Take a look at SpreadFirefox.com - it's the Mozilla browser's quite intriguing experiment in participatory buzz marketing and recruiting of "customer evangelists".
You are our marketing department, a diverse community of people tired of swatting popups, chasing spyware, combatting identity theft and installing security updates you could set your watch to. You have a vision of the 21st century web and are ready to push it to the world, wresting control from a monopoly that has let it stagnate. We'll provide the tools, but you will drive campaigns that will be rolled out here over the coming months.
It's powered by CivicSpace (led by the same guy, Zack Rosen, that built DeanSpace). CivicSpace is an open source software platform with some powerful features that may just be the ticket for your next community-building/group-building project.
UPDATE 9/18: Hmmm, looks like SpreadFirefox.com campaign is so popular the server is straining under the load. Business Week reports on Mozilla Firefox's strategy. In the first three days, nearly 790,000 people downloaded Firefox.
I neglected to mention that while CivicSpace is intended to coordinate volunteer efforts (primarily for political and activist purposes) the Mozilla team has used the same capabilities to coordinate its volunteer force of customer evangelists.
Firefox folks call it community marketing.
Looking for a community marketing platform? Remember I mentioned Bryght - the hosted Drupal solution - check out UrbanVancouver or Doc's IT Garage for a glimpse into Drupal capabilities. Well, Bryght has just started their beta on a hosted version of CivicSpace - which btw is actually an unforked version of Drupal - to be offered for $30/month.
LATEST UPDATE 9/20: SpreadFirefox.com has met its 1,000,000 downloads in 10 days or less goal. "In just under 100 hours, we have smashed through our one million download campaign--with 6 days still to go!" (via SpreadFirefox.com). They are spotlighting "volunteer" evangelists, asking for feedback on the release, featuring the most active community participants/evangelists on the home page (everyone gets a profile page), seeking nominations for best blog posts regarding the browser or the campaign to be featured on front page. Besides spreading the word, they are leveraging the community as most open source projects do to fix bugs, spot vulnerabilities and test, test, test. Lots of great customer evangelism, participatory marketing, and buzz-building ideas...
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