The Impact Mozilla community marketing challenge comes to a close on Friday October 24th, so this is your last opportunity to submit a one or two page idea summary. The purpose of this challenge is to help improve Firefox user retention. We know that tens of millions of people have downloaded Firefox but don’t continue to use it today. How do we get these past users back? How to we keep future users active once they’ve downloaded Firefox? If you have an idea about how we could solve this problem, we urge you to write it up and submit it through the Impact Mozilla website on or before this coming Friday.

Mozilla’s Public Relations team has been working on opening up the PR process, making it more transparent and more in fitting with Mozilla’s open source DNA. Their most recent foray is a post written by Melissa Shapiro, in which she discusses PR metrics. “How do we know if we’re getting better if there’s no baseline indication of impact? The answer isn’t a pure science. True PR metrics are not just quantitative but qualitative as well. Quantitative analysis explores things like total number of articles, mentions in the press, coverage by country, etc. Qualitative analysis includes message penetration as well as audience and tone analysis. It turns out they are equally important in evaluating the success of Mozilla’s major PR initiatives.”

The article goes on to discuss the various types of quantitative and qualitative analysis we explore as part of our PR process at Mozilla, outlining use cases for each and giving examples comparing the public relations activities around the Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 releases. If you’re interested in learning more about the normally opaque world of public relations, you should check out Melissa’s blog for this and other articles.