8 Ways to Make Your Startup Message Contagious Implement these viral-marketing tactics, and the diagnosis will be strictly incurable success.

There are alligators living in the New York City sewer system--slimy green snapping ones--ever since the actor who played Eddie Haskell died in Vietnam. I heard it all from the disappearing hitchhiker--the one who always starts talking about God.

Wait a minute. How do we all "know" stories like that? No full-page ads, no marketing blitz. In fact, not a single one of those advertising dollars that you and I cry we don't have was ever spent to hawk those yarns. And yet we can all recognize these wacked-out tales--and every person we meet seems to know about them, too.

So here's my question: What if it were your product that everyone knew so well? Hmmm?