Are You Confident and Demanding Enough to Switch?

If you have switched to a different internet browser does it mean you are an advanced web user? Do you need to be open-minded to go beyond your “default” option when it comes to surfing on the Internet? And finally, what is the difference between people sticking to Internet Explorer and those who choose an alternative option, like Firefox?

Seth Godin, in his latest blog post “Why downloading Firefox is like getting into college” presents some interesting facts that will help us to answer the above questions:

25% of the visitors we track at Squidoo use Firefox, which is not surprising. But 50% of the people who actually build pages on the site are Firefox users. Twice as many.

As he founded Squidoo he is the best guy to present these stats. He continues with a few conclusions:

This is true of bloggers, of Twitter users, of Flickr users… everywhere you look, if someone is using Firefox, they’re way more likely to be using other power tools online. The reasoning: In order to use Firefox, you need to be confident enough to download and use a browser that wasn’t the default when you first turned on your computer.

Switchers are usually demanding people who don’t just accept an average solution. They go out and look for different options as they believe in the power of choice. Once they find it, they will tell everybody around about their discovery. They can get excited about an Add-on to Firefox that made their life easier and will be happy to spread the news so other can benefit from it as well.

If I ran Firefox, I’d be hard at work promoting extensions and power tools (I love the search add-ons) and all manner of online interactions.

Seth very often talks about sneezers, people who are far more likely to spread an ideavirus than others. Most switchers are like that. Hungry to share the news. Seth is my marketing guru so if you haven’t read any of his books, I recommend you started with his best selling Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable.