A very big congratulations to the happy couple. Sources confirm that despite a cool exterior, there were some extreme nail biting!

After a spate of chair thefts around the office of late, Stu has come up with an interesting approach to keeping his chair his own.

Team neon

After May’s post announcing the arrival of the very first neon Chilli, we can now confirm that another two have flourished. The lucky Chilli is proving its worth… we’re looking forward to what the next bloom will bring.

Team neon

Can you spot him?

The dynamic buzz of agency life has been peppered week-long with, ‘ahh CUTE’s from the corners of the office. As if the live feed from the penguin enclosure at Edinburgh Zoo obsession of Christmastime wasn’t enough, the new BBC Springwatch live webcam can be found lurking in the background of every neon-ite’s computer screen. To quote Stu ‘If you’re feeling stressed… just have a baby wood warbler in the background and flick back whenever you feel the stress levels rising’. We suggest you do the same:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/uk/webcams/

Team neon

It’s been a busy month here at neon, with some great new clients and projects. Last month also marked a new night for neon– our first awards ceremony at Marketing Engage Awards.

We had a great night out with our clients from TalkTalk and Microsoft, both of which had campaigns we were shortlisted for, and also found ourselves taking home a 3rd place for our Windows 7 Second Movies campaign. Any excuse to get dressed up pretending to be posh and have a night out is always fine by us. Have a look at the pictures above to see how the team look when they’re not glued to their desks. And also how Carrie looks after a single glass of wine.

We’re celebrating the arrival of neon’s first home grown chilli in Jess & Graeme’s office. A year in the making it seems to be a ‘lucky chilli’ as it’s arrival coincided with some great new clients and projects. We’ll be finding a suitable way to test it’s potency in the near future….. Watch this space.

Team neon

Happy belated birthday wishes to Costas and Marriage. Anyone for cake?

PHASE 1: PRE-LAUNCH

?1. Identify what you want to achieve

Obvious? Yes. Trivial? No. This is probably the most critical bit of pre-launch work and it often overlooked by brands big and small. Every brand should identify and set out clear objectives of what you want to achieve and when you would ideally like to achieve it by. Examples:

• Increase brand affinity
• Drive active preference of product(s)
• Establish greater WOM marketing
• Engage consumers in R&D and product development
• Enable more effective and accountable customer support

?2. Define your measurement of success

In order to measure your success you need to define what success looks like. Any success needs to clearly link back to your objectives while also being clearly measurable. These need to be tangible, for example:

• Increased sales tracked by affiliate links
• Increased social media conversations about your brand tracked by tweets/posts/discussions

?3. Identify your resource capacity

In order to identify your broader community engagement strategy you must clearly understand the resources you will have in the short/medium/long term. You need to ensure that you have the capacity to build, manage and grow with your community. Resources should be fully understood in terms of staffing, management, in/out office support, hosting and potentially back office support (eg tech support, SLA’s, legal guidance, marketing & moderation support) etc.

?4. Identify who you want to reach

You know what you want to achieve, you’ve defined how you’re going to measure success and you’ve identified the resources available to you. Now you need to identify who you want to target. There is always the danger that brands try to reach too many consumers. While the broad consumer targeting strategy isn’t ‘wrong’ per se it does often leads to scattergun marketing and resource wastage. From a practical point of view it is much easier to target specific consumers with a strategy that engages them in a unique and effective way. You can always broaden your targets once you have an active and engaged community.  As part of this targeting you should aim to have a rich understanding of your consumer, eg:

• What are their hobbies
• What technology do they use
• How do they use social media
• What are their broad personality traits
• What are their motivations for participating in your or other online communities

?5. Identify what type of community you’ll launch

Community management can be characterised into four active categories:

• Leisure: Some people spend their leisure time in online communities. People come together, talk about games, sports, TV, music and have fun doing it.
• Relationships: The world is a lonely place, it’s hard to approach a strangers. You might try to find fellow recovering alcoholics, expand your business network or be seeking true love.
• Fix Something: Something isn’t right in the world and you want to fix it. Maybe the environment is going to hell, your local MP is doing a bad job, or you computer operating system isn’t as good as it needs to be.
• Self-Improvement: You want to improve your life. Perhaps be better at your job or expand your reputation? Maybe it’s to save time or seek help in finding the perfect pair of shoes?

While I do think that this categorisation system may be a bit too simplified it is useful and illustrates how communities can be aligned to consumer motivations. When building a community you need to clearly motivate consumers with a bigger community raison d’etre. Consumers need to understand why they should get involved and what is the ‘pay-off’ or perceived value they will receive from their activity. You should never forget that consumers are not just a ‘target’, these are real people with lots of activities which compete for their time. Every community faces the same challenge, people are self-interested, at times lazy and choose when/where/how they want to engage with online communities. You will never be able to change or control these consumer attributes, so don’t fight them just make sure you always build these attributes into your strategic thinking and planning.

Curious to see neon community management in action? Why not visit:

After a week-long battle of wills with the cleaner and a letter in Spanish to explain the problem. The cleaner now leaves on desk and does not throw in bin anymore

team neon