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.
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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).
Louis CK and shaking up digital distribution
So by now you’ve probably heard about the Louis CK experiment. You know, the one about the comedian who blows off the distributors and makes a cool million bucks in revenue in just 12 days — on his own! And nope, that’s no joke!
The American comedy writer/performer made more than 1 million dollars with $500,000 in profit by releasing and distributing his latest performance Live at the Beacon Theater as a non-copy-protected download for purchase on his own website for a tiny amount of $5.
Its a beautiful thing watching those few brave folks in the entertainment world break out alone into the digital realm. Technology resources, payment processing and the ability to socially building your own brand - are all out there on the Web and waiting to be used.
All the best to Louis CK (and the charities he’s supporting with $280,000 of the proceeds), he understands and embraces his own force multipliers — the value of his work, and that of the new direct relationships he just made with his fans.
The world needs more of these digital experiments, and more artists who want to connect directly with their audiences and fans. Looking forward to 2012 being that year!
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.
Email Marketers - relationships start at the very beginning
According to Matthew Kelleher, from Redeye: on the econsultancy blog “2010 was a year in which email marketers began to wake up to the fact that email is not purely a revenue driving media but rather a ‘customer communication channel’.” Its incredibly hard to believe that its taken so long for companies to realize this.
Heading up User Engagement at Mozilla you’ll say is an easier job if you know Mozilla is a non-profit, that our communication doesn’t need to convert to profit dollars, but we still want long term Firefox users and we use email as a channel to build relationships. The difference? We are interested in engagement, and that engagement is the path to a happy and healthy customer. The “mozilla & you“ newsletter provides tips and helpful advice, it only comes out once per month, and we’re very glad to see our readers are happy with the content and frequency. Open rates are around 25% and CTRs with 15% well above average.
Here are some email best practices we take pride in for the “mozilla & you” newsletter, sadly these are basic email operations which one doesn’t see that often anymore.
- At point of sign up, we ask HTML or Text — its an old-skool question, but people don’t ask anymore and people like choice.
- The Mozilla Privacy Policy is clearly pointed out also at sign up and in each email — how many times have you simply entered an email address for a newsletter, and have no idea if your email will be shared with third parties?
- In the Welcome email you can subscribe immediately, and we make it simple to unsubscribe from any email — how many emails do you get each day because the unsubscribe process was too complex and its easier to hit the delete key?
- An email subscriber can actually reply to the newsletter sender email address, and that email goes to a real person (often myself), and we try to help with inquiries wherever possible — email needs to be human, receiving it from a machine with a no-reply email address, doesn’t build a bond.
I would personally love to see email marketers (as well as creating engrossing content), take sign up and unsubscribe more seriously. Engagement stems from respect for the individual AND that starts at the beginning of the relationship.
Do leave a comment on your email experiences and other practices you believe email marketeers should observe
Consumer Education at Mozilla
Last month my colleague Richard Milewski wrote and published a number of artifacts surrounding the creation and use of safe passwords*. It’s part of the Mozilla Consumer Education project, where we began researching and learning about what new topics are of most interest to ordinary web users, and furthermore what types/formats of information best resonate with this audience (who I hope with all due respect, wont mind me calling not-so-web-literates).
It was a super interesting quarter, where we saw the simple password video comic Richard produced (with characters from Simon “Gee” Giraudot) picked up across media, with over 4.5M Impressions on Facebook and 80,000+ unique video views. As a relatively small test for us, this was a clear indication there is a great need for more of this type of information from content providers and the general public alike. **
Perhaps it’s no surprise that in our research from more than 40,000 respondents: security, online identity theft and managing ones social media profile were some of the greatest web concerns. And so, as we drive quickly into 2011, we’ll be doing as much as possible to provide web smart information to not only our 400M+ Firefox users, but also beyond that to any web user.
Educating and helping web users isn’t new at Mozilla, as an International non-profit with the user at the centre of our mission, we’ve been looking out for the man on the street (or web!) from the very beginning. What’s new here then? A number of things:
(i) more people are spending vast amounts of their time online
(ii) the web is constantly changing, and is not slowing down
(iii) there just isn’t that much web education out there
Nothing new in any of those points, but when you put them altogether you get vast amounts of people who are using the web for everything from dating, grocery shopping to online banking — and who are not web-smart, and therefore not really in control.
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As mentioned this is something we want to change, and we’ll be providing much more web smart guides throughout 2011. And if you touch web users each day, I think we each have the obligation to help folks stay safe and in control of their online life, whilst having the best fun!
Let me know in the comments field of other web topics you hear people express concern or lack of knowledge about. Or if you’d like to help write any guides, we’d love to hear from you.
* Believe or not in Richard’s research there were plenty of very tech savvy folks who weren’t using great passwords — looks like we could all use a refresher!
** I was delighted to see Google also take consumer education forward last week with the launch of their beautifully made 20thingsilearned.com. There really is so much that we could and should all be doing. I have a good feeling that next year a whole lot more people are going to know more about the Web, and be more in control of their online life.
Book Review - The Referral Engine
I just finished reading ‘The Referral Engine” by John Jantsch, which I spotted it in the iBook store. It was published in May 2010, and according to Publishers Weekly is a ‘…thorough primer on the power of letting your products and customers speak for themselves.” I was curious to read how Jantsch suggested one should go about building word-of-mouth referrals, and of course as much of the success of Firefox was spread by satisfied and loyal user advocates, I was keen to see if I could learn something new.
The book goes over (starting from a basic level) all the steps one needs to think of when building a powerful brand, and creating consistent ways for people to engage with and refer your organization / company. I must admit that much of the book was not new to us here at Mozilla, but I found scores of interesting tidbits, which I’m going to look into further. The section on using technology to allow people to connect with you more deeply where and when they choose, however, balancing this with “hugs and handshakes” in real life really made me stop and think. Its going to be important for us to find more ways to connect online and offline people relationships. Jantsch raises many excellent points, and shows himself to truly understand the power and importance of customer experience.
He walks one through the ‘Ideal customer life cycle’ and the seven stages of referral development - all super helpful. And ends each chapter with a recap of actions to take.
I would wholly recommend this book for a wide variety of reasons…
1. To Start-ups: If you are a start-up this book with teach you right from the get go how to bake referral methods into your business, and you’ll shave dollars of your marketing budget.
2. For existing organizations and companies, read it to remind yourself of your customers and how they affect your brand. Remember you don’t own your brand, your customers do. If they are happy and delighted, they will tell others and you’ll have a long future ahead of you with loyal customers. You might not be asking you customers to refer you? Ask yourself why not? And make it easy for folks to share the great experiences they have.
3. For Mozilla, we’ve come so far and can be so grateful for the millions of referrals we’ve had over the years from around the globe. We’ve created great products and moved mountains for the Web, with our users being our largest advocates. Its all our job no matter what our function, paid staff, volunteers, partners to continue to create ways for people to share, advocate and lobby for a healthy Internet — and therefore why its important to use Firefox.
We’ll certainly be doing our best to find news ways for users and community spread the word. If you have ideas, please drop me a line / leave a comment.
And remember, creating something people want to connect with is key!
Mozilla has always been about Engagement, not Marketing
Engagement vs. Marketing?
Marketing, so the dictionary says, is: “… the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising”. But to Engage means to: “attract or involve, cause someone to be involved in, participate, establish a meaningful contact or connection…”.
Which one sounds right for Mozilla? Doesn’t take too much thought, right?
Engage is what we’ve always done. Together as a global community we have and continue to, attract millions of Firefox users, welcome participation and collaboration, build strong relationships, and carve a place in people’s hearts and minds. A non-profit attracting 400M+ Firefox users across the world, isn’t able to do that without people who quintessentially care about the Internet and People.
So what else can we do?
We think its important to further expand engagement, and especially with our users. Over the coming weeks and months we’re going to be examining and expanding the ways we connect with our Firefox users; increasing the ways people can connect, find product know-how and get to know the organization. At the same time, we want to create more, easy ways for people to get involved and participate in Mozilla. The project is already expanding to artists, film-makers, teachers and more, via the Drumbeat initiative. These are exciting times to involve as many people as possible in building a healthy Internet (and have fun!).
What can you do?
We would love your thoughts and input. Many of you reading this have been demonstrative in the building of the Mozilla movement this far, you are some of the most experienced people out there who know how to widen participation in the project and spread Firefox.
We’ve started a wiki page, and added some of the details about projects which we’ve started, there will and should be more. Please do reach out to myself, and others mentioned on the wiki if you would like to help, or find out more. We’ll all be posting more details soon, and would love to hear from you anytime for comments, ideas and help.
Jane’s new blog home
I’ve been blogging on and off for a couple of years now, mainly about the work we do at Mozilla, and Engagement in general. A few weeks ago I decided to move from Wordpress to Tumblr - for several reasons, a big one being that scores of people, plus pfinette said I should. So, I did. And here it is.
So goodbye… http://autological.wordpress.com my older posts will still live on there..
And hello to janefinette.com. Looking forward to posting more here soon.
