Written on June 7, 2011 at 9:19 am, by neoncomms
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.
neon creates entertaining brand experiences through a mix of live and digital
Written on May 23, 2011 at 6:11 pm, by neoncomms
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
neon creates entertaining brand experiences through a mix of live and digital
Written on April 1, 2011 at 3:03 pm, by neoncomms
Hi, I’m Owen Farrington a senior digital account manager here at neon. What do I do you ask??? Simple – I’m a forward thinking project manager and digital marketing strategist…but for short I like to say that I do ‘Digital Engagement’. Whether it is web marketing strategy, digital project management, account handling, social media management or simply using online channels to support traditional PR campaigns, media relations, design work and on-street activity. Essentially, I help build things for brands & companies online – And I get those ‘things’ talked-tweeted-bookmarked-blogged about. You can follow me on Twitter @owenfarrington or find out more about what I do on LinkedIn
We’re going to be running a series of HOW-TO guides on community management. Phase 1 is how to effectively organise a pre-launch strategy for your online community. This will be followed by the following guides:
PHASE 2: Launch
PHASE 3: Growth
PHASE 4: Increasing Engagement
PHASE 5: Measuring ROI
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:
www.facebook.com/windowsaccessallareas
www.facebook.com/kinectforxbox360
neon creates entertaining brand experiences through a mix of live and digital
Written on April 1, 2011 at 1:24 pm, by neoncomms
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
neon creates entertaining brand experiences through a mix of live and digital
