Opera Otaku

I know some of you read Opera employee blogs to learn more about the company. You'll be interested to know that Opera's Capital Markets Day for 2006 was held on December 12th at Opera HQ in Oslo. Investors, analysts, and others had a chance to learn more about Opera's financial outlook and general plans for the future. Here are the presentation visuals for your reading pleasure, linked to from Opera's Financial Reports page: http://www.opera.com/company/investors/finance/2006/Opera_CMDexcerpts.pdf

Happy New Year to everyone who visits my humble blog from time to time. 2007 promises to be quite an exciting year for Opera. Obviously, I can't into specifics, but look forward to exciting announcements and good news as we move forward in the new year. The beta launch of Opera on the Wii has been a great success, and the positive press it generated has helped a lot in our efforts to promote Opera to a larger audience.

How and why we promote Opera is something I want to discuss in this post.

When people talk about promoting Opera, the discussion inevitably turns into a debate regarding which features of Opera we ought to tell people about. This is inherently problematic; Opera has so many amazing features, it's hard to know where to start. What I try to do when talking to people about Opera, therefore, is to listen before I speak. I ask them questions about their browsing needs and habits, and then I see how Opera can help them in their own lives.

In the last few months (my breaking-in period as an Opera employee) I've been spending a lot of time listening to people, learning as much as possible about Opera users, non-Opera users, Opera fans, and Opera foes to help ensure that our marketing (and engineering) efforts are based on real world data about real people. I think that kind of research is really important, but how does that translate into better communication and better understanding?

When people ask us why they should use Opera, if the answer we give is overly vague and subjective ("because it's the best browser!") or too feature-specific ("because tabbed browsing and mouse gestures will save the world") then we have failed to communicate effectively. There have to be bigger, more meaningful, but nonetheless concrete and not overly-subjective reasons why someone should consider switching browsers (or trying any new piece of technology, for that matter).

Therefore, as Opera enthusiasts who want to spread the word about Opera, we have to ask ourselves one very important question: Why is it important that more people know about and use Opera?

How we answer that question will set the tone for everything else we say about Opera.

So what's your answer?

As many of you know, Opera currently makes various web banners available for download so people can post them on their own websites. Recently, there has been a lot of interest in printed material. See, for example, the spirited demand for Opera stickers here and here, and interest in the new poster contest here.

At Opera, we try our best to send our users stickers, shirts, pens, pins, and the like, but it's not easy because our users come from all over the world. Long ago, we made some of our promo material available online for Opera fans to print out. If there is sufficient interest, we'd like to do it again.

My question to all of you is this:

What type of downloadable and printable material are you interested in? Please give any and all feedback regarding the form of the materials and its content (i.e. do you want printable flyers, in color or black and white, or something smaller like stickers, and what do you want these things to say?). Of course, we have some ideas of our own, but we want to give you a chance to tell us specifically what you would be excited to print out and share.