How did we increase the amount of content we published from a few dozen posts a year to over 300? Sure, we could have only shared news and updates about Firefox as a product, but we found our users resonated better with a balance of 3 different types of content. As Jane mentioned in her post:

Our content is split pretty evenly between being (i) informative about Firefox as a product and sharing the latest news, (ii) offering helpful advice and tips on how to make the most of Firefox, and (iii) most importantly balanced with fun, engaging and inspiring engagement activities.

As 2012 kicks off, we’ll continue to nurture relationships more than ever. Mozilla is an organization about people building a better Web. Our millions of friends support that cause and are actively engaged with us. Those friends have made the Mozilla project  successful, and they will continue to help us in making the Web better. Our New Years resolution is to continue innovating on your behalf and keeping the power of the Web in people’s hands. And nurturing relationships is a key part of that.

2011 in social by the numbers

• 6.5 million Firefox fans on Facebook
• 640,000 @Firefox followers on Twitter
• 45-50% of Facebook fans engaging with us each month
• In March, Firefox 4 spread around world through two social campaigns that were shared by hundreds of thousands of users
• Over 300,000 Facebook shares (likes, comments, shares) in the last 3 months alone
• Some Facebook posts were localized into as many as 15 language
• Celebrated 7 years of Firefox by bringing cuteness to the world with Firefox Live with 4.5 million video plays and 200,000 hours of cuteness watched

Today, we are excited to join together as a global community to celebrate the 7th birthday of Firefox. As the only independent browser with a mission to make the Web better, we are proud of how the last seven years of Firefox have pushed the Web forward:

• The latest release of Firefox is more than 32 times faster than Firefox 1.0.
• We recently shifted to a new release cycle to deliver features, performance enhancements, security updates and stability improvements to users faster.
• Leading edge HTML5 support in Firefox ensures that developers can create beautiful and exciting Web experiences for users.
• Favorite features like tabbed browsing, built-in phishing and malware protection, the Awesome Bar, Do Not Track and our gallery of thousands of  Firefox add-ons give millions of users around the world more choice and control over their Web browsing experience.

To celebrate, Mozilla has once again adopted firefox (a.k.a red panda) cubs at the Knoxville Zoo. For the next few months, you can watch these baby firefoxes play, live and grow via a 24 hour live video stream at Firefox Live. Please help spread the word by sharing the cuteness of our newest Mozillians at Firefox Live.

Just as Firefox is localized in over 80 languages, imagine if our Facebook page or Twitter presence was available in 80 languages as well. And what if users could have conversations with other users and Mozilla contributors on those social networks as well? That would be quite a rich experience, and I think it’s an experience we should strive to offer for our 5 million+ users on those networks.

Studies have shown that localized content on these channels offers an experience for users that is several times more engaging. The exciting bit is that we’ve already localized some of our content on our social channels, and it’s proven to be quite successful in engaging our users. We currently localize announcements for Firefox updates and new campaigns, and we also localize our custom tabs on Facebook when possible.

We can improve on this by creating an easy way to offer localized versions of almost all our content on these pages. We could start with a few locales as a trial. We’d create solid experiences and have conversations with those users that is just as compelling as our English content. If successful, we could then add more locales.

What is your favorite way that Firefox content is localized (besides in the product itself)? What organizations or brands have you seen localized content for that have impressed you? Add your thoughts in the comments.

I was recently inspired by the webdev team’s activity at Open Source Bridge the other week, where hackers were asked what they want the Web to be. Dozens of people used posters, letter stencils, and markers to create their answer and show the possibilities open to us because of technology. The beautiful result can be seen in their video and Mike Morgan’s photo gallery, which is appropriately named Your Web.

Everyone uses and thinks about the Web differently, and we all have the opportunity to be part of the Web and choose how it evolves. So let’s show our users that. As part of a campaign for existing Firefox users, I’d like to see the activity from Open Source Bridge grow to a new scale in a way that any Firefox user can participate. The concept should be solid, the user’s interaction should be simple, and the gallery should be visually compelling (with some HTML5 + CSS3 love, naturally).

The Concept

Let’s create a fun and interactive way for users to think about the Web and tie that back to Mozilla’s mission and why we create products like Firefox. Let’s ask users a simple question about the Web and showcase their responses. Questions like “What do you love about the Web?” and “What do you want the Web to be?” can be answered in a single word or phrase. It should be a broad enough question that anyone can answer it easily.

The Interaction

Show users how others have answered the question and then ask them for their response. To make the response even richer and provide a human element, we encourage users to write their response on a poster and upload a picture of them holding the poster, similar to the Your Web gallery. A user can also tag their response to show how they use the Web (eg: an Artist, Developer, Student, or Writer).

The Gallery

Once a user submits their response (the photo is optional, by the way), they see their answer appear in the gallery, along with responses from similar users based on their locale and tag. The gallery could show a word and photo cloud where the more popular responses are larger. One could then share their response by email or on a social network. Here’s a rough sketch of how it could look, courtesy of Crystal Beasley:

Sketch of the main page

Sketch of the submission form

Localization

I’m excited to see how users around the world think about the Web and answer the question, but many of those responses will be in different languages — languages I don’t speak. Unlike other campaigns where we localize content before the campaign launches, most of the content for this campaign will be submitted by users. This gives us an interesting opportunity to have our multilingual users translate responses so that others can understand how people around the world answer the question.

For example, a German user could offer a translation for a French response, and then German users could view that translation when they mouse over it. And we could do this in a way that still gives our localization community the ability to review translations before they appear for other users.

Another fascinating question is how do we structure the responses across different locales so the answers are brief but still descriptive? We could limit user submitted answers to a certain number of words or characters. In English, that limit could be pretty low — perhaps 4 words up to 30 characters total. We could probably establish a rule for each locale as to how long answers can be. What would make sense for other locales? For your locale?

Feedback

I’m teaming up with Winston Bowden to put this together (here’s the wiki page), and I’d love feedback on how to tweak this idea and make it even better. I would especially like to see your thoughts on the localization aspects.

Firefox 4 announcement for German users

And we’ve already started the past couple of months with some localized status updates on the Mozilla Firefox page and in our custom tabs. The status update announcing Firefox 4 was posted in 19 languages. Plus, our Firefox 4 tab is localized and soon our Web Hero tab will be as well.

Web Hero tab in French

Just how global are our users on Facebook? Here are the numbers Facebook provides us:

Top languages

Top countries

We’re continuously thinking about providing content which is even better tailored to Facebook users in different regions of the world who don’t speak English as their first language. Do you know any organizations or brands that have localized Facebook content? Add your favorite to the comments or add your own ideas for localizing content.

Join the Twitter Party

This Twitter Party is pure fun and celebration. No cover charge, either.

Tweet about Firefox 4 with the #fx4 hashtag and your Twitter avatar will join thousands of others from around the world as part of our logo mosaic. Also, check out how the technology behind Twitter Party works by reading a behind the scenes post by Quodis, who created the site.

Post a Facebook Badge

Facebook badges are flair for your Wall. Post one or all four.

Add one of these awesome Firefox badges to your wall for your friends to see and they’ll be encouraged to download Firefox 4. Post one (or all 4) and add a fun message too.

Get your all new Website buttons

Your site looks even more awesome with a Firefox button

Dress up your blogs and websites with our snazzy new Firefox 4 buttons.

Watch downloads live on Glow

The downloads are so bright, I gotta wear shades

Track download stats in real-time and zoom in to view stats for each country, state, or even city. Awesome use of canvas.

Take a moment to share Firefox 4 on your social networks and celebrate the release.

Some of the Mozillians who answered questions on reddit

We had hundreds of great questions and comments. Here a few that caught my eye:

o hai reddit! (introducing the Mozillians)

My grandma wants to know if she’ll “still be able to get the Google” on the new browser. Please advise.

Why is your browser the best browser to ever roam the dark lands of the internet?

I am currently a chrome fanboy. What would be your spiel to get us back?

FF Y U NO RSS button in address bar? (or is that just a rumor?)

Whom do you see as your main competition these days?

And some praise of Firefox 4 as well:

Hi guys! Just wanted to say – love your browser. Thanks very much for being awesome.

You’re on top again in my opinion. Now that you’ve made it a much more minimalistic design (my biggest complaint) you’ve won me back to FF full-time.

I just love your browser. Hats off to Firefox team for all their efforts on Firefox 4.

Big thanks to all the Mozillians who helped response to questions and comments from the reddit community. I heard many of you enjoyed talking with the reddit community, and I know they loved the IAmA as well.

What was your favorite comment? What do you suggest for our next IAmA?

For those not familiar with reddit, it’s a passionate + awesome community of people who love the Web. This is the first time we’re doing a sponsored event with reddit, and you’ll see the discussion promoted on the reddit homepage throughout the day. As Mike Beltzner says:

We’re long time reddit fans, and always wondered y we no reddit – so let’s fix that, today. A bunch of us will be checking back here between 10am and 2pm PT (at least) to answer your questions from all over the project.

Bring your questions and join the discussion.

Army of Awesome in German

Twitter supports 12 other languages so those are the best candidates to localize. These languages are Arabic, Danish, Dutch, Farsi / Persian, Finnish, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Swedish, and Thai. If you’re interested in localizing the Army of Awesome for your language, contact Kadir Topal to find out how.

Next up for Army of Awesome, we’ll be adding a Filter button for quickly drilling down to the tweets you want to see and the ability to remove tweets from the list that don’t need a response. Both of these should make it much easier and faster for you to find the tweets you want to respond to.

Big thanks to Kadir Topal, Paul Craciunoiu, and our awesome localizers for adding localization support. If you have any suggestions for the Army of Awesome, leave a comment or add your ideas to the wiki page.

Tcho HQ by grahamc99

On Friday I got to visit TCHO (pronounced “choh!”) at their Pier 17 headquarters to learn about this young, premiere chocolate manufacturer. I felt an immediate connection with TCHO as I heard about their tech roots and realized how their values are similar to Mozilla’s. Here’s what stood out to me:

TCHO is obsessed. With great dark chocolate. With technology. With transparency. With innovation.

TCHO has strong tech roots. It was started by a NASA technologist and a chocolate industry veteran (think Willy Wonka). It’s led by the co-founders of Wired magazine.

TCHO is scrappy and high tech. It’s very much a chocolate start-up that has to make best use of its limited resources.

TCHO exists because of friends and family investing in a dream. Every employee is an owner.

TCHO beta tests. TCHO encourages their customers to help develop their products by participating in limited beta editions on their website. Beta participants are mailed candidates and can vote for their favorites online. I don’t know of any other chocolate company that actively invites their customers to help create new flavors and products. And yes, I made to sure to sign up for their beta program before leaving TCHO.

While I certainly love chocolate, TCHO is the first chocolate manufacturer that I support their values and culture in addition to their tasty products. Hershey’s, Godiva and Ghirardelli haven’t been able to create that strong relationship with me even after years of being a customer. TCHO was able to do that in less than an hour.

It’s difficult to find organizations similar to Mozilla, but TCHO’s values closely align with Mozilla’s. Their transparent, community-driven development process is unique in the chocolate industry. Their obsession with amazing chocolate is felt everywhere at their headquarters – the factory, the offices, and the store. It’s an exciting group to be part of, and I’m already planning my next visit to TCHO.