Overview

The Den is currently the blog content destination for Mozilla Firefox's user engagement channels, bringing helpful content to our general audiences to help educate and inform them about (i) how to get the most from Firefox (ii) get product news about Firefox and (iii) share experiences with Firefox.

Phase 1 - Q4 2011: The Den has been acting as a content back-end vehicle for social media and email. It allows us to create and publish content at any time. The audience of the Den is currently limited by the number of people content is promoted to and engaged with within our existing direct communication channels.

Phase 2 - 2012: After establishing the Den in November 2011, we planned to extend its capabilities early in 2012:

• Firstly, that it should become a content destination for Mozilla which will serve the needs of product education, promotion and engagement - that may extend beyond Firefox as new products are stood up. Feature content on Mozilla.org/firefox can be promoted and easily updated here, as well as key SUMO articles to better help our users. By using sensible META text we can take advantage of natural search.

• Secondly, we are currently only serving EN-US as a language. With more Firefox users not having English as their first language we intend to carefully expand localization efforts to better serve of users.

Audience

The main audience for The Den in 2012 is a mainstream user. Someone who regularly uses the internet, however is not overtly tech savvy and nor a developer. We aim to reach the broadest possible group with our content. (Note: through the email preference center we will be allowing our users to select the types of content they see in the newsletter).

Firefox users are our primary audience, however we expect to having a growing emphasis on the Mozilla Marketplace and Persona throughout 2012.

We are speaking to a global audience when using the English language, and plan to expand to more localized content in 2H 2012.

Promotion Vehicles

The current promotional channels to drive eyeballs to The Den are:

* Social media (Facebook & Twitter), which links to articles directly
* Firefox & You Newsletter, which links to articles directly, and is the catalyst for a good amount of the content that is created

Requested promotion:
* Universal header / footer on mozilla.org/firefox
* Firefox Facebook account as a destination link
* Other ideas the website team suggests

Content

Our audience is broad, content needs to speak to as many of our users as possible. Content will should aim to engage with at least 20-30% of our audience.

- Based around events that people are already talking about

    * Holidays

    * Events (Olympics)

    * Life cycle (I'm now a Mom, I'm a student, etc.)

- "Sensationalized" posts

    * Firefox "secrets"
 
    * Top X lists

- Case studies - based on broad user categories / slice of life

    * Sports fans

    * Photo buffs

    * Students, etc. 

- While product should be baked in to content, it should tell a story, answer the who, what, whys

   * No product "announcements" - the PR blog covers that. 
   * Instead of "upgrade your Firefox/Firefox NEXT is here" the better story is "3 Reasons to Upgrade Your Firefox.

   * Rather than detail a feature, dig into the situations for use, when it makes sense, how it fits into a user's daily life.

- SUMO content should also be included, but not rewritten. Rather, re-purposed to tell a story

   * A lot of the help content exists in SUMO already, although in disparate places, and sometimes out of context

   * Use SUMO content to put together "packages" of helpful advice

   * Create Firefox University - landing pages which point to blog posts and SUMO content (TBC)

- Consider customer search terms and develop interesting content to link to from search

   * Search term should fit content for a broad audience.

Post Frequency

Posts will be made as often as good content is created, or needed. However, average will be 1-2 times per week for 1H 2012.

Editorial Calendar

A tab featuring an editorial calendar for The Den will be found in the content calendar.

2012 Localization Plans

- EN is the focus for the first half of 2012 as the content gets ramped up
- Each locale will need a separate instance of The Den and of the Wordpress admin

2012 Goals

Content is and will be measured by these metrics: br>

   - # Blog article views (bug entered - CC what's the bug #?)

   - # Shares (need to file bug on how to get this measured)

   - Amount of time spent on the Den (measure with Webtrends - ask Laura F)

   - # of viewed articles in a given period (How sticky is the site?)

   - Content Rating e.g. "How useful was this content?" button (need to file a bug, see SUMO for ideas)

Post Ideas

Anyone can submit ideas for blog posts. Either contact Carmen Collins (ccollins AT Mozilla DOT com) or enter ideas into this etherpad

Carmen keeps a running list of ideas she'd like to cover as well.