ClickZ: Crazy Like a Firefox Nov 13, 2004, 05 :00 UTC (4 Talkback[s]) (10718 reads) (Other stories by Rebecca Lieb)
"Fans of Mozilla's free, open-source Firefox browser make the ardent Apple faithful look like a bunch of slackers. Their community-generated Spread Firefox (SFX) campaign, launched less than two months ago, is already one of the watershed campaigns in interactive marketing history. It's helped generate over a million downloads per day since Firefox went out of beta on Tuesday; registered over 25,000 volunteer marketers; encouraged about 100,000 Web sites to display promotional buttons and banners; generated wall-to-wall coverage in the blogosphere and mainstream media; and raised a quarter of a million dollars for a full-page ad in The New York Times.
"'This summer, we saw we were getting comfortable with a 1.0 product,' Chris Hofmann, chief engineer at the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, told me. 'We started to kick around how we're going to promote this. It's a nonprofit foundation, a bunch of engineers. So we said, 'Let's use the same model as we've used for the software.' Engineers built the spreadfirefox.com Web site. We just kind of opened the door to come up with a bunch of creative ideas...'"
