Posts from the ‘Marketing’ Category

Getting Ready for the Launch of Firefox 3

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. Read more

Firefox 3 T-Shirt Contest Ends Tomorrow

Just a reminder that our first official Firefox t-shirt design contest is quickly coming to a close.

We kicked off this contest about a month ago as one of our first Firefox 3 launch activities and we’ve had over 1,400 entries submitted and more than 3,000 people join the contest pool on Flickr.

Tara Shahian, who’s been managing the contest here at Mozilla, has posted a note to The Mozilla Blog with all the details on how to get your entry in before the deadline of this Sunday, March 16 at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time (which equals Monday, March 17 at 6:59 a.m. GMT).

The Firefox 3 T-Shirt Design Contest is drawing to a close! You can still submit your entry, but time is running out – the deadline is this Sunday, March 16.

We’ve already received close to 1,200 submissions and have created a community of over 2,800 members on the Flickr contest group! There are many great designs in the image pool and we’re proud of the creative talent that has come through so far. The winning design, as chosen by the Mozilla community, will be featured in the Mozilla Store as the official Firefox 3 t-shirt.

Along with everyone else here on the marketing team at Mozilla, I’m excited about the creativity and inspiration everyone who’s entered the contest has shown in their designs. It’s going to make selecting a winner a very difficult but fun job.

*Percy Cabello at Mozilla Links shares his faves from the contest here.

early buzz for firefox 3 beta

I subscribe to a feed from the public timeline on Twitter on the keywords “Firefox 3″ to get direct reactions to our betas from the users of Twitter around the world. Completely unscientifically, since Firefox 3 Beta 3 came out the buzz that I’ve seen from Twittering Firefox 3 beta users has become amazingly positive.

Here’s a quick triptych I pulled together this morning from public updates. Keep in mind Twitter users are most likely people who are quite up on new technology and savvy about using it. To me this says: they have high standards for software and will let you know pretty vocally if you ain’t hitting the mark.

We’re doing great on this front folks.

Check the river of updates yourself at the brilliant Tweetscan service. The RSS feed for “Firefox 3″ updates is what I subscribe to.

mission-oriented viral marketing at mozilla

This post is intended for reference for anyone interested in understanding how we conduct viral marketing at Mozilla.

We just rolled out the Firefox + Freerice.com marketing program in conjunction with the announcement of Firefox achieving 500 million downloads on Thursday, Feb. 21, 2008.

From the Mozilla Blog:

Firefox just reached 500,000,000 downloads. This is an absolutely phenomenal milestone for Firefox. It is sort of hard to imagine what that number means. For some perspective, that’s roughly the audience size of 10,000 Rome Colosseums combined. It would be the weight, in kilograms, of 8,500 Boeing 747 airplanes. In dollars, for $500 million you and 15 of your friends can fly to the International Space Station.

OR, you can affect change and invite 15 of your friends to play a game and feed 25,000 people. With your help we can break another milestone today with FreeRice.com – 500,000,000 grains of donated rice in one day. Imagine helping to feed the hungry while picking up some new vocabulary too!

We’ve tracked the spread of the idea here:

• Front page of Digg
• Front page of Techcrunch
• Ars Technica
• Mozilla Links
• FreeRice.com put up a note saying:
  

  “In honor of the 500 millionth download of its browser, Mozilla Firefox is encouraging people from around the world to donate 500 million grains of rice at FreeRice. Click here for details.”

My personal favorite reaction to our announcement is this video, not made by anyone at Mozilla, that uses remixed photos of past grassroots marketing our extended Mozilla community has participated in to let people know about the 500 million grains of rice program.

It’s amazing, awe-inspiring and humbling all at the same time to be a part of this worldwide community! Thanks everyone for rallying and making this happen in less than 5 days with zero dollars spent; and most importantly, for meaningfully helping others who need a hand.*

Here’s more about FreeRice.com:

*And thanks to Polvi for once again leading the charge.

Firefox 3 Beta 1 press coverage

Here’s a roundup of some of the press coverage we’ve tracked today for Firefox 3 Beta 1.

The hard work by the Mozilla development community on performance, security and user experience improvements is absolutely being noticed in these early reviews.

This is a *great* first public milestone on the road to the final release of Firefox 3.

“Firefox 3 delivers an impressive assortment of new features and interface improvements. There are lots of changes under the hood as well, which improve performance and reduce resource consumption.”
– Ars Technica, Ryan Paul

“Firefox 3 beta 1 delivers an outstanding improvement to the user experience. Unlike Firefox 2, which was a bit light on new features, Firefox 3 is practically overflowing with shiny new goodies.”
– Ars Technica, Ryan Paul

“We’re still waiting for word on the next version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, but Mozilla today released the first beta test of Firefox 3.0, previewing the features to be included in the next version of the open-source browser.”
– Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Todd Bishop

“I saw a demo of the Firefox 3 beta a couple weeks ago at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin, and it was amazing — particularly the zoom-whole-page feature that lets you resize all the elements on a page, up or down, including images and form elements. No more squinting at tiny webcomic writing! No more tedious side-scrolling for huge-mongoose inline images!”
– BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow

“I have no qualms. It’ll be an easy decision to update once everything is ready.”
– CrunchGear, Doug Aamoth

“Firefox 3 employs a button in the location bar that lets users see who owns the site. This is crucial at a time when bogus sites serve as pitfalls for unsuspecting Web users.”
– eWeek, Clint Boulton

“Much of the hardest work has been under the hood, however. Firefox sports a new HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) rendering engine, called Gecko 1.9, that will make it perform better in the graphically rich Web 2.0 world, where developers are trying to find new ways of running software whether the PC is connected to the Internet or not.”
– PC World, Bob McMillan

“Early testers seem pleased with the promise of Firefox 3, which is packed with new features and tweaks alike.”
– LinuxInsider, Chris Maxcer

“A number of meaningful improvements are noticeable with this release, chiefly the speed.”
– PC World, Tom Spring

“Although beta 1 is far from a finished product and some interface changes like platform-specific skins are still in store before the final release, the speed and memory improvements in Firefox 3 beta 1 make it worth the upgrade.”
– Wired News, Scott Gilbertson

Meet the Firefox Marketing Team

Over the past couple of years that I’ve been at Mozilla, we’ve been fortunate to have terrific people join the marketing team, deliver strong programs and roll out blogs on Planet Mozilla and Spread Firefox who’ve never been formally introduced to the Mozilla community.

Like a lot of Mozilla, we have a much smaller team relative to our reach and impact on the Web. When we launched Firefox 1.5, appropriately enough there were about 1.5 dedicated marketing staff in the US dedicated to the launch. We about doubled this number for Firefox 2.

As we’ve been gearing up for the launch of Firefox 3, the team’s grown. We have marketing team members working on our web sites, events, advertising, PR, analytics, grassroots outreach and more.

You’ve already seen posts by several folks that I’m about to introduce here on planet and on SFx. All of us are fully invested in the work our fellow ninjabots in dev, QA, build and IT pour into making Firefox 3 a six-gallon bucket of awesome.

So without further ado, meet the Firefox marketing family (add -at- mozilla -dot- com after the email names):

Mary Colvig
Mary joined Mozilla in 2006 after representing us as part of our PR team and immediately jumped in on the Firefox 2 and Thunderbird 2 launches. She currently manages our events program.
email: mary
blog: http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/author/mary@mozilla.com/

Alix Franquet
Alix is leading our work to support international marketing, with an emphasis on empowering community marketing. She’s also mind-melding with the Firefox development team to build reviewers’ guides for Firefox 3.
email: alix

David Rolnitzky
David leads our new user outreach activities, from search engine marketing to partner initiatives with eBay and Kodak.
email: david
blog: http://www.giantspatula.com

Melissa Shapiro
Melissa is our PR manager. She makes sure Mozilla and Firefox stories are represented well in the media that cover our work.
email: melissa
blog: http://icouldntfindanypaper.blogspot.com/

John Slater
John is Mozilla marketing’s creative director. He’s our branding and messaging guru, responsible for the voice we use to represent Firefox in our marketing.
email: jslater
blog: http://www.intothefuzz.com

David Tenser
David is a longtime contributor to Mozilla and authored the reference standard for Firefox support. He’s joined Mozilla to lead the rollout of new end user support resources, working with a team drawn from the community.
email: djst
blog: http://www.djst.org/blog/

We work with colleagues all over the world. In Mountain View: Rhian Baker, Ken Kovash, Alex Polvi, Asa Dotzler, Jay Patel and Seth Bindernagel. In Europe: Tristan Nitot, Jane Hatton Finette, Anne-Julie Ligneau and Pascal Chevrel. In Japan: Gen Kanai, Kaori Negoro and Kohei Yoshino. In China: Li Gong and Jack Guo.

It goes without saying that we are working together with thousands of marketing community contributors through Spread Firefox and beyond to get the word out about Firefox.

We’ll be sharing a bunch more over the coming weeks as we build up to the worldwide launch of Firefox 3 about our planning, content and approach. In the meantime, say hey to the Mozilla go team.

Firefox on Campus

Earlier today, we launched Firefox Campus Edition, a bundle of Firefox 2 with add-ons from FoxyTunes, StumbleUpon and Zotero.

For several reasons, I’m really happy about this latest Firefox edition.

Good timing. This is the first time that we’ve coordinated a product release with a seasonal event (the back to school season here in the US). Being in sync helps us gain mainstream press coverage and drive additional exposure for the Campus Edition.

Great partners. FoxyTunes and StumbleUpon are well-known in the Firefox add-ons community. Zotero is a more recent addition but has gotten a bunch of attention and praise for its powerful research tools. Each of these teams rallied over the past several weeks to finalize the Campus Edition and provided software updates that improve the end-user experience. Big thanks to Alex at FoxyTunes, Garrett at StumbleUpon and Dan at Zotero.

Introducing students to Firefox, and to add-ons. We wanted to make it as easy as possible for students who are already using Firefox to point their friends to a version of Firefox that had a useful set of add-ons pre-installed. Being able to play with an initial set of add-ons will showcase some of the cool ways developers are expanding the functionality of Firefox and will encourage students to seek out new add-ons.

Getting the word out on campus. We’ll be following up on our press launch this week with a set of on-campus events, led by Firefox Campus Rep program volunteers. This is an ongoing program we set up last year to provide community members at colleges a way to help spread Firefox at their schools.

In the meantime, I’ve bookmarked some of the initial reviews and mentions for the Campus Edition on del.icio.us. Check them out, and if you’ve got a friend in school who isn’t using Firefox yet, point them to: www.firefox.com/backtoschool!