“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…'”