Snip...Snip...Snippets!

You know those little messages you see at the bottom of the "Start Page"? The ones next to the cute little icons under the search bar? (If you still don't see them, continue to refresh the page to see all 4 messages). Well, whether or not you've noticed them, I'm going to take this opportunity to announce that they've just gotten a face-lift!

For the past couple of weeks, I have been working with Pascal Chevral and The Royal Order to update the way we revise and submit Snippets for the Start Page. The result is a more efficient mechanism for the Marketing Team to push localized messaging in more than 40 locales. As of right now, the messaging itself is pretty Mozilla.com web-content related (Mozilla Store, Security Page on Mozilla.com), but the idea is for the team to be able to use this resource to announce new campaigns, add-ons, or anything else we might want to promote.

Besides updating the mechanism, we also updated the way the Snippets looked, specifically the icons. Thanks to The Royal Order, the icons look fresh and are much more noticeable. We will continue to update the icons, as necessary, so that they remain relevant. Overall, however, I think the biggest advantage of completing this project is that we are now able to more easily update and support more than 40 locales.

Anyway, next time you're on the Start Page, check out the Snippets and feel free to let me know what you think! Thanks again to Pascal and TRO for all their help!

Firefox Quarterly Survey

The Marketing team is excited to announce the first release of the Firefox Quarterly Customer Survey!

The survey, which will be released on the 23rd, will appear on the "What's New" page of Firefox 3.0.2 and Firefox 2.0.17 and will be available in ten locales, including: Japan, China, France, UK, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Poland, Germany and the United States. The six question survey will only be visible to 10% of users in each locale and the survey will be closed once we hit our desired completion rate.

The basic goal of this survey is to create a standard the Marketing Team can use to periodically measure our users' awareness, usage habits and attitude towards the Firefox. We will hopefully be able to release the survey every 3 months and to expand the number of locales we include with each release of the survey.

As a whole, I think that the release of this survey is the beginning of a new movement within the marketing team to understand better understand our user base. As the number of downloads grow and the more differentiated our user base gets, the more we, as a marketing team, need to put into trying to segment the population of users we have and the population of users we want to appeal to.

This survey is only the first of many resources we have at our disposal and I'm excited to see how it turns out. I should be posting again about the results of this survey in the coming weeks and I look forward to localizing the survey for more locales next quarter.

Big thanks to Stanislaw Malolepszy for allowing me to use his mozilla-europe.org survey tool and for all of his excellent guidance. I also want to thank Pascal C, Wil Clouser, Stephen Donner and the rest if the marketing team for all of their help.