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.
