270,000 New Direct Relationships Every Week for Firefox
This week the User Engagement and User Volunteer Community teams reached a significant milestone — we passed 15 million direct relationships for Mozilla Firefox.
It’s hard to believe that only a year ago, across all our user communication channels - we were talking in English only to around 4 million people. Today, more than five and half million people receive our monthly email newsletter in five languages; localized by our volunteer community team (with more on the way). And ten million other fans/followers are actively engaged in social (Facebook and Twitter) on a daily/weekly basis; sharing and liking our content throughout the world.
The trajectory has been amazing. Our average sign up rate for email last week was around 185,000 newsletter new subscribers, and around 95,000 new weekly fans for Facebook. That’s incredible growth!
We continue to drive these large growth numbers, however, engaging with our users in channel is the most important role of our team, and whereby we create force multipliers for reach and amplification of our brand. No matter how big your communication channel, if you’re not communicating effectively or maximizing your opportunities - it’s a wasted chance.
How Mozilla Firefox engages fans every day on Facebook
Many people commented on my last post about growing and nurturing brand advocates on Facebook. You asked, so how are you really doing that? Here are a few simple ways based on how we engage fans every day at Mozilla:
# 1. Vary your Facebook content. Think carefully about your content strategy and how posts effective each other. At Mozilla we try to plan 7-14 days out (and many months longer for big campaigns / announcements). We keep a balance of 1/3 product news, 1/3 tips and tricks, and 1/3 just plain-old-engaging-fun. This variety allows us to communicate broadly. We’re conscious not to be narcissistic only giving our own news when necessary, and focusing on what will be of value to the reader.
# 2. Allow users to create content. We very often ask the opinion of our fans, and then post those comments, questions, photos. We have a ‘fan of the week’. It’s a demonstration of who we are, and how we authentically communicate.
# 3. Think Share. Back to content strategy. You may well be creating interesting content. But ask yourself, will someone want to share it, like it, comment upon it? Alter your content strategy, write a post in a way that will generate engagement. Ask more questions, ask your fans to ‘like’ and ‘share’.
# 4. Give back. You cant always take (see #1). Content should be a balance. Sharing should feel fun and engaging to the user - it shouldn’t feel forced. Don’t ‘market’ to your fans - talk to them. Treat them as friends (remember that’s what you do on Facebook!).
The value of Facebook is huge, the potential to amplify ones message is massive, and yet every day brands are failing to treat their fans as citizens and only wanting to push their products. Communicating regularly in channel in a way which is balanced and authentic will lead to your brand being talked about for the long term.
Want to win brand advocacy on facebook? Take-small-engaging-steps-often
Read this super post today on Marketing Prof entitled “Four Ideas for Activating Your Brand Advocates”. Theresa Trevor of Amplifinity describes ways to convert Facebook fans who ‘like’ a page (and who probably don’t “…promote your brand in any measurable way”) to become brand advocates who are actively engaged in promoting your brand, bringing in new business, writing reviews etc.
At Mozilla where word of mouth marketing and brand advocacy are key to both our engagement and acquisition strategy, we already actively employ these types of brand advocacy programs and have done so successfully for many years (its partly how as a non-profit, we’re able to compete alongside those tech behemoths).
Particularly with regard to growing a larger Facebook audience (currently 8.5 million fans) and the debate of quality over quantity, I believe audience size is actually incredibly valuable, but much like Trevor asserts, only if you continue to effectively encourage group participation and action. Said another way, you can’t invite someone to dinner and not serve any food — nor would you want to cook a 5 course meal, only to then have no-one eat? We engage with our Facebook fans every day and over the last six months have gone a level deeper. We’ve begun to focus beyond our monthly Facebook activity rate as a core metric (averaging 45-50% of our fans liking / commenting/ sharing p/m), to doing that plus specifically focusing on increasing the number of Facebook shares (# of people talking about this).
We are able to calculate the number of friends our Facebook fans have, and therefore understand (i) what is effectively our entire ‘potential Facebook audience’ and (ii) the audience reach for a post that was talked about by our Facebook fans. That multiplication number for Firefox on Facebook is 81. Over the past six months we’ve been able to successfully increase the number of shares on Facebook by 20% each quarter respectively. Think about that with a Facebook audience of our size, and think about how much amplification that translates into? (In the first quarter generating more than 2 million people talking about Firefox on Facebook).
Most companies these days have a serious Facebook strategy, some with big and expensive campaigns, — for me, that’s not always necessary. Rather nurturing daily interaction with thoughtful content and building social gravity is what will create loyal users, who will ultimately want to talk about you with their friends. And just about anyone can do that!
Taking very small engaging steps —> The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
2011: 10 Million new direct relationships and establishing the User Engagement team
One year ago I started the year with a big job ahead of me - build the user engagement team at Mozilla and grow direct relationships with 10+ million Firefox users.
2011 ended well, very well, I am delighted to say.
Socially speaking
With the help of William Reynolds, the first person to join the user engagement team in Nov 2010 we more than doubled the number of social connections on Facebook and Twitter last year. Today, over 7 million people are interacting with Firefox via their preferred social channel. William, our social expert led our sharing campaigns for the Firefox 4 launch with the Twitter Party and Facebook badges program. He also stood up our Army of Awesome Twitter support channel, relaunched the Firefox Live campaign, and too many other social engagement campaigns to mention here. William was a super intern at Mozilla in 2009, he’s now our super social man, who lends a hand to all folks on the team. You could say he has a lot more friends than any of us put together.
Email powerhouse
In mid January 2011 Winston Bowden changed his world and came West from North Carolina to head up and drive our email engagement program. Starting from virtually nothing Winston strategically grew our program whilst rolling up his sleeves every single day to grow the number of Firefox and You monthly newsletter subscribers to almost 3 million by end of 2011. Winston also spent much time helping nurture and grow other teams who communicate directly with their users, fans and developers via email. We’ve come a very long way under Winston’s tutelage. He has built a steadfast email program, that like our products, answers to no-one but you. We take engagement, privacy and the latest email best practices with regard to data incredibly seriously. And to all those marketeers out there — believe us when we say; not spamming, not heavy-handed targeting, not selling your customers data pays dividends. We respect our email subscriber like a family member or friend — and with often 20+% open rates and 8-10% click through rates, we have email numbers that are way, way above average. We’re terrifically proud of our program.
A is for advocacy
In early Summer, we had the great fortune to hire Chelsea Novak. Chelsea based in the Mozilla Toronto office had been working for the Mozilla Foundation in a fundraising and engagement role for 2 years when we had the great opportunity to have her join our throng. Chelsea was and is different. She understands both how to win and how to keep Firefox users. She embraces scale and leverage, and has been able to apply this to everything she touches. One of the biggest projects Chelsea lead and launched was the Mozilla Affiliates program, finishing the year with a program live in more than 10 languages, and with 10,000+ affiliates around the world. She also managed several partner campaigns with Ripcurl and the Ripcurl Pro event in San Francisco, and currently with the Firefox Challenge challenge on Crowdrise (celebrities are still duking it out for their charities to win). We’ve ended the year with even stronger word of mouth marketing programs and new ways for our Firefox users to engage and become advocates.
Content is king
In the late Summer Carmen Collins based in Florida became our content editor. As our direct channels grew and the number of people wanting to interact with us grew, it was clear we needed to put even more thought and rigor around a communication strategy and also calendaring of content. Carmen brought her skills as a writer, and process advocate - and set about constructing and implementing a content strategy. After several iterations we sit in a place where scores of stake-holders communicate and plan content together every week, and every month. Carmen also birthed our user engagement blog The Den which currently acts as a destination for articles often posted in social or helping give more context to email articles — there is much more to come. Lastly, Carmen is also a social media maven, and has been instrumental in assisting William work on increasing engagement in those channels; particularly working together with William to increase social sharing on Facebook in the last 3 months of the year by 20% to 300,000 shares.
Take it to the world
Lastly, Jess Davis also relocated from North Carolina to expand our email program throughout the world. Jess works very closely with Winston and apart from being a coding whizz, process junkie and sheer bundle of energy and delight - she has very quickly grown our email program to include truly localized versions of the Firefox and You newsletter in French, German, Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish. Jess recruited and works directly with our extended team of volunteer email content leads each month to produce and localize for their specific locales. Jess, has only been on board just over 3 months but already grew our volunteer efforts from 0 to 12. It was a great way to end the year.
-
And so, as you’ve read 2011 was an incredibly busy and successful year for the user engagement team. We smashed throughout our main target of building direct relationships with more than 10 million Firefox users. We nurtured and created loyalty. We built advocacy programs and allowed others to help. We extended beyond the English speaking world. We grew our team to include some amazing volunteers and paid staff from around the world.*
We’re putting the finishing touches to our 2012 plans. If this year is anything like last, its going to be a superb year!
* Big thanks to so many other people who helped the user engagement team in 2011 - you are a hugh part of that success - we’re incredibly proud and grateful.
User Engagement team (left to right): Carmen Collins, Jane Finette, William Reynolds, Jess Davis, Winston Bowden and Chelsea Novak. Sadly our extended volunteer team are not in this picture, but are still dearly part of the team. We’ll make that photo opportunity happen in 2012!
Force Multipliers - how Mozilla engages and wins despite the odds
A contradiction in terms — Mozilla a non-for-profit, with less than 600 paid staff, but with a product that celebrates 450+ million Firefox users served in more than 80 languages.
Operating in a highly competitive environment, with significantly lower marketing budgets and people resources will sound familiar to many small and large businesses alike. So how do you compete and win? Its always been this way at Mozilla — but despite the odds in the very beginning and continuing today (with even more competition I might add) we continue to defy belief in terms of market-share and impact.
How is this possible?
We’ve built an incredibly strong product, community and brand foundation, and on top of that there are 3 areas in User Engagement which allow us to significantly have impact:
1. Direct relationships with our users
2. A loyal and passionate community of advocates
3. Partners who want to delight and tell our story
I recently gave a first talk about how Mozilla is able to compete using these force multipliers to the WebFWD teams, describing no matter what size or scale of operation you have; you can attempt to do the impossible by focusing on: Engagement, Participation and Partnering.
Here’s the deck (note: there are a lot of visuals, and not much context - I’ll be writing more detail about these force multiplying factors in future posts).
Hugs, handshakes and high-fives
In the realm of social media as king, having friends is easy, but keeping all those new friends engaged and nurturing that friendship isn’t as simple as it sounds. At Mozilla we have nearly 6.5M friends on Facebook, and we work hard to engage with our fans on multiple levels.
Our content is split pretty evenly between being (i) informative about Firefox as a product and sharing the latest news, (ii) offering helpful advice and tips on how to make the most of Firefox, and (iii) most importantly balanced with fun, engaging and inspiring engagement activities.
Throughout 2011 we’ve been able to significantly grow Firefox engagement activity on Facebook, with between 45-50% of our fans interacting with the brand on a monthly basis. We’ve also doubled the number of fans who ‘like’ Firefox. That’s pretty impressive given our size and compared to other high-profile brands.
The basis for all this? A hug, a handshake, a high-five. Every time we post and consider content in our direct communication channels we do that remembering our followers are our ‘friends’. We tell news, share tips, give virtual hugs, smiles and pointers to fans we care deeply about.
There are many more ways we can improve our interactions with fans and increase our direct engagement further - we’d love to hear your thoughts on how we can continue to make our social media channels engaging.
We’re in the business of building friendships at Mozilla. Its those friends who have made us, and will continue to make Mozilla successful.
Engage! The Mozilla Firefox User Engagement team are hiring
The team behind growing direct relationships with Firefox users helping them have a deeper and richer experience of the product, and having fun along the way is looking to hire 3 people as the team expands.
Marketing Manager - User Engagement Team (2 open positions)
A Marketing Manager is charged with driving acquisition and retention programs with millions of Firefox users worldwide, as well as deepening user participation in the Mozilla brand. We’re looking for people passionate about people and the web, and you have to be willing to roll-up your sleeves!
Primary responsibilities: developing and managing multiple acquisition and retention programs and campaigns across various channels, monitoring campaign results, ROI and making recommendations to increase engagement. Growing engagement activity with the Mozilla brand, work closely with other marketing managers to build integrated marketing plans. Identifying and recommending new engagement strategies and coordinating with the Mozilla community on a worldwide basis.
Interested? Learn more and apply here.
Content Editor - User Engagement Team
Mozilla Firefox is looking for a seasoned Content Editor. That right person will be responsible for our overall consumer content strategy in our direct channels (email, Facebook, twitter and more) for one of the most popular and influential tech brands. As part of the team who is building and nurturing relationships with more than 400 million Firefox users in more than 80 languages worldwide, you will help drive deeper engagement and user participation in the Mozilla brand.
The primary responsibilities are planning and developing engaging content for our direct channels, campaigns and program, creating and writing content, defining and measuring content success, make content recommendations to increase engagement, drive subscriber retention, ensure high quality communications globally, work closely with marketing managers to build integrated marketing plans, and coordinating with the Mozilla global community.
Sound like you, or someone you know? Learn more and apply here.
Be a Web Hero and help someone upgrade to Firefox 4
Two weeks ago I wrote about one of our campaigns encouraging existing users of Firefox to upgrade to the latest and best version so far of Firefox — Firefox 4.
The first approach we took was aimed directly at Firefox 3.6 users, and asking them to upgrade based on certain web interests they may have (social networking, gaming, content streaming and more), and matching the benefits of using Firefox 4. The second approach we’re taking is motivating satisfied users of Firefox 4 to help someone in their network make that upgrade. We’re encouraging our community to become a “Web Hero” by finding someone in their family, at school, at work who is still browsing in the past and helping them get the latest and safest version of Firefox.
A specially designed landing page and Facebook tab have been created, providing helpful material for our web heroes to help others upgrade (PDFs and videos on how to install Firefox for a Mac or on Windows).
We’re encouraging people to share with their friends via their social networks (Facebook and Twitter), or to simply visit someone they care about and help them upgrade in person.
In the next two weeks, we’ll be building out the functionality of our custom Facebook Web Hero tab to include a share option that will give the possibility to earn a special badge for sharing with a friend.
Our loyal community often go to great lengths to help people upgrade and make sure they are on the safest and best version of Firefox. We’re hoping others will also help.
If you know someone still using an old browser, or older version of Firefox - be a Web Hero today and help them get a better experience of the Web.
