Celebrating the launch!

I want to take a moment to thank the amazing community marketing team for making this such a great launch!  It was pretty incredible to see tweets and Facebook updates spilling in from all over the world via Shiretoko Shock.

We’d love to do a wrap up of all the great activities that took place on launch day.  Please take a moment to help us collect and share the following on our activity tracker:

• Blog posts you created or found on Firefox 3.5
• Mentions of Firefox 3.5 on Twitter, Facebook or Digg
• Articles about Firefox 3.5 on news sites
• Videos or photos related to Firefox 3.5
• Details about Firefox 3.5 launch parties
• More!

We’ll share all the results at the next community marketing call on July 15th.  We’ll also be sending some very cool Firefox goodies for those that have helped make this launch great so be sure to submit  your activities!  And, don’t forget to have some fun by finding a Firefox party near you!

Firefox Launch: Help get the word out tomorrow!

We’re launching Firefox 3.5 tomorrow (June 30th), the fastest Firefox ever! Over the last few months we’ve talked a lot about how people can help promote Firefox 3.5 and already received a lot of interest and buzz thanks to our 130+ community marketing team. Just watch Vineel Reddy’s Firefox 3.5 video to get a sense of the excitement brewing.

You might be wondering how you can pitch in on the actual launch day.  Here’s a summary of all the ways you can help, but I wanted to call out a few things in particular:

Shiretoko Shock

Our campus reps came up with an awesome idea to create massive buzz on Twitter, Facebook, Mozillaca and more called “Shiretoko Shock.” (Shiretoko is the codename for Firefox 3.5, btw!) It’s going to require a little coordination, but it’s sure to make some noise.

Here’s what you do:

• Regional shocks: Set your watch for 3:50 p.m.—to correspond to the new Firefox version number: 3.5. When it’s 3:50 p.m. (that’s 15:50 for those of you on 24-hr clocks) on launch day in your region make your move. We want you to tweet, blog, post to Facebook, and more. This will move around the world for 24 hours!
  • We’ll start at 3:50 p.m. in Brazil and move west, sending the Shock around the world one time zone after another.
• Super Shock: The final Shock will be a biggie—the Super Shock—because we’ll all join in to celebrate at precisely the same time. No matter what time it is in your hometown, at 3:50 PM (BST) on Wednesday, July 1st, we’ll all go post crazy: tweeting, blogging, facebooking, and more! It will take place on:
  • Wednesday, July 1st
    • 11:50 AM Pacific (San Francisco)
    • 2:50 PM Eastern (New York)
    • 7:50 PM GMT (London)
    • 12:20 AM IST (New Dehli)
  • Thursday, July 2nd
    • 2:50 AM CST (Beijing)
    • 3:50 AM JST (Tokyo)

More details will be posted on Spread Firefox shortly.

Tracking our success

Throughout launch day and beyond we’ll need to track all of our promotional activity to see how we did and what worked. Please take a moment to fill out our activity tracker to share and collect:

• Blog posts you created or found on Firefox 3.5
• Mentions of Firefox 3.5 on Twitter, Facebook or Digg
• Articles about Firefox 3.5 on news sites
• Videos or photos related to Firefox 3.5
• Details about Firefox 3.5 launch parties (this will be ongoing)
• More!

Hoping you’ll help us get the word out tomorrow!  If you have any questions, the community marketing team will be hanging out in #marketing on irc.mozilla.org all day.

It’s almost party time…

We’re getting close to launching Firefox 3.5 and that means it’s time to start thinking about celebrating.  Per tradition, our community has hosted launch parties all over the world to acknowledge all the hardwork and have a little fun.  Here’s how to get in on the action by hosting your very own party!

• Add your event to Spread Firefox (be sure to log in first!)
• Request some Firefox goodies
• Let folks know about it by adding it to services like Meetup & Upcoming
• Writing about it on twitter or identi.ca (use #fx3.5)
• Post updates, create events or send invites via social networks

Check out our party page for more details on how to be a host with the most! You can also find and attend a party near you.

Mozilla Service Week: Time to get your service on!

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
– Margaret Mead

Mead’s quote never ceases to inspire me! I thought a lot about this during AIDS LifeCycle a week or so ago — a few thousand people raised close to 11 million dollars for the S. F.  AIDS Foundation and the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center — plus, rode 500 miles!  It’s pretty amazing to come back from that experience  to officially launching Mozilla Service Week.  While most people experience a bit of a funk post-LifeCycle, there’s been no let down here!

Not only does Mozilla Service Week create new opportunities for people to become part of the Mozilla Community and contribute (see Mark Surman’s post), but it gives folks a chance to look outward to their local communities or favorite public benefit organizations to see how they might put their web-saaviness or tech skills to good use!  I encourage everyone to take a pause from the hustle and bustle, and think about how  you can help out your local community or a non-profit — a few ideas:

• Teach senior citizens how to use the Web.
• Show a non-profit how to use social networking to grow its base of supporters.
• Install a wireless network at a school.
• Create Web how-to materials for a library’s computer cluster.
• Refurbish hardware for a local computer center.
• Help a non-profit update its website or database.
• And, more!

We’ll be adding more languages and partners over the summer with the actual week of service happening Sept. 14 – 21, 2009.  I’m really looking forward to the difference we can make.  We set a Guinness World Record after all!

Just getting the program together has been an awesome collaboration.  Austin King does a great job explaining everyone’s contributions, but I did also want to call out everyone who helped.  Thanks team!

• Austin King
• Jane Finette
• Stephen Donner
• Krupa Raj
• Michael Morgan
• Axel Hecht
• Pascal Chevrel
• Ryan Doherty
• Fredrick Wenzel
• Mark Surman
• David Boswell
• John Slater
• The Royal Order team
• Craig Cook
• Ladonna Willems
• Seth Bindernagel
• Wil Clouser
• Stas Malolepszy
• Les Orchard
• Alex Buchanan
• Reed Loden
• Nicole Loux
• Melissa Shapiro
• Barbara Huppe
• Raymond Agbeame
• Jeff Balough
• The Idealist.org team
• The Betterplace.org team
• Peter Deitz & Mike Everett-Lane of Social Actions

Update: Mozilla Service Week

As I’m packing up to ride to Los Angeles as part of the AIDS/LifeCycle event which raises funds for AIDS research, I thought it would be a good time to provide an update on Mozilla Service Week. The AIDS/LifeCycle event (which is seven whopping days!) is made possible by hundreds of committed volunteers who support a moving village of bike riders each day and thousands of volunteer fundraisers. It’s exactly that type of spirit — people wanting to make a difference in their communities — that we’re looking to harness for Mozilla Service Week.

Since I initially posted about Mozilla Service Week, our effort to provide technology-based service to local communities and organizations, we’ve had great interest from our localization volunteers. Over 17 different locales have stepped forward to translate the site which magnifies our potential to do good around the world! We’ve also been working to complete the English version of the site which we’ll roll out shortly.

The actual week will take place in September. We’ll post more details soon on how you can get involved and make this an awesome week!

Socializing Firefox 3.5!

Hope you enjoyed our Social Media presentation a few weeks back. We’ve posted the video and slides for your viewing pleasure. As most of you know Social Media (Facebook, Reddit, Digg, Orkut, etc) played a huge role in helping us set a Guinness World Record last year — it took word of mouth to a whole new level for us! For Firefox 3.5, we’re hoping to leverage Social Media once again to gain incredible reach and create awareness in even more regions!

Here are just a few ways to help:

• Help us identify the most popular social networks (Orkut, Hi5, Facebook, etc.) in your region, as well as any Mozilla or Firefox-related groups they might have. Post them here.
• Get the word out about Firefox when it launches:
  • Donate your status on Twitter, Facebook or Identi.ca (use #fx3.5)
  • Change your profile picture (i.e. the Firefox logo)
  • Help drive up Firefox-related stories on Digg or Reddit
  • Blog, blog, blog!
  • Don one of our new Affiliate buttons on your site or blog (coming soon…)
• Create some buzz during the run up to Firefox 3.5 by promoting:
  • Our Fastest Firefox video campaign (our first video will be released on June 1)
  • Firefox 3.5 in 35 days which highlights the cool developer features in Firefox 3.5
  • The availability of Firefox 3.5 release candidates
• Help energize our Facebook and Orkut pages (Tara Shahian has a great write up on our Facebook success)
  • Post pictures & comments
  • Share videos!

Let’s knock this launch out of the park! If you have any questions or need some help please find us in #marketing on irc.mozilla.org.

Making Firefox 3.5 “eventful”

Thanks for joining William and me for the recent Firefox 3.5 events workshop! Events have always been important for us – helping to celebrate successes, such as a launch, garner awareness for Mozilla and Firefox, build community and draw in new members, and more! Unfortunately, we weren’t able to capture the Air Mozilla video for this session.  Please comment below if you’d like us to host it again.  In a meantime, here is a recap of the presentation below and slides can be found here.

Here’s how you can help:

• Organize a launch party
• Hold installfests or tutorials to help new users get started
• Host a booth at your university
• Organize a meetup for other enthusiasts
• Organize a Mozilla “Walkabout”
• Speak at a conference
• Hold a virtual presentation with a Mozilla speaker

Some resources to help you:

• Spread Firefox Events Calendar
• Mozilla-related Materials
• The Mozilla Brochure
• Community Marketing Guide

As with each launch, we’re looking to have hundreds of Firefox launch parties around the world.  Please stay tuned for details on how to plan them — we’re working on a new Spread Firefox page.  Hope you’ll join in the fun!

If you have any questions or need some help please find us in #marketing on irc.mozilla.org!

Creating some Firefox 3.5 buzz with a little help from our friends!

We’ve been working this year to build our global marketing team around the Firefox 3.5 and increase our reach.  We had over 130 people heed the call from countries such as Argentina, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, Macedonia and more!  One of them was Vineel Reddy, a dedicated campus rep from India, who was recently featured as our community spotlight on Spread Firefox.

Vineel and his team decided to focus their efforts on creating an awesome video to demonstrate the increased speed of Firefox 3.5, add-ons and Personas.  Check it out!  They filmed the video entirely on their own.  Here are some behind the scenes pictures to give you a sense of the effort that went into this video.

Awesome work, Vineel!  Really looking forward to what the community marketing team has in store!

More Firefox 3.5 launch workshops this week!

I hope everyone has been enjoying the workshops to-date — please feel free to share any feedback.  We want to make sure that everyone is getting value out of these.   We’ll post the Creative and Events workshop videos this week.

Here is this week’s lineup:

• May 14th:
  • 9:00 a.m. PDT/16:00 UTC – Social Media workshop:  We’ll discuss the different ways we can put social networks, Twitter and other tools to work around the launch and it’s various campaigns.
  • 10:00 a.m. PDT/17:00 UTC – Campus Reps:  Jay Patel will show you the various ways you can participate in the launch as a Campus Rep.
• May 15th:
  • 9:00 a.m. PDT/16:00 UTC – PR online workshop:  Melissa Shapiro, Nicole Loux and Barbara Hueppe will talk about how you can participate in PR which has always been a critical tool in growing Firefox awareness.

Please note that we’ve combined the Video and Faster Campaign workshops and they’ll be taking place on May 20th.

Hope you can join us!

Firefox 3.5 Launch: Creative workshop

Quick note that Tara Shahian and Laura Mesa will be hosting tomorrow’s Creative Workshop for the Firefox 3.5 launch.  If you want to get involved with the launch and have a creative bent or graphic skills, please tune in!  The ladies will cover:

• Why Creative / Visual Design is important
• How to Contribute
• Design Guidelines
• Community Store / T-shirts
• What are Affiliates
• Why Affiliates are important
• Existing Affiliate buttons / Creating new buttons

Here’s how to join:

• Date:  Thursday, May 7, 2009 9:00 am PDT/16:00 UTC
• Dial-in Info: +1.650.903.0800, followed by 92# and then 7391#
• Or you can use our toll-free number: +1.800.707.2533, followed by 369# and then 7391#. If you’re outside the US, use Skype to call in with our toll-free number.
• If you can’t join the call — but want to ask questions — you can join us in #marketing on IRC (irc.mozilla.org).

Hope to see you there!