Stanford Professors and industry consultants Diego Rodriguez and Bob Sutton launched the first full day of AlwaysOn '06 this morning with an energetic romp through their "10, no, 5 rules for spreading contagion" derived from their class at Stanford University's new "d school" aka Hasso Plattner Institute of Design:
1. Failure Sucks, but Instructs
2. Enlist Fanatical Mavens
3. Begin with Empathy
4. Find an Enemy
5. Be Authentic
Examples of successful projects included two designed to encourage the spread of Mozilla's open source browser Firefox - one called FaithBrowser which uses religious icons on the customized browser's toolbar and adds rotating lines of scripture at the top of each page and another called firefoxies, which encourages people to upload modeling pictures to the website www.firefoxies.com and to encourage voting on the "Top Firefoxy of the Month" to extend familiarity with the browser.
Both were developed by four-person teams this spring at the d school - which has generated tremendous excitement since being funded by the former SAP head, although it is still working out of temporary quarters in a "Double Trailer" on Stanford's campus.
This spring's highly competed for course, which had 24 students, four full time instructors, 10 industry executive coaches and one full-time "d shrink" or psychologist, focussed on the idea of spreading Hip-Hop, as well as encouraging people to save money (in conjunction with sponsor Fidelity) and helping Mozilla expand awareness and use of its Firefox browser, as noted.
The room is now packed as Kara Swisher, of Wall Street Journal correspondent and D: All Things Digital conference fame, leads a panel on Consumer Generated media in which YouTube CEO Chad Hurley deservedly appears the center of attention, flanked by executives of Yahoo! Music, Sony Pictures Digital and MP3tunes.
More to come!
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