Viral marketing: It's hard to create a viral product when you set up barriers to get to your product. Take the online version of

Viral marketing: It's hard to create a viral product when you set up barriers to get to your product. Take the online version of NBC's Heads Up Poker Championship by Rusty Cawley

Clealy, the free download is designed to help promote viewership for the TV program.

Yet when you try to download the game, you are presented with a list of barriers to participation.

The web site informs you that, if you want to play, you must have:

• PC (we're sorry, the Heads-Up Poker game is not supported for Macs)
• High speed internet connection (Cable or DSL)
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 or greater (we're sorry, the Heads-Up Poker game is not supported for Firefox)
• Macromedia Flash Player 5.0 or greater
• 1024x768 screen resolution

So everyone else is screwed? A successful ideavirus is smooth. It's easy to pass along from acolyte to novice.

When you set these kind of high-end standards for participation, you cripple your meme.

Tags: poker | NBC | viral marketing | ideavirus | memetics