Marketing

In February of this year I joined Linden Lab fulltime, as a Marketing Manager.

You can follow me on Twitter and I keep things current on LinkedIn

Rock Your Firefox visits triple

I’ve continued to blog for Rock Your Firefox 2-3 times a week.  I was thrilled to learn that it now gets over 350,000 visitors a month–with 30,000 visitors on the most active days. That’s 3X as many visits than in April. All that comment moderation, Facebook posting and Tweeting has paid off. I’m beaming into the ether, but also know it has everything to do with Mozilla’s great developers, add-ons and the add-on team.

Some of my favorite RYFX posts include Ghostery:

Feedly:

and FoxSplitter

Since the spring I’ve been leading projects as a Content Strategist and/or Marketing Consultant,  aligning messaging and navigation with business goals. I’m planning integrated and community marketing and social media, building social media, and choosing and directing design agencies for clients. And I contribute to business development–big fun for me. Part of this work shift has meant fewer things to post. Projects last longer, and contributions are higher-level and harder to showcase than headlines. Some of my best value-adds have been conversations. And many clients are in stealth mode. In some cases, I can share more one-on-one, so ping me if you’re curious. I can say I’ve thought about a lot about: the developer audience, online and mobile payments, crowdsourcing, social media, community management, meritocracy, green home building, open source, acquisitions, and a paradigm shift in workplace teams. And I got to know Lithium, a company one client hired to host their community and forums. I think they’re doing an interesting job with social CRM and their thinking about meritocracy and community building is worth following.

I was lucky to be invited to the Mozilla Summit and attended Women 2.0 Pitch Night, the PayPal X Developer Conference, and Chip Conley’s weekend workshop at Esalen on PEAK leadership. I’m looking forward to Add-on Con in December and Yoga Journal’s Business of Yoga Conference in January 2011.

Rock Your Firefox

New Mozilla Blog — Rock Your Firefox

Earlier this year I was honored when the Mozilla Add-ons team asked me to help set up and write their newest blog, RockYourFirefox.com.  Timed for Austin’s SXSW conference,  the main goal of the blog is to introduce Add-ons to Firefox users who don’t necessarily consider themselves tech savvy.

I imagine the users to be a little like me. My partner (in life) is a Systems Administrator ( “computer guy”) and walked me through the concept of Add-ons and Firefox in the early 2000s. Open source  appealed to me immediately because of the collaborative, community principles. But it could be intimidating. No one knows their stuff like Firefox fans and Mozilla Community members and developers.

Rock Your Firefox does an excellent job of making one of Firefox’s best features, the Add-on, accessible to everyone. By following thrice-weekly personal recommendations for add-ons, Fx users can find new ways to get more out of their browser. Or just discover the fact that Firefox can be customized in the same way you can add apps to your phone.

As is the case with all good sources for recommendations, not everyone will love each add-on that we review. If they did, we wouldn’t be hitting our goal.  But I hope to help build an authoritative source for non-techies to discover highly relevant add-ons, even if they only find two or three. For example, if you have a need to take a lot of screenshots of Web pages, my Screengrab recommendation would be helpful. If you’re a Craigslist fan and love crawling through the ads, the CLIP add-on populates your search with pictures for amazing scan-ability. Check out the complete list of my reviews and let me know what you think.

I’m a huge Firefox fan, but I’m not a developer…or even always an early-adopter. I think in terms of strategy, creativity, emotion and brand in my day-to-day work. Not ones and zeroes. But I still  constantly discover new ways to use Firefox in my online life.

I hope the blog will recruit more users and empower current Firefox users to fully customize their experience.

Mozilla Ecommerce

Since August of 2009 I’ve been part of a great project at Mozilla. I took a look at how branded clothing and gear (a.k.a. “swag”) was sold online to different Mozilla communities around the world. There were some immediate problems to solve and some long-term strategies to develop.  I used SurveyGizmo for the first time to find out what users wanted and needed from Mozilla ecommerce. One of the first solves was to build a simple page to link users to all Mozilla stores and partnerships, and give them context for making a choice:

Mozilla Foundation’s David Boswell blogs about the landing page (be sure to read community responses). At times there have been over four separate landing pages for Mozilla stores and partnered experiences. Now that this immediate need is buttoned up, I’ll be thinking about ways to aggregate the shopping cart, solutions for international shoppers and big-picture ways to align the ecommerce experience with Mozilla’s mission and brand.

I’ve been thinking a lot about best practices in internet retail because of this project, researching crowdsourcing, and looking at companies like Zazzle.com, Threadless.com, Spreadshirt.com, Etsy.com & others. Although not directly related to the Mozilla project, I’ve also started paying more attention to virtual currency and companies like Zynga and Linden Labs (Second Life).

At first blush this project feels a bit, well, secondary in comparison to the other work the Mozilla community does. But the more time I spend with it, the more I realize how key it is to the health of the internet.  I think it is important for Mozilla to play an active role in online retail. And there’s room for a lot more constructive open source thinking about the role of consumerism on the Web. A playground for trying on best practices is the only way to really learn what works, and that’s how I see the swag ecommerce experience.  Open source principles can translate for ecommerce and Web marketing and exist alongside for-profit business models, guiding them. Directly embracing the slowly evolving, organic negotiation between the two would be interesting. And establishing and maintaining fair standards for the consumer–and merchandiser–while keeping current with Web technologies is something I’d like to take further.

Three Recent Projects

#1 Dynamic Buttons for Mozilla’s Latest Tool

The buttons “know” the status of a user’s browser and serve up the correct message. Mozilla community members can place the button code on blogs  to help spread the word. The campaign has the viral appeal necessary to educate Web users about Plugins and encourage safer browsing.  I started helping with this campaign in October and was happy to write content for the buttons. Mozilla’s Laura Mesa blogs about it .

And here’s the real deal. What message do you see?:

var pfsNextImage = “http://www.mozilla.com/img/tignish/plugincheck/wb/en-US/180_150/safe.png”;var pfsUpdateImage = “http://www.mozilla.com/img/tignish/plugincheck/wb/en-US/180_150/upyourplug.png”;

#2 Take the Mozilla Security Facebook Quiz I recently wrote.

Find out if you’re a Security Rockstar or a Rookie, and if you know your phishing facts. Possible Results: 0% — Security Newbie The Newbie is all heart, but could use some help. That’s where Mozilla comes in. 20% — Security Rookie You’re at the start of something beautiful. Rookies ramp up security skills in no time with help from Mozilla. 40% — Security Dabbler A little information can go a long way, but when it comes to security, why not know it all? Dabblers brush up on their expertise with Mozilla. 60% — Security Aficionado The Aficionado knows the basics, but could do with just a touch more security appreciation. Take a browse and see what you can learn from Mozilla. 80% — Security Rockstar You’re pretty darn safe. Rockstars get the inside security scoop. And you’re invited to our beta testers program. Yep, you’re that cool. 100% — Security Ninja Congrats! You’ve aced our quiz. Beef up your mad skills  or make our beta better by testing Firefox 3.6.

#3 A headline from the original Ancestry.com landing page enticing users to discover their Ancient Ancestry.

Who Would You Be in 40,000  BC? Are you an Artisan? An Ice Immigrant? Or one of The Predecessors? I developed over 50 ancient ancestral names and descriptions for Ancestry.com DNA, and recently edited the results for Ancient Ancestry FinderTM and the corresponding Facebook app.

In addition to writing product marketing copy, I was asked to develop the printable results packet. Content included user-friendly scientific explanations  and results  for all possible outcomes of  an ancestral DNA test.  Engaging stories of ancient ancestral lands, mythology and culture and original names, like “The Artisans” reflected the warmth and family friendliness users expect from an Ancestry.com product.

#4 Ancestry.com DNA Webinar In this presentation I speak about the science behind genetic genealogy at 6:05. Skip ahead to hear my part of Genetic Genealogy Made Easy.  In addition to writing the content and slide presentation, I drove the production and coordination of the project. It was well received and perfect for the Ancestry.com demographic.

New Site in Progress

I’m currently working with LabZero to rebuild my site using WordPress functionality. Since 2007, my freelance writing career has grown into a well-rounded consultancy. I often shape strategic product and online marketing in addition to writing content and campaigns. My new site will include both case studies and copywriting.

See more of my copywriting by category:

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