Sarah Doherty

Always thinking. Always dreaming.

  1. Huzzah! Social Media Toolkit Launched!

    Today, I definitely don’t have a “case of the Mondays” because it’s Social Media Toolkit launch time!  Over the last few months I’ve been working on putting together a grouping of tools and best practices around social media – think of it as a sister site to the Spread Firefox Education Toolkit.

    The Mozilla Social Media Toolkit is a set of tools that allows you to leverage social media to market Mozilla and Firefox in your region and beyond.  The toolkit contains everything you’ll need from best practices, tips and tricks, to design assets for both Facebook and Twitter.

    Are you a Mozillian that has a community or localized Mozilla/Firefox social media account?  Or are you interested in setting one up?  Then this toolkit is for you!

    One of the coolest parts of the Toolkit (in my humble opinion) are the social media design asset kits.  Collaborating with The Royal Order we are releasing a set of 5 Facebook Profile Images and 4 Twitter Designs (2 Mozilla, 2 Firefox) that include a Twitter background, design color palette and profile picture.  With these designs kits you are able to instantly identify your page as a Mozilla community-supported group (while looking pretty sexy too)!

    socialmediatoolkit1

    socialmediatoolkit2

    Of course this project could not have come together without great synergy and collaboration from many different people. I want to give a huge thanks to Jamey Boje, Mary Colvig, John Slater, Tara Shahian and the fine folks over at The Royal Order.

    Thanks so much and can’t wait to see these new design assets all over the Twittersphere (and other social networks too)!

  2. SXSW 2010: Sessions, Parties, Intellectual Stimulus and Good Food

    Nearly two weeks have passed since SXSW Interactive, yet I still can remember the overwhelming feeling of excitement and happiness that passed through me during the warm Austin weekend thinking that I actually *belonged* at this conference.

    Although I’m a self proclaimed geek where programming lingo and coder’s jokes put me at ease, I don’t spend hours hidden behind bash shells, fighting with svn or checking on the stability of a server.  My days are are spent in marketing where I live and breathe social media, creative campaigns, and the power of engaging a wonderful community to promote Firefox.

    As a SXSW Interactive “first-timer” I came in not knowing what to expect but leaving with the feeling that this was the first conference where I truly felt like I was *home*.  The material of each of the sessions was tailored around my interests and although I’ve heard  complaints that SXSW has changed, I still felt that I  left with lots of insight, new connections and a revived passion for the field I am in.

    Sessions

    I was fortunate to attend a lot of great sessions on Saturday and Sunday.  Some of my favorites were:

    • Web Fonts: The Time Has Come
    • We F*cked Up: Happy Cog and Friends, Exploring Failures, Together
    • danah boyd‘s keynote; Opening Remarks: Privacy and Publicity
    • Offering Your Content in 100 Languages
    • What’s Open Video and Why Does It Matter?
    • Wow, That’s Cool…Fun With HTML5 Video

    Although this is just a snapshot of some of the sessions and panels that I attended the few that still stick out in my mind is the We F*cked Up Panel and danah boyd’s keynote.  In the session it was wonderful to hear about projects that fall apart and the tremendous opportunity to use our failures to grow both professionally and personally.  I left this session inspired to take risks and to not be afraid to try something new for fear of failure.

    danah boyd’s keynote was inspirational for a two reasons.  For one, there were two illustrators creating real time drawings of the content being discussed.  Being a very visual person this was a great way to take in the information and to process afterward.  The second was the actual content – her discussion on privacy and publicity and how it fits into the realm of social media was awakening.  As social media continues to become a huge part of our everyday life what risks are we taking by putting our content out publicly?  What privacy concerns does this bring up?

    Mozilla SXSW Events

    In addition to the many sessions that, we had some great events including the Add-ons “All You Can Mini Golf Meetup” and our SXSW Happy Hour party, which were both featured in ZDNet’s “15 SxSW 2010 Parties and Meetups You Can’t Miss“.

    The Mozilla Happy Hour party at Cedar Door had a line that started forming out the door over an hour before the event event started.  Throughout the night we saw 700+ attendees come through the door to learn about Mozilla and get some great Rock Your Firefox swag.  One of the perks of the night had to be when Joi Ito announced the three Jetpack for Learning winners that then received the “ride of their life” in the pimped out Firefoxin’ Local Motors Rally Fighter Car.

    Miscellaneous

    In addition to some great sessions and Mozilla Events I was able to attend to some great parties including Happy Cog’aoke and the Mashable Party, enjoy good Austin cuisine and soak up the Austin sun on my brisk walks between the hotel and conference center.  I’m excited for 2011 and what SXSW will hold for me!

  3. Illustration Visualization from Dana Boyd’s Privacy and Publicity Keynote

  4. Firefox 3.6 & Personas: What’s Your Style?

    First off – happy download day!  Go grab a brand new shiny copy of Firefox 3.6!

    This is my second product launch since coming onboard at Mozilla.  Product launches normally involve lack of sleep and getting into the office super early.  This launch was special for me because I got to be involved in two really cool projects:

    1. Air Mozilla Streaming during Launch
    2. Personas: What’s Your Style? Photo Booth

    Air Mozilla Streaming During Launch

    We wanted to create a collaborative way to share the excitement of our 3.6 launch with the community.  Thanks to the help of Mary, Asa, Jono and Atul we were able to pull together 2.5 hours of great content on Air Mozilla.  We had cameras broadcasting both the Toronto and Mountain View offices, which allowed people to ask questions through the IRC #airmozilla channel.

    In addition to the action between Toronto and Mountain View, Jono hosted a number of wonderful 5-10 minute interviews.  Some of the interviews we conducted were:

    • Firefox Engineering – Crashkill & Improved stability with Damon Sicore
    • Evangelism – Chris Blizzard
    • Web Development – Plugin Updater with Mike Morgan
    • Marketing – Melissa Shapiro (PR) and  Tara Shahian (Making of the Personas video & “What’s your style campaign?”)
    • Build and Release Engineering with John O’Duinn and Lukas Blakk
      • A look at our process
    • Personas with Ryan Doherty and Myk Melez
    • Firebug with Rob Campbell – v1.5 released and compatible with 3.6!
    • QA with Tony Chung and  Juan Becerra

    This was a lot of fun and got the entire community involved.  We peaked at around 200 people watching through our air.mozilla.org stream and I am looking forward to putting together something similar for our next launch!

    Personas: What’s Your Style? Photo Booth

    One of the new features of Firefox 3.6 is that Personas are baked into the browser.  This allows you to easily customize your web browser right “out of the box”.  Thanks to a few of our amazing marketing community members, we started a pretty cool campaign where you can take a photo of yourself with your favorite Persona.

    I spent part of today wrangling fellow coworkers to pose with their favorite Persona by setting up a MacBook Pro with an iSight camera and using Photo Booth to grab photos.  This was a very easy to way to get everyone involved and we got a great collection of photos!  Check it out:

    This setup can easily be duplicated anywhere – think coffee shops!

    For more information on this check out the Spread Firefox page (and while your at it watch our cool Personas video!)

  5. My Personal Identity on the Web

    Personas | Metropath(ologies) | An installation by Aaron Zinman
    http://personas.media.mit.edu/

    Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.  It allows you to see how the machine is working, revealing the computer’s uncanny insights and inadvertent errors such as the characterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name.  It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world where digital histories are as important – if not more important – than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant – for now.  Fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, and this kind of data is indispensable but far from infallible.

    (I’m at least very proud that I have pretty much completely re-branded myself with my new married name so not much still exists online with my old maiden name.  It hasn’t been deleted, just renamed to “doherty”.

    This installation brings up a couple of really good points.  I’m sure we all have been shocked that someone shares the same name as us and that it is impossible to correctly search the internet for our contributions and not someone else’s.  It will be interesting to see how this problem is solved.

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