PKB

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.

I’ve been invited to give a talk this weekend on the marketing career path at Stanford University’s second annual “I Don’t Know to CEO” conference. It’s a student-run event to help undergraduates get exposure to a set of different business roles. I’ll be talking about community powered marketing with Alex Polvi, sharing Mozilla’s non-traditional approach towards marketing, and reviewing case studies of successful grassroots campaigns we’ve launched. Our workshop runs from 3:00 to 3:45 Saturday in Old Union. More details are on the idk2ceo site.

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.

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.

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.

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