Web strategist, Jeremiah Owyang, at Mozilla

I’ve blogged about Jeremiah before and how we met at the >Play Digital Media conference held at Berkeley each year.  Since then, Jeremiah and I kept in touch over email, Facebook, occasional Twitter feeds, etc.  (He’s a web strategist…what do you expect, right?)  After a few exchanges, I took Jeremiah up on an initial offer he made to do a brown bag discussion at Mozilla about various topics where he his expertise crosses-over with Mozilla.

From a few different people, I heard that Jeremiah’s discussion today was one of the better lunchtime chats we’ve had in a while.  It was mostly due to Jeremiah’s facilitation skills and a lively crowd at lunch.  In our planning for the session, Jeremiah forwarded me a few ideas and specifically asked that the expectation be set that the conversation would be two-way.  I hope we satisfied his hopes and I think we did.

Our team gathered around the downstairs couches and had a pretty engaging conversation about user experience, product, and marketing for Mozilla.  What was most interesting to me was that we continued to focus on the international aspects of each of these subjects.  What is Mozilla doing to market itself in places like Japan, China, Europe, and the United States?  Is it different across cultures?  How do we localize our products beyond language translation?  What are we doing to engage user (customer) feedback into our product development process?

Overall, I think we had knowledgeable responses and insights and the conversation flowed nicely.  We honed in on Mozilla’s historic marketing focus on early adopters and how they can become big brand advocates to help spread our products virally.  Although it would be great to have a robust marketing budget to also touch mainstream consumers, I’ll be one of many to tell you that we are never going to fund a commercial for the Super Bowl or anything like that.  Jeremiah seemed really interested in points made by people like Gen (Japan) and Tristan (Europe) and John (U.S./China), who all discussed similarities of early adopters across cultures.

Before I knew it, the hour was up.  As he closed the conversation, Jeremiah posted a few challenges for our team:

1)  How is Mozilla going to move its marketing beyond focus on early adopters?
2)  What other strategies outside of word of mouth does or will Mozilla do to spread its products?
3)  What localized (yet globally deployed) tools will we create better marketing collaboration and feedback from our users?
4)  Technographics studies indicate different users need different products, how will Mozilla respond (esp in growth markets like China and India)?

A great lunch conversation.  Thanks, Jeremiah!