Jay’s Blog

It’s no surprise that Firefox 3.5 is already causing a ruckus on Twitter… but that’s just the beginning!

We hope the social media blitz will continue over the next 24 hours as we watch the Shiretoko Shock travel around the world.

The idea for the Shock came from Prashanth, one of our Mozilla Campus Reps, and we put a campaign together in just a few days so that the Mozilla community and fans everywhere could participate during our launch.

We’re hoping everyone will tweet, blog, share, post, etc. on their favorite social media channels at 3:50pm in their time zone, starting in South America at 3:50pm BRT (11:50am PDT) today.  Every part of the world will get a chance to share their thoughts on the new Firefox 3.5 as the Shock travels west around the globe.

We’ll come together 24 hours later at 3:50pm BRT (Brazil Time) on Wednesday, July 1st for the “Super Shock”!  At that time, we want the entire world to help us Shock the Web at the same time.

It should be interesting… so get ready to get your Shock on!

Mozilla Japan just launched the Discover Shiretoko campaign in collaboration with the Shiretoko Nature Foundation (SNF), a Japanese nature conservation organization.

Visit the Discover Shiretoko site http://www.discovershiretoko.org/en/ to read four stories that tie together Mozilla’s mission, philosophy and history. Join the banner campaign to spread the word.

Over the past few weeks we’ve held a number of marketing workshops to get our community ready for the Firefox 3.5 launch. We covered a number of areas that will help raise awareness and get people excited about the fasted Firefox ever!

I focused on how students can contribute during my Campus Reps workshop, which covered the following activities:

1. Creating Firefox 3.5 posters and flyers to post on campus bulletin boards, coffee shop windows, around the dorms, etc.
2. Writing an article about or review of Firefox 3.5 for the school newspaper, magazine, and/or blog.
3. Setting up a Firefox Help Desk to provide support and educate people about new features, cool Add-ons, and other tips and tricks for Firefox 3.5.
4. Posting to social networks like Facebook or Twitter with updates about why you love Firefox 3.5
5. Throwing a launch party and/or download fest to celebrate the release of Firefox 3.5 and encourage people to download and install or update from previous versions.

More details for those activities and others can be found in the Campus Reps Guide.  Since many students may not be around campus during the launch, just remember you can still get involved in your town, wherever you might be traveling during the summer, or even at home!

Check out the slides above and you can also watch the workshop* or listen to the audio.

If you’re interested joining us, tell us how you want to participate and we’ll contact you with more information as we get closer to release day.

We hope that these workshops and our open Community Marketing Team meetings will provide everyone an opportunity to learn more about how they can get involved and make a huge impact during the Firefox 3.5 launch!

* You’ll need Firefox 3.5 beta or a video player that supports Ogg Theora to view the video.

Seth Bindernagel (l10n community lead) and Rishi Mallik (one of our interns) started a CRM project back in 2007 to build a database of Mozilla contributors.  They evaluated a number of CRM solutions and developed a proof of concept built on Durpal + CiviCRM.  After their demo and some discussion around how we might use it, the project lost traction and was shelved.   I’ve spent the past few months reviving the Mozilla CRM project and we’re just getting started with development now.

I gave a quick presentation on the project at the Mozilla All-Hands today and we had good discussion around the scope of the tool and the value it will bring to various groups within the Mozilla community.  Check out the slide deck for more info:

As development gets underway, I hope key stakeholders and community members will share their ideas and provide feedback so we can continue to refine the features and functionality to create a tool that will help us all work better together.

I think a lot of folks understand the need for a centralized database of our community, and I hope the Mozilla CRM project will finally give us a way to not only bring together our community, but also give everyone a chance to explore the entire Mozilla Universe.

It’s long overdue, but after a couple of years of running the Mozilla Campus Reps program, we finally have an official logo!  I’m excited to have an identity for our campus efforts and the logo is the first step in making the program and our reps more visible in the greater Mozilla community… and the world.

The logo, which I am dubbing “the shield”, was the first phase of a project I’m working on with Nobox.  We’re currently creating a fresh new design for the online Campus Reps Guide, which we also plan to offer in print for our Back to School campaign (Fall ‘09).

With an image our reps can now call their own… I can’t wait to see what we do with it.  I’m already thinking about posters, t-shirts, and even business cards for our top reps!

UPDATE: Thanks for all the wonderful comments, and also the honest opinions.  It looks like there is a lot of interest in creating buttons/badges, t-shirts, cards, etc… so just wanted to let everyone know that I will draft up some guidelines and let you know soon how we can all use the logo for our projects.  I appreciate your enthusiasm and patience while I sort all that out.

For all you egg hunters out there: