Dave Squires on Engaged Communities

There are various techniques to get consumers more engaged in your campaign. If you’re planning an experiential roadshow that’s going around the country, for example, you might ask your community where they would like it to go. Instead of just stating, ‘we are going to ten cities’, you could say, ‘we’re going to 9 cities and we want you guys to vote on where we go next’. It’s all about making the consumer’s opinion count, and everyone has a view on something.

The Smirnoff Nightlife Exchange Project worked like this. Once it was agreed that London was exchanging nightlife with Miami, the Nightlife tour went all over the UK, but it was down to the communities to tell the brand where they wanted them to visit. So it’s really nice engagement from a user’s perspective, and it shows that the brand is listening. It’s clear from this campaign that the brand wants to touch consumers in the real world as well as in the virtual world, so it’s nicely joined up.

Community is everything. Where RPM really scores is that one of the key drivers for keeping any community engaged is through the provision of great content. This content could be created through films, webisodes, games, maps, ads, or banners, and we’ve got a very strong visual content photographic team here who produce high-quality stills and moving images all generated from events we’ve run. RPM has created the events, covered the events, created content for the events, and then atomises that content in other digital and social worlds to further amplify them.