(For now, I am just copying and pasting and refactoring this little blurb from Tara's post to the Google groups list here. Some of it is Tara's writing, and some of it is added by me.)

The Firefox developer community fostered and leveraged their developer network
to really spread the word help Firefox become a real IE competitor.

One successful example is the ad placed by the community on the New York Times. The signficance of that wasn't that it was a traditional ad
placed in the NYT, it was that:

1. It was 'suggested' by the developer community
2. It was funded by raising money over a 10 day period from within that
community, which was originally supposed to by a 1 page WSJ ad, but the
funds collected exceeded all expectations, so it became a 2 page NYT spread
3. The final ad focused not on FireFox, but on the community behind it -
listing all of the 10,000 users who donated as the artwork itself:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:2004_New-York-Times_Firefox_ad.png

http://www.spreadfirefox.com is an ongoing community effort that uses blogging, and community feedback to create apply ideas about spreading the use of firefox webrowser. Examples include:

*Firefoxies project- similar to a "hotornot" type of contest, but requiring the download and use of Firefox web borwser to participate.

*Affiliate Program People who click through your link to download firefox give you credit towards rewards.

*Mozilla Goes Mainstream - An article from Biz Week that goes over bit of the history and some of the thought process from the Firefox team as well as some more examples of how their community ran with their product.

The Spread Firefox Community marketing page hosts many other projects that are all ideas of the community of users and the open source developers of the product itself. These ideas create marketing memes about the safety, no-cost, and dependability/superiority of the product.

Note that the community is so enthusiastic about participating on the marketing of the product in part because they have input on the design of the product itself. So, this gives them an incentive to want to make it a "standard" that is supported by others (like other software makers, people who design websites, etc) So this is one primary driver for getting people enthusiastic about participating in Pinko marketing:

People will likely be more enthuisiastic about marketing something when they have some input on it's design, or on the decisions made about a service, etc.

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