We have a new design on our community website, based on the official Mozilla wordpress theme:

Finally we had fully localized homepage for Mozilla Addons and Mozilla Addons for developers.

Previous Week:

Now:

We are trying to organize our community better and to make the localization better. So you may expect some news on that pretty soon.

Have a nice day,

Mozilla Bulgaria

I know there are a lot, yes I mean a lot of ideas and techniques to do that, but let me explain you mine, that is actually working good.

The image is under Creative Commons License. More info here.

Who’s your audience?

Define your target group and what they exactly need in the domain/area you are familiar with. Let’s say you are targeting programmers, because this will be the case I will use to describe the workflow.

What do they need

• To have fun
• To know what is going on in the IT world
• To get in touch with people like them
• To save time
• To earn money

 Channel: Content

Focusing on the same target group you will know that programmers often don’t have time to browse the web every hour or to follow most of the channels you are following. They are busy as well and open for knowledge in the same time.

Create a content remix:

Fun:

• Xkcd
• Pinterest (use your own board there to collect funny pictures)

News:

• Blogs, mainly blogs
• Dzone
• Hacker news
• Reddit

Get in touch:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Meetup
• Newsgroups

Money:

• Job ads
• Affiliate programs

Uniqueness:

1. Try to find unique blogs and content that are often out of the main stream. Usually this is more interesting and useful for a programmer than an article published on mashable for example.
2. Create your own content – interviews and product articles – this is a lead generation effort.

Regularity

Create the remic whole week, but publish it on a certain day of the week. For example – IT Tuesday.

Usability

Create a website/simple landing from where people can subscribe for the notification for a new edition of your mix and can share the page with friends or colleagues.

Make sure your website and content are accessible from any mobile device, even Amazon Kindle. (it’s easy)

The good news is you don’t have to create a lot of content in order to get this stream popular.

Channel: Social media

Spread the word about your channel via social media and this will bring you success. Publish some of the news like a teaser in twitter and facebook for example.

Track everything – clicks, visits, user behaviour, conversions.
If you are brave enough to do this every week for 2 months you will see how more and more subscribers are coming back to you, because they trust you and now is the time to …

Convert and nurture.

Once you have a lot of views of your content you will have a lot of subscribers? Why? Well I will reveal you a secret.

You can give them more than valuable content and trust:

1. Once a week or month you can give them a book or a huge discount and track the engagement.
2. Lead them to join your company website/product trial or use any other technique to convert them to an opportunity via funny and interesting white-paper or a piece of code they can execute in order to join.

 What am I using:

I am using scoop.it to create the mix.

• A landing Page with a good SEO and mailchimp for quick subscription.
• Rss channel to send the data to Kindle devices.
• Firefox and Chrome addons.

I am always trying to mix software development methodologies into community and marketing management.

Last year I gave a talk at Fosdem about using Agile methods, and especially Trello, to engage your community. Currently I implementing a similar approach into a project I am involved in.

Warning: The following paragraphs may contain a mixture of different software methodologies, usually not compatible with each other.

What is a modern marketing world?

Marketing now, especially online marketing, is a mixture of Community Management, Brave Content Management, Strong Business Analysis, Good and Awesome Metrics, knowing the hacker attitude, fast problem solving and many, many tasks every second.

I am talking about using new technologies, methodologies and fun in the marketing world. I know there are marketing departments with 100 or more employees, busy with a little tiny boring segment, but with an exciting title. But also, there are startups and small, but very successful companies, having teams with up to 4 members that can do better marketing than those 100 using Marketing Kanban Style.

That’s why we need Marketing Kanban Style.

I am an internet enthusiast – maybe one of the few left in the world. I really want to test and hack amazing web tools. Sometimes I find a great tool like Trello and I start using it and talk about it without having been paid a single cent, sometimes it turns out to be a negative experience, like my Facebook story. But I love being an enthusiast.

Yeah, so let’s focus on the step by step go-through:

0. Plan Your Sprint

•   Sit on a table with your team and define the 3 main tasks you want to see implemented this week. Yes, I am not talking about months or years here. Of course this should be in line with the marketing plan, budget and other documents, tables and graphics …
•  Define what resources you will need – guys from IT dept, Customer care service, Sales dept, etc.

1. Visualize

• Tasks may look good in your brain or in a paper or event in your notebook, but they must be placed on a board and here comes Trello.
•  Start: All tasks start from “To Do” or you can call it “Repository” or “The Dungeon” or even “Death Start” but this is your starting point
• Define your flow process. It can be simple “Doing” – “Done” or you can add additional steps like “To be approved” or “Testing needed”. Please do not work with more than 5 steps. It’s a waste of time a energy.

2. Make Policies Explicit

• Define who will do what. If you want you can let people choose what they want to do. This works perfectly for community based marketing and it depends on how cool is your team.
• Resolve conflicts before they appear. Define the collaboration flow – for example – for this HTML newsletter you must talk with Mike and Petra from Dev department. Add this as a note to the task.
•  Do not add other department members to the board.

3. Marketing Stand-ups

• I know the developer stand-ups are real – the people actually are standing up, but the marketing people are allowed to sit down
•  Do a stand-up every day for 15 minutes and be sure you have feedback loops. Every member of the team should report what he/she is working on now and what troubles he/she is having.
• - This is not a problem-solving meeting. Afterwards you can sit down and try to find a way to resolve the problems.

4. Be а Brave Marketeer

• Your team must not be afraid to test new techniques in order to achieve the weekly goal.
• Try to find the boundaries of your team and push a bit outside of them. The marketing world travels with light-speed and you must be very fast as well.
• Explore the Trello functions and use them for your work. It’s a really useful piece of code.

This is just the beginning of a journey for you if you are taking this path. This is the easiest part but believe me you will be more flexible and successful than the good ol’ huge marketing slow moving company.

This will allow you:

1.  to achieve results every week.
2.  to plan your work better
3.  to easily define metrics and goals
4.   to do more work for less money
5.  to build your team and let them evolve together with the company
6.  to have fun.

Let’s do some Marketing Kanban Style. Shall we?

Learn more?

If you want to learn more about Marketing Kanban style and some more amazing ideas – subscribe to my mail-list from here. No spam guaranteed.

What is your browser at work

Who installed it

What browser you are using outside of the office

Fedora 18 on Techbeat.com

Engage

I know most people are busy, especially in big cities. Start your engagement process at least 3 weeks before the release party.

Whom to target:

• All Gnu/Linux users – we are on the same side of the “war”
•  Journalists – create a mini-press release and send it to all journalist friends you know and ask them for help. Most of the time they react really quick. This is a news, anyway and a good one, though
• Your colleagues – common, you can find at least 3 people to share the news with and they can find 3 more people to share it with. IM tools are powerful these days. Your colleagues are spending a lot of time in jabber or skype during the work time
• Programmers and Designers (yes, Fedora is not just for geeks)
• Try your local Hackerspace
• Try your local GNU/Linux and FLOSS related websites. In exchange for the news you can promote them as “media partner” or just call them friends
• Create an identica/ twitter/ FB account and #hashtag and use to spread the word about your party.
• Create simple badges and ask people to put them on their blogs
• Create a mini-website (you can use wordpress.com for a free blog for example)

Schedule and timing

• Try to find out what groups you are targeting – hackers. teachers. programmers, designers … and put at least one topic for every group. Keep them under 20 min.
• Ask people to RSVP to the event and to share it at least 2 weeks before the event.
• Good idea is to use name tags. Just provide some empty white stickers and a pen – let them to the rest.
• Start with asking every person to introduce himself/herself shortly. What’s your name, what you do, and why are you here today…
• Start with an introduction – “What is Fedora and Why all we are here today”. Some people may not know anything about it.
• Combine the talks with free discussions – let people to talk to each other, let the knowledge flows. Ask if someone wants to share how they are using Fedora in their work, life, device or just for fun.
• Have a beer and pizza in the venue if possible. It helps! Especially the beer.
• Bring something to giveaway: buttons, stickers, DVD, brochures.

Collaboration

• Don’t do anything alone, find friends/fans/ambassadors to help you out
• Use agile tools like trello to plan and execute your event. Create tasks and ask people to take the ownership and to do it. Community, community, community

Goal

• Define your goal. Why you are doing this? If you spread 50 DVDs what will be the impact?
• What about if you ask your attendees to do something? For example in the next meeting to bring someone with them or in one month to share their story about Fedora 18.
• Give knowledge and freebies only in exchange for something else – a blog post, an action, an idea, a possible non-free OS replacement.
• Track the success of your event. Definitely attendees will be happy after 3 beers, but what will be the impact for the community in1 month.

Have a smashing Fedora 18 release party and share some pictures and ideas.

Right now I am working with more than 1 mln free users on our freemium model and the challenge is of course to keep this model forever and we will. So how we can get some more money from this user?

Converting “Free” users to “Paid” users.

There are a lot of methodologies to use here, but I am not a fan of any of those. Ha ha, this is so me.

As you know I really like to mix things and I am using a 3-component campaign:

E-mail drilling + behavior recognition

If it’s possible do not send the same message to all users. Try to separate them to different segments according to their activity on your website/service, location, habits or even culture.

Give them a reason to buy.

Internal website support

It’s not a secret that the e-mail marketing is not an effective way to make business these days. Most of the people are not reading their e-mails in the time when they have to or some of the messages go directly to the spam folder or are blocked because of the content.

I combine e-mail marketing with internal website messages, because we run a SAAS and we can do that. Some of the messages say “Go read your e-mail inbox”, some of them are linked directly to the landing page of the promotion.

I am changing the messages almost every day and this works very well.

Social media support

I know our community spends a lot of time in Social networks and that’s why оne of my components is social networks like Twitter, Edmodo and Facebook. No direct buy is requested, just informative campaign.

The campaign is focused on our current free users, I am not looking for new users with this campaign, that’s why I choose informative campaign in social media instead of pure “Order now” campaign.

Nice deals

Obviously our “free” users are happy with the product and do not want to buy, the question is that we want them to buy, so we have to offer them something really attractive:

Metrics’n Tracking

I am measuring everything starting from user’s sentiment via online tools + customer satisfaction via RATER model, open rates, click rates, purchases, different channel behavior and many more. When you have the data, using a tool like geckoboard.com for example will show you in REAL TIME what is going with your campaign and if something went wrong, you can modify it in the fly. Priceless!

What’s next….

Do not discontinue the free service, most of the people count on it, try to monetize it instead, that’s the second part of this article, that will be published anytime soon.

Fedorize it!

How to install Fedora on it? Easy? Since I don’t have SD card writer, shame on me I used my wife’s Windows machine build-in writer, but for good. Unfortunately all Fedora instructions are for Windows 7 and Vista, but here’s how to do that in Windows XP:

1. Download this GNU-licensed program:  Win32DiskImager.
2. Download Fedora 17 PI disk image from  here
3. Burn it on your SD card
4. Plug it in your Raspberry Pi and turn it on

Ready

Bosiya recently sent a letter to the Parliament, the President, the Prime Minister, the Supreme Judicial Council, the Bulgarian National Television and the Bulgarian National Radio, threatening to throw tomatoes at their buildings, as he deemed them responsible for the widespread corruption, crime and lack of media freedom in Bulgaria.

He also specified the date and the order of his “tomato assault,” saying he would start from the Parliament at 10 am Tuesday.

“I can no longer remain a hostage to hope and good manners. Go to hell!” the letter ends.

Kolev’s threat did not go unnoticed and he was anticipated by some 40 police officers as he approached his first target. He was arrested after he threw one tomato.

The “tomato” rally is called for 5 pm Saturday in front of the building of the Parliament.

The “Tomato Revolution” on Facebook is gathering the support of thousands amidst reports of Facebook users that the Interior Ministry has already established emergency headquarters to deal with the threat and 300-strong police force will be used against the demonstrators to prevent possible tons of tomatoes being thrown at the Parliament.

Author: Veselin Drakov

 learn more here

//Bogo

Did you get your 5 dollars back?

It’s not a secret, that I got this question as well:

Did you really delete the data as requested? Can you sell it to me … /can you share it with me?/

Well the truth is, I don’t want my 5$ back, especially not from Facebook.

And yes, I deleted the data…but maybe, just maybe I’ve deleted the data the same way Facebook deletes users’ data when he/she wants to delete his/her account…

What do I want?

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I want Facebook to start removing entire user data after pressing “Delete my account”. Is this so much to ask. This is fair, isn’t it? Can we achieve that as a community?

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News: It seems part of the personal data is still visible in a post in Facebook.

Perhaps you know that a few days ago I bought information about 1 million FB users from a website for the meager amount of 5 US dollars.

Anyway, I received a strange message that FB wanted to talk to me – someone from a deprtment called “Policy” which in my opinion was an euphemism for “Police” and unfortuntely it turned out to be so.

Our conversation began exatly on the agreed minute and with the warning that it “is being recorded”. The part where they usually say that it is for the purpose of “improving the service” was spared.

They thanked me for what I have done but they also asked me that I did not share the information about our talk in my profile (?!?) and my blog.

“Now we would like you to send us this file, delete it, tell us if you have given a copy of it to someone, give us the website from which you bought it including all transactions with it and the payment system and remove a couple of things from your blog. Oh and by the way, you are not allowed to disclose any part of this conversation; it is a secret that we are even having this conversation”.

I agreed to send them the data and the website of course, for that was my purpose. I tried to ask what they would do next but they said it would be an internal legal investigation.

I asked if it was possible to tell what the problem was, after they finished the investigation, so that the users could protect themselves, but they they emphasized that it would be an internal investigation and they would not share any information with third parties. And they mentioned again that I must not tell about it to nobody, because…

The overall tone of the conversation was very imperative, it is Facebook after all.

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Warning: According to Facebook you are not allowed to read this post, so beware.
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(Update): No, Facebook, I don’t want my 5$ back, but I want something from (for) you.