Diego Rodriguez and I had good fun talking at AlwaysOn about our d.school course on Creating Infectious Action yesterday, and the audience -- both online and offline -- seemed to be especially amused when Diego talked about the websites that our students built to spread Firefox. Check out the C|Net story on Selling Mozillia Through Sex and Religion.
We then had lively panel with people who have spread ideas and products successfully. My three take aways:
1. Mitchell Baker of Mozillia talked about how hard it is -- and how important it is -- to let go of control of your message and your brand, to get others to help you spread. As she emphasized, there are times when Mozillia does take steps to encourage some messages and discourage others, but they have to pick their battles because they've got about 55 people, and there are over 100,000 people out there spreading the news about Firefox. Traditional corporate control freaks have a lot of control letting go, although they seem to make internal decisions that ruin brands just fine (e.g., I don't understand how having 15 different Coca-Colas to choose from helps their brand).
2. Perry Klebhan, founder of Atlas Snowshoes and inventor of the modern snowshoe, emhasized that the product became a success only after he realized who real users where -- people who wanted a safe and organized experience, not hotshots who pull over to the side of the road and take off where there no trails -- which affected who Atlas marketed to and led to work with snowparks to create marked trails for snowshoe users. It was a message about listening to and finding who really wants your product, not who you think would be a "cool" person to like it. Perry also was a coach in the class, and is heavily involved in the d.school in other ways.
3. Gil Penchino, CEO of Wikia, who had a great point. He argued that he had learned not to keep pouring gasoline on logs when there was no fire, but instead to look for little fires that were already burning and to dump the fuel on them. In other words, if there is no real interest in anything, spending a lot of money won't help, but where there is already interest, money and attention can help something take off that is already creating excitement and buzz.
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