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October 29, 2004
The Firefox Effect
Open-source web browser Firefox has good buzz, and not just because it's mounting a fundraising effort to buy a full-page ad in the New York Times.
Firefox has solid buzz thanks to its worldwide congregation of true believers. They testify about the new browser on message boards, blogs and websites. That's adding up to tangible grassroots buzz and spreading to network hubs such as journalists, who are always looking for trends. A journalist will almost always consider a trend more credible if it is organically uncontrived, and that's part of Firefox's appeal. Once identified as a trend, a newspaper or magazine article spreads additional buzz among the early adopters, who pass it along as validation to their followers, the secondary adopters. If the product (or service) solves an immediate problem or need, adoption rates can corkscrew epidemically.
Considering that Firefox has picked up two percentage points of global browser usage in the past four months, as Internet tools firm Websidestory said last month, Firefox certainly seems viral.
Why? As a free product, Firefox couldn't be any easier to try. Is it remarkably better than Microsoft's Internet Explorer? That's a subject of debate. (After several lock-ups while writing blog posts using Microsoft's Internet Explorer, then losing those posts, I've switched to Firefox.) A continued trickle of unfortunate news about security holes affecting IE make Firefox more attractive.
Here's a $100,000 question: Is raising money for a six-figure full-page newspaper ad open-source marketing, as some call it? Perhaps, if you accept the premise that the Mozilla Foundation (the open source organization behind Firefox) is relying on its customer evangelists to fulfill a marketing goal. (As of this writing, more than 9,000 people have contributed money toward the ad campaign.) The fundraising effort has parts of the blogosphere talking, but arguably that's due the participatory framework of evangelist involvement.
Mass media advertising is decidedly not open-source marketing, and expectations beyond the novelty surrounding the "first-ever, full-page advertisement in a major daily newspaper created and paid for by the open source community" could turn into a trap. The problem with most one-off ads (and most mass-media advertising) is too much competition. A full-page Firefox ad will join 3,000+ marketing messages Times readers will see the day it runs. Just as TV branding ads do not convince you to suddenly switch car makers, a one-time Firefox print ad (whose content is apparently the names of the 10,000 or so people who contributed to the fundraising campaign) won't convince a Fortune 500 CIO to install the browser on 120,000 PCs. As a tactic to generate awareness, a full-page ad fundraising strategy has a very short half-life, even with a novelty factor thrown in for good measure.
The familiar siren's trap of advertising (that it quickly reaches a lot of "eyeballs") is already devouring some common sense in the Firefox community: Some supporters are calling for ads in their country's newspapers.
The Firefox faithful would do well to understand that their personal ownership of the Firefox "brand," if an open source product can be termed that way, is the marketing. They're already doing very effective "open source marketing" by releasing a good product that solves a problem, encouraging evangelists to host worldwide Firefox release parties and displaying iconic Firefox web banners on their blogs or websites. Community-oriented grassroots activities contribute eminently more long-term value than any traditional advertising.
A New York Times tearsheet will be a keepsake for many of its x-thousand sponsors, a tangible totem celebrating their affiliation. But the Firefox faithful should keep a clear head about the difference between marketing and advertising.
Next time, raise money to host a smokin' Firefox convention.
Other blogs that reference The Firefox Effect:
» Participatory Media Much More Than Ad Buys from Crossroads Dispatches
At the risk of coming across anti-advertising (on second thought: so what?), I guess I'm feeling compelled to chime in with the recent discussions around the Mozilla Firefox campaign to raise money for a six-figure full-page ad in New York [Read More]
This article contains a number of inaccuracies.
1. The Mozilla Foundation did not organize Firefox users to take out a full-page ad in The New York Times. I did.
2. You assume that the advertisment's primary goal is to persuade the newspaper's readers to use Firefox. It is not. The ad is a celebration for Firefox's advocates and developers who have worked hard for 2+ years to support Mozilla. The Foundation went along with the idea because it was also a fundraiser.
3. You cite $100,000 as the amount of money needed to purchase the ad. The New York Times advocacy ad rate is less than 1/2 of this price. This information is publicly available from The New York Times and in a recent Red Herring interview.
I would also advise caution with the use of "open source marketing." Has anyone defined it? Sure it sounds sexy, but does it actually mean anything? It smells like innovative business transformation language.
After much internal debate, the term we decided to use for the Spread Firefox campaign is "community marketing." Community marketing is the distributed execution of numerous marketing or advocacy initiatives focused on a collective goal and emphasizing a common set of messages.
Rob, thanks for the comments.
When I was researching my post, the "spread Firefox" website didn't make the ad's intent clear, nor its cost. Until the Red Herring piece, the only information Firefox evangelists were receiving was that you didn't want to disclose the ad's cost because of the discount involved.
I had looked at the New York Times website, too; the cost of a full-page ad is shown as ranging from $100,000 to $1 million. In other words, it wasn't clear.
You're absolutely right that "open source marketing" is a new term without much collective agreement. I wouldn't disparage it, though; just as open source software creation relies on community involvement in building a product, so does open source marketing, with the community of believers bootstrapping itself toward clearly stated goals. There's lots of opportunity for discussion on this topic.
Here's my hope: that you and the other terrific supporters of Firefox don't fall into the trap of expectations that advertising sets. Once you lead others in, it's pretty hard to lead them out. Stay focused on grassroots efforts. That's where the authenticity lives.
I really, really like the work you're doing with this. Marketing "in the open" like this accelerates the discussion of ideas and clarifies points of view, just as it would do on a project team. Only the project team is about a thousand times bigger than most companies' project teams. That's both the concomitant opportunity and challenge.
Ben - very well put.
