Instead of keeping their TV advertising campaign under the hood, Firefox has looked to their community of devout users, to develop commercials for the increasingly popular web browser.
Interestingly though, this is an example of a trend that speakers at Mplanet 2006 are predicting to grow in popularity next year. Have you also seen the Nikon Flickr! campaign? That single campaign dramatically boosted sales of Nikon’s new cameras. It just goes to show how much power and energy that consumer driven projects can have.
When Firefox can use their community to develop ads and supply funding to promote the software, what opportunities does that present to you?
Check-out how cool these videos are… Would you like to have your adverts made and displayed for free? With all the giant communities and fan-boism of different software packages it really makes me wonder why companies aren’t leveraging the power of their brand loyal advocates…
I mean, how come other community projects, like Linux and Open Office, don’t have the same scale of community support? What could they do to create a sense of community and ‘sticking it to the man’? Well here’s some quick thoughts I had which you could apply to your own business…
- Create an identity for your brand.
- Create a cause that people are willing to fight for.
- Create external pressures to maximize community bonding.
- Provide a place for the community to play.
- Make good friends with influential bloggers, who share character traits with your project.
- Make the community feel responsible for it’s own success.
- Help them to promote your product with press kits and banners.
What do you think?
Will other community projects follow suit?
Microsoft sure has a lot of enemies. Imagine where the world would be if nothing ran on Windows? … would it be Mac, Linux, something else???
Or at least create an alternative to an entity people are willing to fight against.
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