“Mozilla is currently deep in the heart of its celebration over officially setting a new Guinness World Record for the largest number of software downloads in 24 hours for its Firefox 3 browser. But the company isn’t cheering alone — its enjoying this victory with the community it rightfully credits for helping it succeed.” Jennifer Leggio’s ZDNet article is an interesting examination of Mozilla’s non-traditional marketing strategies, where social networking and word-of-mouth engagement has generally ruled the day. Interviewing Paul Kim, Mozilla’s VP of Marketing, Jennifer digs into the methods used to promote the recent Firefox 3 Download Day activities, which include: Spread Firefox, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube among others. The full article is available at ZDNet.

On the evening of Firefox 3 Download Day, Stephen Colbert gave Firefox 3 his “Colbert Bump”, further buoying the already giddy and exhausted crowd of folks involved with the launch efforts. The Mozilla Metrics team has since combed through the download logs looking to see if the “Colbert Bump” actually had any effect on the traffic on the website. “Download Day was a wild success, and we were happy to share some thanks and credit with Stephen. However, a few questions naturally arose, e.g., what was the direct impact of the Colbert Bump? and could the effect be precisely measured?” It turns out that there was a significant spike in the downloads exactly one and two minutes after “the Bump”. For the details, read the full post at the Blog of Metrics.