Marketing, so the dictionary says, is: “… the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising”. But to Engage means to: “attract or involve, cause someone to be involved in, participate, establish a meaningful contact or connection…”.
Which one sounds right for Mozilla? Doesn’t take too much thought, right?
Engage is what we’ve always done. Together as a global community we have and continue to, attract millions of Firefox users, welcome participation and collaboration, build strong relationships, and carve a place in people’s hearts and minds. A non-profit attracting 400M+ Firefox users across the world, isn’t able to do that without people who quintessentially care about the Internet and People.
So what else can we do?
We think its important to further expand engagement, and especially with our users. Over the coming weeks and months we’re going to be examining and expanding the ways we connect with our Firefox users; increasing the ways people can connect, find product know-how and get to know the organization. At the same time, we want to create more, easy ways for people to get involved and participate in Mozilla. The project is already expanding to artists, film-makers, teachers and more, via the Drumbeat initiative. These are exciting times to involve as many people as possible in building a healthy Internet (and have fun!).
What can you do?
We would love your thoughts and input. Many of you reading this have been demonstrative in the building of the Mozilla movement this far, you are some of the most experienced people out there who know how to widen participation in the project and spread Firefox.
We’ve started a wiki page, and added some of the details about projects which we’ve started, there will and should be more. Please do reach out to myself, and others mentioned on the wiki if you would like to help, or find out more. We’ll all be posting more details soon, and would love to hear from you anytime for comments, ideas and help.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/User_Engagement
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July 30, 2010 at 2:03 am
Ken Saunders
I really like this a lot, primarily because it has the potential to bring in new participants and contributors to the Mozilla Project overall.
It can be a little difficult to get someone to wrap their head around the thought that there’s much more to Firefox than it just being the best browser available with the coolest add-ons (such as about Mozilla and its mission, open source, etc), especially when they’ve just made the leap from using the default browser that they used to learn how to interact with the Internet, but it is possible.
I was just a fan of Firefox, then I tried Thunderbird because it was made by the same people, and after becoming a fan and dedicated user of it, I wanted to learn more about the organization who was developing this awesome new software so I dug in and started to educate myself on Mozilla and was so impressed and inspired that I wanted to be involved in helping and giving back in any way possible.
Hopefully, there can be a quicker process developed for getting people interested in Mozilla and motivated to participate.
The stakeholder concept is probably the way to do that.
For the record, it was through Spread Firefox that I got interested in getting involved in Mozilla. It was disappointing to see through the marketing survey that few SFx members actively promoted Mozilla.
I’m hopeful that User Engagement will change that.
Will there be a User Engagement site, or Mozilla subdomain?
I can’t imagine that User Engagement efforts and projects will always be coordinated and run from the wiki.