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  • Paul Kim 8:24 pm on June 30, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

    Going Live with Firefox 3.5 

    mozilla marketing

    This morning Mozilla released Firefox 3.5.

    It’s a terrific upgrade for the 300 million+ current Firefox users, and will radically improve the Web experience for everyone who migrates to Firefox in the months to come. Most of all, Firefox 3.5 is a compelling expression of the values that underlie Mozilla’s ongoing mission to improve the Web itself.

    I’m extremely proud of the hard work everyone in the Mozilla marketing community put into making this a stellar product launch. Each launch I’ve been a part of has felt unique. This year, and with this release, we’ve crossed into operating within a new, more intense competitive environment. One that we’ve had a huge part in creating, for the benefit of everyone on the Web.

    Much <3 to everyone in the Mozilla community on a fantastic release, and to upgrading the Web.

     

    • db 7:02 am on July 2, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Paul – congrats to you and the team on pulling off a stellar Fx 3.5 launch! Well done.

  • Paul Kim 3:40 pm on June 17, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

    Marketing Updates on the Road to Firefox 3.5 

    Firefox_by_Ophyr_2Some of what’s been happening on the Mozilla marketing front to share with you, friends, as we trek down the final stretch to the release of Firefox 3.5.

    Advertising Age’s Garrick Schmitt (also EVP at Razorfish and kind human) paid a visit to Mozilla last month. Garrick’s post on the work we’ve done in conjunction with our community to spread Firefox just came out and it’s a great read. Here’s a clip:

    Mozilla competes against Microsoft, Apple and Google — arguably the biggest and most valuable brands in the world — and it succeeds with no traditional advertising (or big budgets) to speak of. It may have taken Barack Obama’s historic political campaign and election to alert the ad industry to the power of grass-roots marketing, but the ongoing success of Mozilla’s Firefox marketing efforts are more relevant for most.

    Read Garrick’s full column at AdAge.com

    I gave a talk last week at the Influx Curated conference, a one-day gathering of 250 creative professionals from  the advertising, design and technology fields organized by Ed Cotton of BSSP. The reaction to the Firefox marketing stories I talked about was gratifying, mainly because of how the way we’ve learned to work as a distributed, participatory movement resonated with people just glancingly familiar with us. (I’m indebted to John Lilly for his help with a bunch of the content in my slides, which I’ve embedded below.)

    Ed Cotton’s insights from Influx Curated

    Lastly, Mozilla is a sponsor of this weekend’s Open Video Conference in New York. It’s going to be an epic, dare I say, wes-andersonian gathering of people working across the spectrum of technology, activism, and culture about video, the Web and the power we have to shape this still emergent media space. I’ll be attending the OVC along with several Mozillians: Chris Blizzard, Paul Rouget, Asa Dotzler and Mark Surman.

    Here’s an overview of the Open Video Conference that co-organizers Dean Jansen and Ben Moskovitz sent my way:

    Open Video Conference
    June 19-20 in New York
    http://openvideoconference.org

    What is Open Video? Open Video is a movement to promote free expression and innovation in online video. The upcoming conference is a three day showcase of inspiring talks, awesome video and film, open hacking sessions, parties, and cutting edge open tech.

    Why is Open Video Important? At this very moment, in 2009, we have a chance to ensure that internet video retains key characteristics of the internet at large. It’s still early and things are looking good, but we need devices that play nice with each other, networks that aren’t totally neutered, and playback and production tools that are low-cost (ideally free/open source) and easy to use. Developments like Hulu are interesting, because people can watch what they want, when they want. But we don’t want internet video to be a glorified TV on demand service. We want video to be a dynamic medium that invites clipping, archival, remix, collage, repurposing, and many other uses that are currently inhibited by law or by lack of tools.

    About the Open Video Conference: The event will take place on at NYU’s law school and is expected to attract more than 600 participants from a wide range of backgrounds. Industry will meet grassroots, artists and filmmakers will meet technologists; and theorists will meet activists. Everyone will be talking about the future of internet video as it relates to free expression and innovation.

    Speakers: NYU’s Clay Shirky, Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin, Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman, co-creator of the Daily Show Lizz Winstead, the head of video for TED Talks, representatives from YouTube, Adobe, Mozilla and many more technology companies, an EFF staff attorney, and lots more! Also participating are hackers from free and open source software projects, including: Firefox, VLC, GStreamer, Xiph/Ogg/Theora, Miro, Boxee and many more. See the full lineup here: http://openvideoconference.org/speakers/

    Phew! Lots going on, as usual (I didn’t even mention our uptown office move, Mozilla Service Week, our collaboration with Infectious, or FastestFirefox.com). And, shortly, make way Internets for Firefox 3.5 – you’re going to love it. No treasure hunts required.

     

    • Tom 5:25 pm on June 21, 2009 Permalink | Reply

      Hi Paul,

      After stumbling across you’re blog I wanted to say that I think Firefox is the best web browser I have ever used!

      I’ve tried Google Chrome but it was more complex to use so I went back to Firefox.

      I only realized how intuitively friendly Firefox is to use when I could no longer use the browser in the Taiwan office it does not work, on our network :(

      I did try Internet Explorer, but it’s always slow and unstable, plus book marks are more of a pain to add. Internet Explorer do have one nice feature though which is when you click on a new tab, it puts the table too the right of the tab you are on. While Firefox put a new tab at the end of all the other tabs if that make any sense?

      I now use Safari which I still think is not that great, always to crash if you have too many tabs open….ha now you’re thinking I have some tab fetish going on.

      Anyway hope you and you’re team keep up the good work!

      Cheers,

      Tom

  • Paul Kim 10:13 pm on January 9, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

    becoming firefox 

    This is a video we took last summer when Mozilla sponsored a small booth at the 2008 Pitchfork Music Festival. The Firefox suit you see here has travelled around the world, and been featured more places than we ever expected. I’ve been meaning to share this for a while, and finally got around to it tonight. Sadly, dressing Firefox fans in the one suit we’ve been able to dig up doesn’t scale. Yet.

     

  • Paul Kim 6:49 pm on October 5, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    keep it human 

    Another mind workout from Clay Shirky, this time a riff on why imperfection invites participation; and why the belief in marketing circles that we only have one shot to capture attention induces a reliance on very expensive photo shoots on Corfu. (Not that there’s anything wrong with Corfu, per se.)

    Some of the choicer quotes as they relate to the marketing corpus:

    Brands don’t interact. Brands are inert. People interact.

    Over and over again what we see in interactive environments: if something looks too good, people won’t touch it.

    The messiness, the openness, these kinds of human characteristics tell people it’s ok to interact.

    Errata
    1. More Shirky on the blogs of Messrs. Blizzard and Kanai.
    2. This video originally sourced at Influx Insights.
    3. Since you asked, the summer was aces. My blog holiday was mostly spent on a whirlwind tour of Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Managr.

     

    • marco casteleijn 6:42 am on October 13, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      This is true so true, the lower the threshold, the easier it is to cross.

      Live and interactions happen on the edge of order and chaos. Restrict and it will stall, let it float in entropy and it will dissipate.

      Open, in constant Flux, Easy to Use!

      Keep it Fresh over there in SF ;o)

      - Up North -

  • Paul Kim 5:38 pm on July 21, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Joining the Band 

    Since I last wrote about the folks on the Mozilla marketing and PR team, we’ve been lucky enough to have some great new people join us.

    Meet them here now, and then live at the Firefox Summit next week.

    • Dave Bottoms. Dave brings extensive software and web marketing experience with him to Mozilla, and just blogged his first post to Planet.
    • Nicole Loux. Nicole joins Melissa Shapiro on our PR team after working for several years on the agency side.
    • Laura Mesa. Laura is our first new grad marketing team member, joining us after finishing college this past June.
    • William Quiviger. William was previously introduced on Planet Mozilla by Jane Finette and will work on community marketing out of the Mozilla Europe offices in Paris. William’s blog is at somethin-else.org.
    • Tara Shahian. Tara’s been with us for several months, working closely with John Slater on numerous design projects, including the Firefox 3 T-Shirt Contest. Her blog: MusingT.

    We’ve also benefited from the contributions of four rock star summer marketing interns, who’ve been working on market research, metrics, events and affiliate programs: Juliana Chea, Natnaree Chummanon, Blake Cutler, and Ulili Onovakpuri.

    Welcome aboard the Mozilla project to each one of you! It’s terrific to have you here.

     

    • Rafael 9:27 pm on July 21, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Couldn’t comment on dbottom’s blog yet. But I’ll see him at the Firefox Summit. (I’ll be there for Tbird stuff).

      Good pick up. dbottoms knows his stuff and is old-old school. Not to be confused with the post AOL old school. There’s a difference.

  • Paul Kim 3:38 pm on June 17, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Kicking off Firefox 3 Download Day with a Boom! 

    Download Day

    It’s been an awesome morning and afternoon here at Mozilla headquarters. We launched Firefox 3 this morning and immediately felt the love from millions of people all over the world joining us to set a Guinness World Record for most software downloaded in 24 hours.

    Our systems were quite busy earlier this morning so individual requests may not have gotten through – but they are all up now and serving a tremendous amount of traffic and downloads. We’re currently serving almost 9,000 downloads a minute, which puts us on track to achieve 5-7 million downloads our first day of general availability.

    To put some more color behind what’s been happening on this historic day:

    • We exceeded the first day download mark for Firefox 2 of 1.6 million after just five hours of availability for Firefox 3.
    • Net Applications is already reporting a 300% positive change in Firefox 3 market share worldwide just today.
    • Over 500 articles about the launch were linked to from Google News
    • The Firefox 3 launch made the front pages of BBC.co.uk, NYTimes.com, Liberation.fr, laRepubblica.it, Digg, Slashdot, Techcrunch, and Yahoo! News
    • The completely redesigned Mozilla.com launched in over 25 language versions
    • New community activity on SpreadFirefox.com has skyrocketed with dozens of new groups and hundreds of new postings
    • Over 700 community launch parties have been registered on mozillaparty.com

    Download Day has already been an amazing demonstration of the power of the Mozilla community. Thank you to each and every one of you who’s contributed to a terrific launch of Firefox 3.

    Onwards to a new World Record, together!

     

  • Paul Kim 6:20 pm on June 13, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Thinking about Brands 

    businessworld branding case study image Last week, I wrote a branding analysis for Businessworld, India’s top general business magazine. Meera Seth, who edits an ongoing series of case studies for Businessworld, got in touch and asked me to give a technology industry perspective on a case about extending a successful consumer brand into an adjacent category.

    Here’s an excerpt from the case, which features Firefox as a jumping off point for thinking about names and branding (The full case is online too, if you’re interested):

    Karan Kashyap’s mind was buzzing with the debates over naming the new shampoo at G&TW India where he was the product manager. The marketing manager Sudhir Dhuni had mooted the idea that they launch a shampoo under the deo[dorant]’s brand name, Mali.
    …
    Karan sat half-lying on his chair, listening to the music streaming out of his computer. And then his eyes slowly took in what he had been unwittingly staring at, the flaming orange icon of his browser, startling him unusually. Firefox, said his mind; Mozilla, came the echo. Mozilla Firefox, muttered Karan. Why on earth is it called Firefox? For a web browser? What kind of name is that for a product? How do consumers relate to it? And why Mozilla Firefox? Why two names, or is that one name?

    And here’s an excerpt from my response (Read the full analysis at Businessworld.in):

    Traditional brand building strategies have been disrupted. Industrial era techniques — repetition, saturation and need generation — rely on two aspects of the media landscape that no longer hold sway: concentration of attention; and one-way message push. Pre-internet media relied on scarcity and control over content and channels of communication to aggregate consumer audiences. We were passive recipients of a set of mass market messages. The rise of the internet has introduced choice and nearly unlimited personalisation into the mix of how a consumer chooses to allocate the attention he or she has to give to media. Add contribution of nascent consumer expectations to have an ongoing dialogue with their peers and the world, and what you have is a changed landscape for brands.

    It was great to do this, as it helped me get down in writing concepts around attention and brand co-creation that have heavily influenced the marketing we’ve done at Mozilla this past few years. I’m grateful to Meera for the opportunity to share my perspective with Businessworld’s readers in India and beyond.

    P.S. Working with a great editor absolves the late night writer of many sins – thanks again Meera!

     

  • Paul Kim 8:58 am on May 26, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    The Firefox 3 Launch Beat Goes on 

    The front page of today’s New York Times business section featured a story on Firefox 3.

    firefox 3 in the new york times

    Props are due to Melissa and the rest of our kickass PR team, and to John, Schrep and Mitchell for telling the story of Firefox 3 to the Times.

    In this experience, as with all the other work we are doing to get the word out about Firefox 3 in advance of the launch, we view our role as helping to advance the broader cause of the Mozilla manifesto. And we know we wouldn’t have any story to tell without the amazing work, dedication and contributions of everyone in the Mozilla community this past three years on Firefox 3.

    Onward to launch!

    P.S. If you spy Schrep and Tristan in Munich and elsewhere in Europe this week, make sure to say hi. :-)

     

  • Paul Kim 10:57 pm on May 8, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Jordan University Mozilla Club Site 

    jordan mozilla club

    I learned about the Mozilla student club at Jordan University through Issa Mahasneh’s group on Spread Firefox, the online home of our Firefox marketing community.

    Hey Issa: this is a really well-done design. Great combination of an overall visual metaphor (a student’s desk), professionally-executed graphic design, and balance overall between your copy and imagery. Thank you for sharing this!

    * For those of you who are students or interested in general in helping out with grassroots marketing projects, check out Spread Firefox and The Mozilla Blog to participate or just keep up with our adventures bringing Firefox to the world.

     

  • Paul Kim 8:17 pm on April 23, 2008 Permalink | Reply  

    Getting Ready for the Launch of Firefox 3 

    firefox 3 logo We’re nearing the finish line for Firefox 3, so it’s a good time to share our plans for the launch marketing that will introduce Firefox 3 to the world.

    As with every previous major version launch, we will be utilizing a combination of traditional marketing and PR programs with community and grassroots outreach. This combination has served us well over the past four years to drive adoption to over 160 million people worldwide, build the Firefox brand, and provide meaningful opportunities for participation at launch.

    Core launch principles
    It all starts with a great product.

    Firefox 3 is the strongest version of Firefox we’ve ever built. It contains over 14,000 improvements from Firefox 2 and reflects three years of work by Mozilla project developers. Active use of Firefox 3 beta versions is roughly 4x what we saw at peak for Firefox 2 betas, and, most importantly, beta testers are sticking with Firefox 3, indicating it is already delivering a great daily experience.

    Reflecting the strength of Firefox 3 across multiple dimensions – performance, user experience, security, customization, and web standards support – the theme for the Firefox 3 launch is: “A No Compromises Web Experience”. The core idea we will communicate in our launch marketing is that no other web browser matches Firefox 3 and the quality of the experience it delivers against these key measures.

    The growth of Firefox is being supported by an active and vocal community of end users. We aim to give our community new tools and more importantly new reasons to continue the word of mouth referrals that have amplified awareness of Firefox.

    Firefox is global. We will be shipping with over 40 language versions on launch day, and our launch will touch as many parts of the world as we can reach.

    Our goals are simple: to accelerate the growth of Firefox and drive significant new user adoption beginning with the launch of Firefox 3 and continuing through the lifecycle of this release.

    Driving awareness for Firefox 3
    Press outreach: We will be conducting worldwide press tours for Firefox 3 in the US, UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Poland, China, Japan and Brazil. We’ll meet with technology and business reporters in each country to present Firefox 3 and showcase new features that make their debut with this release.

    Viral marketing: We have been working on a global, participatory marketing program that we will announce very soon. We wanted to give Firefox users all over the world a fun, easy way to join in on the launch and have developed a program that we think meets this objective well. More details when we unveil this program on spreadfirefox.com.

    Search engine marketing: We will shift our ongoing search engine marketing program to focus exclusively on the launch in the weeks just prior to final release of Firefox 3. We’ll also be rolling out new search engine marketing campaigns in the UK, France and Germany (to complement our campaigns in the US and Japan).

    Partner program: We are working with a group of add-on partners for the first time ever at launch to highlight the strength of the Firefox add-ons ecosystem. Partners will spread the word about Firefox 3 to users of their add-ons and will also work with us on press outreach.

    Helping people get Firefox 3
    All of our awareness generating activity is intended to drive visits to getfirefox.com, which serves over 85% of the cumulative downloads for Firefox. We’ve made major enhancements to the visual design and content on mozilla.com in preparation for the launch.

    Website redesign: Mozilla.com has been completely overhauled for Firefox 3. New imagery and messaging evolves the Firefox brand while remaining true to the straightforward, human voice we’ve established.

    Screencasts and tutorials: We are producing several screencasts and working on a project to invite community participation in creating more, to show people what’s new and useful in Firefox 3. We’ve also developed several quick and easy tutorials that will go live with the new site at launch.

    But wait, there’s more!
    Firefox 3 Parties: Continuing a hallowed tradition here at Mozilla, we are updating our Firefox Party Planner with the goal of topping the hundreds of parties held all over the world at the launch of Firefox 2. As usual, we will send party hosts a Firefox party kit upon registration.

    Everyone on the extended Mozilla marketing team is excited about this launch, and we can’t wait to kick off what is shaping up to be the strongest Firefox release yet. Expect to hear more about the launch in the coming weeks on Planet Mozilla from the members of the team.

     

    • Jesse Ruderman 9:49 pm on April 23, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      I don’t think “A No Compromises Web Experience” sounds very strong.

    • David Naylor 1:30 am on April 24, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Having seen the upcoming mozilla.com I can just say: Wow! Great graphics, great wording, great structure.

    • Doug 8:03 am on April 24, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      If that’s the launch theme, *please* include a hyphen: “A No-Compromises Web Experience”. It’s more grammatically correct, and (as a result) it reads better and looks better. Starting with “A No” is awkward and halting.

    • Aaron Mc Adam 4:27 am on April 30, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Is there any way universities can help promote firefox 3?

    • Paul Kim 5:54 am on April 30, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Aaron: absolutely. Visit http://www.spreadfirefox.com/campusreps to learn how you can get involved. Jay Patel is the contact person for our Campus Reps program and you can reach him at jay at mozilla dot com.

    • Stefan Scholl 5:26 am on May 2, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Too bad I can’t update to FF3, because I don’t know if the add-ons I rely on still work under FF3.

      “They” changed the add-ons page. Important information isn’t available anymore. I can’t go there and see which versions of FF are supported by my favorite add-ons. :-(

    • Paul Kim 7:32 am on May 2, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Last night a revision was made to our add-ons site that restored information on application compatibility ranges on add-on details pages.

      See http://blog.mozilla.com/basil/2008/05/01/minor-revision-to-amo-v3.4.1/ for more information.

    • BobChao 11:07 pm on May 9, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Please don’t forget to upload the screencast videos to dotSub, that way we can translate the videos’ CC to other languages (instead of English only, again.)

    • Tim 7:15 am on June 12, 2008 Permalink | Reply

      Hey Paul,
      I am currently writing my bachelor thesis about the marketing-communication of open source projects with the example of mozilla.

      I do have some questions which are not directly connected to this topic and would like to ask them in an email, since it is too detailed for this site.

      but to summarize it, I would like to know if these marketing ideas are all generated within the community, or if they are only intitiated into the community. (meaning the core idea comes from the full-time employees.)

      I would really like to get some feedback about that, since information on the web is not 100% clear and differs from site to site.

      A appreciate your help!

      Thanks

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