MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA – According to company executives, the Mozilla Foundation is planning an extensive, largely ‘community-based’ marketing campaign to get the word out about Firefox version 1.5, which could be released as early as tomorrow.Christopher Beard, vice-president of products at Mozilla, told CNet News that a “big marketing push” will coincide with the release of Firefox 1.5, and will include a community driven campaign, encouraging Firefox users to extol the virtues of the browser to the world at large by creating homemade videos which will be posted to a Mozilla website.
“You will have real people telling you about Firefox’s features – what’s cool and great,” Beard said. “People can create the video and upload it to the Mozilla site. The video will then be reviewed and put on our website, with a link from their location.”
Once completed and reviewed, the videos will be hosted on the “SpreadFirefox” website, which will include a world map display with a dot marking the location where each of the featured users created their video.
Beard said it’s hard to predict how many Firefox users will participate in the campaign, and especially so since participation requires some sort of video recorder, or webcam.
“It’s hard to tell,” Beard told CNet. “With The New York Times’ ad campaign we thought it would take weeks to raise the money, but in less than 48 hours we had already raised enough for an ad.
Beard added that there’s similar uncertainty with this new video marketing campaign, saying that they aren’t sure whether to expect “hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of videos.”
Anticipating entries from all over the globe, Mozilla has already assembled volunteers to cover 20 European languages, according to Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe.
In addition to the user-submitted videos, Mozilla intends to launch a new consumer-oriented site at Mozilla.com next week. Currently, Mozilla’s primary site is Mozilla.org, but the company plans for Mozilla.com to be the primary point of entry in the future. The move is part of a general shift towards appealing to a larger, possibly less Net-savvy audience.
“Part of our marketing strategy is to target more of a general consumer audience, who don’t necessarily have a technical understanding, so we are looking to make our Web sites more approachable,” explained Beard.
Another aspect of Mozilla’s strategy for the future is to step up its pace of major releases. Going forward, the company plans to offer a major release every six to nine month, as opposed to every 2 years (the average time between releases when Mozilla was part of Netscape). Accordingly, Firefox 2.0 is scheduled for release in the middle of 2006 and Firefox 3 is slated to drop during the first quarter of 2007.
