PKB

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.

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!

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!

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

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. :-)

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.

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.