clips, a set of IM icons, video podcasts, background images for your fan website (see above as well), and even a set of color hex values so that your fan website is on-brand.  This is great marketing at work, because it releases control while it enables brand-appropriate behavior.  Instead of trying to fight the entire fight yourself, designing to spread means spending at least part of your energy on enabling others to do it for you.  It’s about walking around, pouring gas on a bunch of little fires, rather than endeavoring to build one big bonfire yourself. 

And, the more you consciously design a system to spread the word, the more likely it is your cool thing will fly.