Recently Firefox celebrated its fifth year in an industry where there are few players but a lot of competition for user loyalty. Breaking from the usual tradition of emailing a birthday card announcement or offering its loyal users some promotional item, Firefox developed a creative and inclusive way to celebrate and invite everyone to participate.
With a single page mini-site to celebrate their 5 year anniversary, the Firefox team marketed their “Spread Firefox” community marketing campaign. Designed to be fun, lighthearted and interactive, the mini-site effectively utilizes multiple online media tools to further their branding and business objectives to increase visibility and user-ship.
- Video: Easy-to-watch animated short that tells their story. It can be viewed, downloaded to a computer, or shared via email or any of the social networking sites like Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, Digg, Live, Buzz Up!, Bebo, Reddit, Technorati, AIM, Yig, Yahoo…you name it and it is listed there along with an easy click to share feature built-in!
Even after the party it lives on and can be accessed over the web. - Twitter Tweets: Congratulatory messages from loyal Firefox users posted plus a built-in tool that interacts with Facebook and Twitter, allowing you to post your own congratulatory message in addition to links that allow you to “Become a Fan” of Firefox on Facebook or to Follow their tweets (posts) on Twitter….keeping followers part of the conversation!
- Upload Photos or Video: Featuring a built-in tool that interacts with Flickr that allows you to upload your own photos or video……a way of inviting followers to the party; also supports the understanding of “users as creators”.
- An Interactive Project “Light the World”: As a way to invite you to participate in Firefox’s “cause,” this section provides some fun, lighthearted photo/video “art” project suggestions and encourages you to upload them using the built-in upload tool described above.
- Link to Mozilla (Firefox’s parent company) blog to read about how the web has changed: including “users as creators, mobile web, and what’s coming up in next five years.
- Link to new Firefox for Mobile, allowing you to download the app.
- Link to another art project ……“users as creators” idea again – hitting home that Firefox is about you and what you can do – inextricably linking you to the web browser (they hope!)
- Sign up for email alerts: Not only did they include a built-in sign up tool but they had the foresight to include their Privacy Policy!
- Link to the larger site dedicated to the Spread Firefox community marketing campaign…….enlisting followers to join the cause.
The beauty of the mini-site is the incredible long term marketing and branding value it offers. First of all, by effectively using the tools and techniques of social networking (including a “users as creators” philosophy), it ties loyal users to Firefox giving them a sense of pride, ownership, belonging and contributing (very important!). As loyal evangelists they will set out to support the “cause” to spread the word (word of mouth advertising) to get more people to use Firefox. The company doesn’t try to hide this. The “Spread Firefox” website is touted as the “Home of Firefox Community Marketing.”
If that doesn’t impress you then this will! All of that linking out and backlinking (inbound links) to Firefox website/blog properties provides long term search engine optimization value. Now for Firefox that may or may not be massively significant but think of the value it would offer you if you were to create such a mini-site that served to congregate and unite your loyal customers while increasing your PageRank and link popularity score by increasing the inbound links that point to your web pages.
The point is this: Firefox used the available tools of the web in a fun and creative way to rally its supporters and effectively advance its business objectives.
What’s stopping you from doing the same?!!
