Declassifying Operation Firefox: A wrap up of what went into the campaign

OPERATION FIREFOX HAS BEEN DECLASSIFIED, FIREFOX AGENTS HAVE ALL REPORTED IN FROM THE FIELD, ALL LAST TRANSMISSIONS HAVE BEEN INTERCEPTED OR RECEIVED BY OPERATION FX HQ, AND…it’s finally time to stop writing in all caps using the voice of “central command” for Operation Firefox!

In case you missed it, Mozilla marketing teamed up with the Mozilla community to host Operation Firefox — a contest for anyone to submit plans to place a Firefox sticker in a location with potential for high visibility that also illustrated one of the aspects of Mozilla’s brand: performance, security, customizability, or 100% organic/community.  Please check out the site to learn more about the contest, the winners, and to see all the pictures.

(Mid-post disclaimer:  This summary comes a bit late because, like a lot of us, my blog posts got derailed by the holiday break.  It’s a bit of catch up time…)

If you remember from an earlier post on my blog, I mentioned a bit about how the contest got its start.  After the summer interns, John Slater, and I ran with the idea, we had something to work with and much to do to make sure this was successful.

First, we established the goals of the campaign:  To engage our users and community to help spread Firefox’s brand and logo using Fathead stickers in a fun and entertaining way.  A second purpose of the contest was to have a set of cool photographs that made people think, “Wow!  How’d they do that?” and that we could use in the future to show just how creative our community is when it comes to promoting Firefox.  (See NYtimes Ad, Firefox Flicks, and crops circles)

After establishing the goals of the campaign, we created a detailed timeline and task list to follow and complete in order to pull off a successful project.  This included the following:

• Setting a budget and getting approval from Pkim;
• Engaging designers from Nobox to create the Operation Firefox microsite;
• Working with developers in our community to create a back-end database for the website to collect all entries;
• Having the designers “slice” what they created and then getting the microsite ready for testing by QA;
• Getting “legal” to make sure we were doing everything by the books and without liability to participants or Mozilla;
• Establishing rules for the contest;
• Making sure we had enough stickers to send to final contestants;
• Creating a blog to disseminate contest information after launch.

We gave ourselves about six weeks to complete these tasks and then launched the contest on October 22.  The first round was open until November 9, 2007.  Then, over that weekend, we judged all submissions and whittled the entries down to 50 finalists.  (Thanks in most part to intern/community member, Andrew Stein.)  We sent out 50 stickers on November 12 and 13 and gave the finalists until December 5 to send in their final entries.  Our team of 7 judges reviewed all submissions and we made our final announcements shortly after.

From a marketing standpoint, we thought of defining success on this project by how much visibility this drove to Mozilla and Firefox.  There are probably many ways to track visibility, but with our budget, we had to stick with perhaps some non-standard metrics to see how we did.  This is what we were able to learn about the mission:

•  3,500 submissions (888 on the first day)
• 110,000 sessions on the OFx microsite the first day
• Contest picked up by a few news sources, here is one from Tech Digest, another from Techpin.com (I pulled these articles randomly from a search on Operation Firefox)
• 1,386 Diggs on the article posted about the launch of the contest
• Over 20 great final submissions, including the winner who placed it at a UNC vs. Georgia Tech football game with 45,490 fans in attendance

Many thanks to a number of people in our community who helped out. Justin Scott (Fligtar) and Jeremy Orem who developed the site and made Operation Firefox site go live.  Stephen Donner for doing QA on the site.  Nobox for some great design.  Slater and Rolo for their “creative marketing-ness”.  Rishi Mallik and Sarah Arora for helping with it during their internships.  Catherine Brady for the legal.  And, special thanks to Andrew Stein.  He stayed on after his internship to pull this project all the way through to completion.  Andrew was a real task master and we teamed up well to complete the mission.

In closing, one might ask, why was Seth working on this project?  It’s a fair question, but the simple answer is that I thought of the idea and volunteered to take it “on the side”.  Lots of stuff gets done at Mozilla because someone gets an idea and runs with it.  My biggest concerns were how might we execute the idea with high impact, but low cost…same old leverage thing.  I think we did.  It was a pleasure to work with everyone and pull off what seemed to be a successful contest.  Hope you all enjoyed.