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.
A new generation of Web builders are coming - 5 tips to be ready
TODAY = the Facebook generation, consuming, wasting time, trying to be something.
TOMORROW = a generation of makers, tinkerers, creating value, building tomorrow.
In the next five years more people will code, more kids will remix, more people will expect to participate.
Open source at its very core has thrived and grown by allowing anyone to get involved, fostering collaboration, and striving for openness. As a company out there, chances are you have a social media presence and have therefore, already begun experimenting with community involvement with your brand. However, it is only skimming the surface of what is to come.
Here are 5 considerations that will help you prepare for the next generation of Web makers ready to be put to work.
#1 Reduce the barrier to participation. If you have a strong social media presence on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest, identify your biggest fans, encourage them to become brand advocates and help other users with support issues. Reward them, get to know who are the most loyal and active fans. Maybe at some point in the future you’d give them access to your accounts to post on your behalf? Takes a lot of trust, but it is not impossible. When you allow your trusted fans inside your house; they are overwhelmingly your loyal devotees.
#2 Let customers build your product. The Web makes testing and garnering feedback easier than ever. Give your users an easy way to provide their thoughts on product experience or ideas for future needs. Those who reply often, invite them to join a special task force who will test and build the next generation product. Invite them to your office, or a weekend event. Treat them as equals and listen to the great advice they will give.
#3 Find solutions outside of your walls. Open innovation is gaining momentum. If there are problems you can’t solve inside your org, look beyond your R&D team. Online communities such as Innocentive are finding solutions for companies, governments and non-profits in the open from all over the world. It helps to look outside of your industry and geography for answers. We often think too narrowly and do not open our world to other impressions. Beyond open innovation, talk to a wide range of people often from all walks of life. It will change your perspective and may even create your next success.
#4 Strive for transparency. Even if you are a Fortune 500 company, there are still numerous ways you can be more transparent. Do your customers know what happens to their data, do you have a privacy policy longer than 5 pages? If so, you are not being transparent. Strive to inform your customers about how your business is run, they will thank you in the long term. Then allow your customers to control their web experience - many companies (e.g. Yahoo ) are building privacy control centers. Take in a primary principle of open source, and put the user front and center. Kick start educating your customers, inform them early and start building user control functions. Trust me, it will soon be a business table stake that all users will demand.
#5 Give back. Not everyone can completely open source their code, not even a little, and some have no code to share at all. That said, we all have something we can give back in terms of knowledge sharing, expertise or perhaps even code. Companies are stronger the more they can create and / or be part of an eco-system. It will create new ideas, foster innovation in new ways and bring forward potential new hires. Can you help a local school or community center? Can you check a piece of code into GitHub? The more you give, the more you’ll get back.
Things to remember on this journey: people are basically good, put the customer at the center and think non-linear.
Open source at its very core has thrived and grown by allowing anyone to get involved, reducing the barriers of participation, fostering and nurturing collaboration, striving for openness and innovation.
Embrace the principles of open source, and you’ll be ready to welcome the soon to be newly minted innovators, artists, and storytellers.
Don’t start engaging on a new social network before you do these 2 things!
Dave Cutler at MarketingProfs wrote this great piece on “Five Reasons You Shouldn’t Ignore (Insert Name of Shiny New Social Media Platform Here)”.
I humbly disagreed in a comment on the blog - as I believe the latest shiny social network for businesses and orgs should not always be followed or even experimented without *first* bearing these two things in mind:
# 1. Always consider what you expect to achieve from engaging on a social network. Is it for brand building, user engagement, driving leads or customer support etc?
Different social networks are often better suited to different types of engagement e.g. Facebook for user engagement, twitter for influencers and customer support, Linked In for B2B and Pinterest for media / e-commerce.
Try to understand this network first and research whether its going to be worth your while. Don’t just do it because you think everyone else is!
# 2. Ask yourself how much time and resource do you have to grow, nurture and manage a social network, or multiple social networks? It takes a considerable amount of time to make social media work, and by adding more and more networks the work load can vastly increase.
Experimentation is good, but also think for the mid-term. How will I manage, how will I spread my time? You can’t ask someone for dinner and not give them something to eat (I love saying this!). Engaging socially takes time no matter what people say.
The advice Dave gave in his article is super – but I would always remind you to (i) understand what you want / hope to achieve from social media and (ii) how much extra time you have to commit if the social network does take off. Otherwise, you might have the situation where you are on every social network out there, however, none of them are really working!
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.
“To pin, or not to pin…”
So to ‘pin’ is the new like. Suddenly it seems that to ‘pin’ is everywhere. ‘Pin’ was mentioned in three separate meetings I had last week in varying forms. We’re not just talking ‘Pinterest’ here, but pinning: websites, apps, new stories and even restaurants. I even caught myself saying it in conversation today on a completely unrelated topic!
And on that note, I’m somewhat afraid that we’re about to see a slew of niche Pinterest style sites that will truly only exist to be (i) an immense distraction of time for their fans, and (ii) yet another burden on marketeers constantly battling to keep up with the latest vogue of social expression.
The bigger interesting trend I see though with this type of engagement, is yet another step toward images taking center stage with minimal amounts of text waiting in the wings. Be it Facebook’s new timeline view, MSN Now, or Pinterest itself - the direction is (what I am calling…) ‘image first’ followed by the slightest amount of written word - usually headline grabbing and that’s enough.
It’s a demand of our busy social generation who only create/consume/interact with information in smaller and smaller bite size pieces. The old adage a ‘picture speaks a thousand words’ is so true, and our hunger for images has never been stronger. Thanks to the likes of Instagram (with its $500 million valuation) everyone can take and post an artful picture within a few moments. I do it myself, and love it.
As a creative and visually driven person, I guess I should be happy that the Web is becoming more colorful. And in a way I am. I’m also concerned (warning old person thinking here) for the future of long form expression. And how images without context can alarm, manipulate, confuse and much more.
Lets keep enjoying this visual goodness… but please don’t forget to read!
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.
