Use Your Community to Spread the Word Online

Two years ago, many Web surfers had never heard of Firefox, Mozilla's free Web browser, let alone tried it. Now, thanks in part to the Spread Firefox campaign, the browser holds just under 15 percent of the worldwide market.

What's more, the wildly successful campaign garnered enough donations for a full-page Firefox ad in The New York Times and led to 75 million downloads in about six months. The best part? Spread Firefox didn't have to pay a dime to get the word out.

A successful grassroots marketing campaign isn't about spending money, but rather about understanding and harnessing the power of community. Actively involving the community to help promote a cause or product is one of the main ideas behind Pinko, a marketing style primarily developed by Tara Hunt. An online marketing professional with more than seven years experience in both the corporate and nonprofit worlds, Hunt sees Pinko marketing as a way to empower individuals by engaging them in a dialogue, rather than just talking at them.

Recently, Hunt co-founded her own consulting firm with Chris Messina, a Web builder and one of the minds behind 2004's award-winning grassroots Spread Firefox campaign.

Known as Citizen Agency, Hunt and Messina's consultancy focuses on helping companies and organizations build and maintain thriving online communities, with a mantra of "Individuals, working together, can move history."

Hunt and Messina sat down with TechSoup to answer a handful of questions about Pinko marketing and to offer advice on how nonprofits can use technology and their communities to get the word out.

TechSoup: Can you discuss the basic philosophy behind Pinko marketing?

Tara Hunt: There are five principals. The first one is no more outbound messages. It's all about inbound messages, so you are concentrating way more on feedback and putting money into building the on-ramps for feedback. The second is authenticity: people can see right through the bull. And with that comes ethics. There are a lot of companies that exploit viral marketing and grassroots marketing to sell products that are not so nice to the environment or [nice] in general.

There's also the idea of nichefication, so stop thinking about the mass market and start thinking about solving real peoples' needs. Of course, there's adopting open-source principals and really involving people in the entire design process of your product.

TS: You've cited the book "The Cluetrain Manifesto" as a major influence on your marketing style. How would distill the book's main ideas for the uninitiated?

TH: The basis behind "The Cluetrain Manifesto" is that markets are conversations. I think previously, it was all about branding and targeting and creating this idea of the corporation as all-powerful and almighty. Markets are conversations — talked about, opening up, listening, and having conversations back and forth with people — rather than just talking to them.

TS: Is Citizen Agency currently working with any nonprofits?

TH: We're working with a festival out in New York called The Inspiration Festival, and we're helping them put together a way to collaborate with all of the attendees, as well as people who can't be there, to create something really spectacular.

We're teaching them how to use all of the various different free, collaborative tools out there like wikis, blogs, social bookmarking, photo-sharing — all those cheap and/or free tools. And we try to stitch them together for them, so that they can use everything that's available to do this collaborative stuff.

We are working with them to create various different feeds from the various different collaborative tools out there. We're going to set up — on their main site — instructions for their participants on how to upload and tag your photos on flickr. And then whatever photos is tagged "inspiration festival" on Flickr will magically appear on their Web site.

We're also using PBWiki, so they [the Inspiration Festival] can put all the projects on there and we just direct them and help people through the process of collaborating on a wiki. And then we're using Magnolia for the bookmarking. So it's just basically stitching together what's already out there, and that's the hardest thing to explain, is that these small pieces loosely joined is happening.

We're so used to many, many years of creating these big, heavy, walled-garden Web sites. And some firm that might still be in that era would go to the Inspiration Festival and say, "This is what you have to build." We're saying, "You don't' have to build that. It's free and cheap and simple and let's keep it as simple and lightweight as possible so you can clone this process for any other event that you're having."

TS: Chris, can you talk about your previous work on the Spread Firefox campaign, back when the browser was part of Mozilla's nonprofit arm?

Chris Messina: The [Howard Dean presidential campaign] provided a great deal of inspiration for the Firefox campaign, in terms of people-powered campaigns and shifting from the sort of centralized, top-down models to being bootstraps — not just by choice or by fashion — but by necessity.

The Mozilla folks just didn't have a boatload of money to throw at this stuff. And to do something that literally captured the enthusiasm of people around the world without having a major marketing firm behind it…shows a lot of promise for folks who can put out a good product and include their community in exactly what they're doing.

TS: One of the Spread Firefox campaign's highlights was when it ran the New York Times ad, which was mostly financed by individual donations. How did the word spread around the Internet and what did you guys do to help the get the message out?

CM: [It spread via] blogs, forums, IRC.

We had a lot of campaigns going on where we would do mini-contests for people who had the most donations per day or the most referrals. We had a whole referral system set up where people would put a little "Spread Firefox" button on their site and they would get referral credits and points for doing that. Then you could put a "Money Raised" meter on your site. And then, later on, we did a downloads-count thing, and that continued a lot of the momentum, because we ended up getting 75 million downloads in about six months.

We had forums on the site that a lot of us were active in, we had photo galleries; things the community wanted, we would build them into Drupal. And we didn't even build it very well, but we just tried to throw as much out there as possible. And the community would literally come around and fix bugs for us and solve problems. So it was extremely transparent in that sense.

TH: You can create all sorts of badges and widgets and try to get people involved as much as possible, but if you're not delighting people…. Firefox was amazing and delighting people by getting better and better and making people really tied to the cause. And if you're not doing that, you're not going to go anywhere.

TS: So what shouldn't you do when conduct a marketing campaign? What turns people off?

TH: A lot of pushing, and when things aren't working, to continue to throw money into that push.

CM: I think just duplicity. It's like the music industry: "Oh we're all about music and fun, and then we're working with a company that goes and sues people." It's like, get your message straight.

TH: There's also just not listening. AT&T has these big billboards that say "Blogging Delivered." And the blogosphere — the majority of it — was up in arms, like, "How the heck did AT&T become the savior of blogging?" There are all sorts of negative campaigns about that online. And AT&T has said nary a word, and they continue along with the campaign.

CM: The problem was partially that they were being disingenuous by suggesting that they knew anything. On the one they have these billboards that say "AT&T Blogging Delivered," and then you do a search on their Web site for "blogging," and nothing comes up.

If anything, I think nonprofits need to be very true with where they come from. The more that nonprofits have gone commercial or tried to become more corporate-like, I think they've alienated a lot of the people that who wanted to work with them because they represented an alternative.

TS: So what do nonprofit marketers need to do differently from those in the corporate world?

CM: I think for one thing, they have to be scrappy. I think that the money situation is different, and I think that's actually a good thing. I think having constraints does keep you humble and should keep you closer to the ground.

A lot of it is building solid foundations, really. This is the funny thing about Web 2.0: a lot of people get all caught up in the technology, but it's still the same old world. People still need to have good services and good relationships with people — very, very basic things that often get glossed over in the technology itself.

TS: Many nonprofits might be unable to afford a marketing staff or consultants, meaning that someone with little experience may be forced to take on this job. What sort of advice would give this person?

TH: The basis of everything that we do is to give our clients the advice of being part of the community they serve. They just need to be involved at the grassroots level deeply, because they'll grow long-term relationships, they'll know exactly what their community's needs are, and they'll be able to see trends coming down the pipe that they should be aware of.

CM: One of the things that we saw in our experiences was sort of a lack of appreciation for the community that you already have. A lot of what I think nonprofits can do for bootstrapping stuff is to look at the people who are already there, who already are engaged and don't want to just give you their money but want to help out...and make things happen.

I think that hooking those folks together and letting them have some direction and some say in the organization is really important. And insomuch as you can find folks who are turned on with technology, they can be the guiding force for the organization, because they'll be on both sides. They'll be the connector and the bridge that goes from one culture to the other culture and will slowly help transform things from the inside out.

TS: Would you recommend any online resources nonprofit marketing staffers or volunteers can tap into?

TH: I would definitely join the Pinko Marketing Google Group. There's an amazing number of Pinkos on that list — whether they're entrepreneurs or nonprofits or marketers — from around a world. You pose a question to that list and you'll find that you'll get probably 15 great answers, great ideas for how to market in the Pinko way. The Pinko marketing wiki is a good place for some resources.

Kathy Sierra's blog Creating Passionate Users: amazing. Even though her principles apply to software, I think you can use them in all sorts of different areas; they're pretty general.

CM: Just generally, there's always the nptech [nonprofit technology] tag. You can either do a search on Technorati or go to del.icio.us — there are a lot of resources there.