How to promote and market Firefox addons – Part 2

May 19th, 2009, By talk

As I mentioned in my last post the top four “most downloaded” Firefox addons published are responsible for over 15% of all addon downloads and were written by only three men. Mr Giorgio Maone wrote two of the top four and is single handedly responsible for a staggering 112 million addon downloads to date. I’m hard pressed to think of another example of how the work of just one man has benefitted so many people in such a short time.

Wishful thinking (photo by striatic)

Wishful thinking (photo by striatic)

The Top Four

  1. FlashGot – by  Mr. Giorgio Maone – 64 million downloads.
  2. Adblock Plus – by Mr. Wladimir Palant – 49 million downloads
  3. NoScript – also by  Mr. Giorgio Maone – 48.5 million downloads
  4. Video DownloadHelper by Mr. Michel Gutierrez – 38 million downloads.

8 addon marketing tips from the masters

These gentlemen were good enough to share some of their insights in the discussion that served as the basis for this post. What follows is a summary of the points they raised:

  1. Build a unique plugin that people need.
  2. “If you build it they will come” – great addons are passed on from user to user.
  3. Develop extensions that provide services you can explain in a single sentence, for example “Headup is the Firefox extension that connects you to your interests and friends”.
  4. Develop extensions that are easy to use. A great addon can be used by anyone, doesn’t require reading a manual and doesn’t need configuration. If necessary experienced users can be offered advanced options.
  5. Ensure your extension’s name indicates its purpose clearly.
  6. Be responsive. Follow up on user commentary on the AMO and elsewhere. If you have a website for your addon, a feedback service like GetSatisfaction can be a great free way to communicate with your users and gradually build a valuable support resource. Twitter is another great tool for communicating with your users. It’s fast and is still populated mostly by technophiles. Check out our @headup account to get an impression of how I’ve been using it to interact with our user community.
  7. Educate enterprises about the advantages they stand to gain from your addon and let them do your marketing for you. This is especially true if your addon helps the enterprise accomplish its goals or saves it development time.
  8. Reach out to advocacy groups, consultants and bloggers specializing in your addon’s field and get them to try out and review your product.
This is also good advice (photo by gary j wood)

This is also good advice (photo by gary j wood)

To view and participate in the original discussion from which I summarized these pointers go to: http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.extensions/browse_thread/thread/b3d5edc8d9ae4521

Acknowledgments and Thanks:

I would hate to misrepresent myself and therefore I wish to make it clear that the tips offered above are not my own, rather they are based on the collective wisdom of  a truly incredible trio: Giorgio Maone, Wladimir Palant & Michel Gutierrez, furthermore without the good advice of Rey Bango and Eric Jung the materials used of this post could not have been collected.

THANK YOU ALL!

When all is said and done

In my original request for help in locating materials about marketing Firefox addons I expressed my surprise at the evident scarcity of such resources. To this Mr. Eric Jung replied that:

“Given the grass-roots nature of most addons, I’m not surprised by this (lack of resources). You might find yourself trail blazing.”

I’m usually a pretty lazy guy and trail-blazing isn’t really for me.
Frankly I’d have much preferred to find a bunch of juicy resources to work with instead of bothering with all this research, but if what I’ve collected here is deemed useful by you dear reader,
it was all worth it!

Mike
“I tweet @headup”
: )

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Posted in addons, firefox, for developers, marketing | 3 Comments »

How to promote and market Firefox addons – Part 1

May 19th, 2009, By talk

As the “marketing guy” for a company that has a Firefox addon as its first public product, naturally I’m interested in the promotion and marketing of browser extensions. Surprisingly, despite the steady increase in addon development over the years, I was pretty hard pressed to find materials about the effective methods for promoting them.
After doing some research and reaching out to members of the Mozilla community I was finally pointed by Mr. Rey Bango, add-ons community lead for Mozilla, to the Google group for Mozilla extension developers where I again posted my request for help. The next day I got a response from community member Eric Jung who suggested that I contact the developers of successful addons and ask them what their secret was.

A little Chutzpah goes a long way

As audacious as it might sound I actually followed Eric’s advice. I used the AMO site’s search features to discover which Firefox addons had been downloaded the most times over the years, and then sent invitations to their developers asking them to share their marketing hints, tips and insights on the group’s message board.

We are the champions my friend... (photo by www.ericcastro.biz)

"We are the champions my friend..." (photo by www.ericcastro.biz)

Despite the fact that I’m usually a pretty optimistic guy I was expecting this venture to be a complete failure. I was sure none of the people and companies I’d approached would bother answering my call so you can imagine how amazed I was when within a week of my initial invitation ALL the non-enterprise developers I’d invited to the discussion answered and shared their hard gained insights…

In my next post I’ll list the tips shared by these developers and disclose their identities, but before I do I’d like to take a minute to discuss just how popular Firefox addons really are and what commonalities are displayed between the most successful ones out there:

How popular are Firefox addons?

At Mozilla’s last “all-hands” Mr. Nick Nguyen gave the following presentation regarding the future of addons.mozilla.org (AMO) which tells us some pretty interesting things about the addon phenomenon.
According to Nguyen:

  1. The AMO site is home to over 3.5 thousand public addons.
  2. The AMO has served over 1.3 billion downloads.
  3. Currently there are over 160 million addons installed.
  4. The top 5% of all addons account for 80% of all downloads.
  5. 50% of the traffic to the AMO site is from the US and 40% comes from Europe.
  6. 53% of AMO visitors are English speakers. 10% are German speakers.
Addons in 2009

View more presentations from osunick.

What do successful Firefox add-ons have in common?

Far from me to claim that coincidence is causality. I’m also a big fan of the quote:

“There are three types of lies – lies, damn lies, and statistics.“

…attributed to Benjamin D’israeli, Alfred Marshall, Mark Twain and other famous dead people.
That said I’d like to list a few commonalities I’ve observed while researching this topic:

Being featured helps

One of the most fascinating statistics Nguyen’s slides present is that 99% of the top 5% addons have been on the AMO “featured” list. Addon developers would do well to familiarize themselves with the AMO’s guidelines regarding the selection of addons for this list.

2006 was a good year

Looking at the top of the chart it’s hard to ignore that a disproportionate number of the top addons were first published in 2006. I realize that unless time travel becomes a widely available soon this isn’t really helpful. It’s worth noting that second best year for popular addons is 2007. Together these two statistics suggest that good addons are a little like wine – they require patience and they age well. If immediate gratification is your thing the addon game might not be for you…

Addons are a one man show

Most of the top addons on the AMO were developed by a single developer. In fact the top four addons, together accounting for a staggering 200 Million downloads which are nearly 15% of all addon downloads, were written by three developers who’s insights you’ll find in my next post…

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Posted in addons, firefox, for developers, marketing | 4 Comments »

Semantic Web Shopping – a "how to" for the immediate future – Part 2

April 26th, 2009, By talk

Continued from Part 1

How to prepare for Shopping 3.0

A key element of preparing for the Semantic Web is to remember that the best Semantic Web technologies are only as good as the data they can access. If you want to enjoy the best that Semantic Web technologies have to offer be prepared to make A LOT of  information about yourself available online. A great place to start is your Facebook profile. If you want to get the most from the future of Semantic Web shopping I suggest you begin by flesing out your profile as much as you possibly can. The reason I suggest you begin with Facebook in particular is because you’ve probably already got a profile there already and, whether you like or not, Facebook is already making your information available to other services via it’s API. The Facebook API grants access to the following details about any and every Facebook member (this is a very partial list):

  • Location
  • Gender
  • Sexual preference
  • Marital status
  • Employment history
  • Likes – books, films, music, etc.
  • Fan pages the member belongs to

Despite current criticism over Facebook’s failings in regards to monetizing, the information they have is without doubt a veritable treasure trove of personal information just waiting to be commercialized. Whatever the future has in store for us in terms of Semantic Web there can be little doubt that the Facebook API will have an important part to play in it.

Hunting for bargains - a thing of the past? (image by avlxyz)

Hunting for bargains - a thing of the past? (image by avlxyz)

What about privacy?

I’m fully aware that those of you who are touchy about privacy are probably scandalized by my last suggestion. Right about now you’re probably thinking: “What? make stuff about me publicly available online? What are you nuts?!?”.Luckily while writing this post I ran into an excellent article titled “How much is your privacy worth?“. The article, written by Eric Harber, does an excellent job of presenting the Semantic Web consumers’ paradigm, and moreover illuminates that there’s little that’s new about it. The articles main premise is that we’ve been trading our privacy in for perks and benefits for years and therefore there can be little doubt that we’ll continue to do so in the future. Mr. Harber argues that every loyalty club we’ve ever subscribed to, every coupon we’ve ever cashed and every marketing survey we’ve ever particiapted in all stand as examples of cases where we’ve voluntarily surrendered some of our privacy for a perk offered by a marketer.

Our wish to safeguard our privacy is understandable but the simple truth is that in this data driven day and age privacy is increasingly an illusion. More and more of our daily activities are monitored, individually or in aggregate, whether we’re aware of it or not. The data collected is already being put to use in advertising whether obviously or less so. This trend will increase as the quality of data and the ability to analyze it continue to improve.

Semantic Web shopping will be Opt-in

To me there’s something very comforting about the knowledge that this process of cashing in my privacy for perks isn’t new. It means that the practices and policies that need to be developed in order to enable and regulate marketing on the Semantic Web have a solid base for reference, one that not only takes consumers’ privacy into account, but also gives it a paramount importance. There can be no doubt that the Semantic Web will usher in a new age that will change not only our understanding of what consists of “private information” but also what may be done with it. As was the case with this same dilemma in the past, ultimately legal frameworks will be created that will ensure that a consumers right to privacy is protected and that receiving marketing offers remain an opt-in experience (Anti spam legislation being a prime example).

If you’re skeptic that the legal aspect alone won’t be enough to enforce the sanctity of consumer privacy I submit to you the following argument – companies that abuse privacy will suffer such a backlash from consumers and create such splitting PR headaches for themselves that the practice will quickly become unprofitable. At worst we’ll have to deal with the Semantic Web version of Viagra spam…

Epilogue

Progress is inevitable therefore it becomes the collective responsibility of both marketers and consumers to define to what extent the trade-off between privacy and purchasing perks creates value for all the stakeholders involved. The laws of economics will eventually guarantee that imbalanced models will slowly die out leaving us with those that we not only can, but also want to,  live with.  After experiencing first hand how inefficient online shopping really is I personally would be happy to divulge information about myself if it would save me all the time I spent searching for that perfect stroller… ; )

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Posted in Semantic Web, web 3.0 | 5 Comments »

Semantic Web Marketing – Part 2

April 19th, 2009, By talk

Continued from Part 1

Why Now?

Understanding the basic difference between the web-that-is and the web-to-be supplies a few clues as to how this change is happening and why it’s happening now:

  1. The democratization of online publishing in the past few years has done a lot to contribute to the Totality of the web and has without doubt been the key to its unprecedented growth. The Web still has a long way to go before it encompasses everything, but it already contains enough data to allow generating limited Semantic Web experiences, especially in “UGC-rich” fields.
    UGC is one of the major catalysts to ascent of the Semantic Web (Image by James Cridland)

    UGC is a major contributor to the ascent of Semantic Web (Image by James Cridland)

  2. The ascent of APIs as the de-facto method for structuring inter-service communications is creating an ever increasing degree of Accessibility. Every day now greater swaths of the web are made accessible and “understandable” to automated services.
  3. Tagging, Natural Language Processing and other forms of hi-tech voodoo are all coming of age around now. Their evolution is having an increasingly positive impact on computers’ ability to “understand” the Web.

How will this affect me?

By now (April 2009) it’s already clear that the next evolution of the Web is right around the corner.
The first generation of companies pioneering this field, including Evri, Apture and of course ourselves, have already been active for 2-3 years. This in itself should be enough to convince you that it doesn’t matter whether you call it “Semantic Web”, “Web 3.0” or “Super Duper Web with Sprinkles” you should get your act together and start preparing for it NOW!

Rapid evolution creates opportunity

It’s worth remembering that the transformation we’re experiencing from Web to Semantic Web is a gradual one. Changes of this magnitude always are. Even so I strongly advise against complacency – “gradual” is a relevant term. I don’t remember how long it took for all of us to start using Google but I remember it wasn’t long, and I know that Yahoo and Microsoft are still trying to figure out where they lost us.

The Semantic Web revoultion will probably begin in UGC rich segments (Image by Franco Folini)

The revolution will probably begin in UGC rich segments (Image by Franco Folini)

Where will the Semantic Web revolution begin?

Although prophecy is dangerous business I think it’s safe to wager that those fields where more has been done to improve the availability of data and its accessibility to computers, are those that will enjoy the boons of the Semantic Web first.
User-generated-content heavy segments like social networking, music and photo sharing sites are some of the first places where it’s already possible to enjoy genuine Semantic Web experiences. In fact our own Headup has already been complimented by blogging heavyweights Robert Scoble and Jeff Pulver for its Twitter boosting capabilities.
Product sites like Amazon are another good place to experience Semantic Web. Their ability to offer products based on their relevance to users’ needs, intentions and social circles, is another Semantic Web early bird, albeit a rather primitive and limited one.

Looking out for your business (Image by Kevin Dooley)

Looking out for your business (Image by Kevin Dooley)

How can I best prepare my business?

The best easy-to-adopt-today tips I can suggest marketers who want to prepare for the Semantic Web are all based on the points I’ve mentioned earlier:

  1. Be aware of the coming change, keep your ears and eyes open for developments and deepen your understanding by reading blog posts like this one. I personally recommend checking out the excellent repository of Semantic Web articles that’s been published on the ReadWriteWeb blog.
  2. Tag the widgets you’re marketing comprehensively so that they are readily identifiable by computers. For example: If you’re selling football jerseys make sure to tag your inventory not only with the relevant team names but also with tags defining your merchandise as “clothing”, “shirt”, “jersey” and/or “fan merchandise”. As far as the technical details of “how-to-tag” are concerned I suggest using Microformats if at all possible but linking as described below is shaping up to be a viable option as well.
  3. Link widgets meaningfully to assist in there identification. This is especially true for ambiguous terms. For example by linking this instance of the word “Pink” to the last.fm page dedicated to the singer of the same name I’ve effectively removed all possible ambiguity as to which “Pink” I meant.
  4. Connect your site to relevant APIs wherever possible. If you deal in real-estate try integrating a map service like Google Maps. Music your thing? Integrate Last.fm or Deezer, etc. A great source for following available APIs and the innovative mashups created with them is ProgrammableWeb.com.

Epilogue

In many cases timing one’s adoption of a new technology can make all the difference. The Goddess of Economics tends to bestow her blessing upon those few nimble early adapters savvy enough to identify and take advantage of the changing marketplace in order to create a unique advantage for themselves and/or their businesses. Being prepared for the Semantic Web will require you and your business to embrace the coming change. The good news is that if you do it right then this time round it’ll be the machines doing the heavy lifting…

I hope you’ve found this useful. Your comments would be much appreciated…
: )

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Posted in Associative browsing, Semantic Web, marketing, mashups, web 3.0 | 1 Comment »
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