I don’t know if you have noticed that the Daily Telegraph Travel section have just started running a competition to ‘Win a Kindle’ during July.  It makes an interesting case study.

The competition was mentioned in the Daily Telegraph Travel section on July 2nd – win a Kindle every hour between 10am and 6 every Friday in July.  It was in the small print though, no big splash – and the direction given was to a website page

Last Friday, I thought I would give this a go.  I couldn’t remember the website page so I searched around for a bit and found a link to the  TelegraphTravel facebook page.

You could take part in one of three ways (that I could find):

1. www.telegraph.co.uk/kindlecompetition and fill in your name and email address

2. Like the Telegraph Travel facebook page and then click a link to enter your first name and email address.

3. Click the link from the TelegraphTravel twitter feed which would take you to the sign up form.

You could enter more than once.

When I ‘liked’ the TelegraphTravel facebook page at about 11am last Friday – the competition had been running for an hour, there were just over 350 ‘likes’.  There are now 1,164 likes – not a huge increase in number, but not bad for a few hours – and now they have those fans as a captive audience.

The competition was also promoted through Twitter – which took people direct to the sign in page on the website.

Both facebook and Twitter kept people informed of who had won the kindle (not me unfortunately!) and answered any questions.

This is a nice example of joined up Social Media (almost).  I would be interested on how the return on investment is measured and what was their original objective.

They are gathering email addresses – is this worth the cost of over 35 kindles?  I wonder how many of these are email addresses that they don’t already have?  I was surprised that my having entered the competition through the link on facebook didn’t appear on my wall – this would potentially have generated interest through my facebook friends, similarly through Twitter.

It will be interesting to see how the campaign changes during the next month – and what use is now made of my valuable email address.

What do you think – have you done anything similar?

LinkedIn News

is a set of news feeds that appear on your LinkedIn home page or can be displayed on your smartphone LinkedIn app.

The news displayed is selected from a large number of possible feeds, based on  and the number of people in your network that have shared the news feed.

To select which feeds to follow, click on See All Headlines (or click News from the Menu bar).  This will bring up LinkedIn today.

On the right hand side, you can choose which sources or industry sectors to follow either by selecting from the right hand side or clicking on the ? in the top right hand corner and selecting Follow/Unfollow.

The sectors or sources that you have selected to follow will be displayed on the LinkedIn today page.  This is particularly useful if using the LinkedIn app for the SmartPhone as you can see a list of all feeds that you follow.

You can also save a particular news item to review later and don’t forget to share news with your contacts so your network can benefit from what you are looking at.

Blogging is another tool in your Social Media Locker that you can use to share information and engage with your audience.  When you start to write your blog, consider the following:

1. Audience

Central to all of your social media should be knowing your audience.  Who do you want to read your blog?  Write in their language.

As an accountant, if you are trying to appeal to your potential clients, don’t put them off by using technical language.  Nothing is more likely to make me stop reading your blog than long words!

Ensure the blog post is relevant and useful to your audience – not many people will want to read in your business blog about the terrible journey you had home last Friday!

2. Professional

The blog is representing your company, make sure it is not full of spelling and grammatical errors.

Use white space to make it easier to read and where appropriate images help make a blog easier to read and understand.

3. Link to Website

If people find your blog either through your other forms of Social Media, you want to keep them looking at the information about your business.

I would generally recommend including your blog within your company website – or very closely attached.  Once you have captured interest, why not keep it?

If your website doesn’t have the facility for blogging, create a blog using wordpress or blogger, but make sure you have clear signposts to and from your website.

4. Keywords

Think about the title of your blog – and your content.  Can you tweak the title to be more friendly to search engines?Consider what your audience would type in to Google when searching for the information in your blog – and use these words as your title.

5. Call To Action

What do you want your audience to do when they have read your blog?  I don’t like blogs that sell to me, but you don’t want the audience to just go away.  Get them to do something, once they have read your blog.  This could be as simple as a comment on the content, a tweet or like, sign up to your newsletter, give you a call, download a document or read another blog.

It is a good idea to put the call to action at the bottom of the blog.

6. Regular

It is a good idea to create blog posts regularly and frequently.  I try to do a couple of posts a month – others will do a couple a week.  You need to think about how much time you have to write good quality posts as well as making sure that each post is useful to your audience.  Ideally, you will schedule the content of your blog posts several months in advance.

Blogging is one of the Social Media tools available to you.  Each business needs to decide whether it is a tool for them based on their audience and their own resources.  If you would like help with this, do give me a call.

I am often asked to present to networking groups about Social Media.  To me, Social Media is all about engaging with your contacts using the tool or tools that are most appropriate for your business and your audience.

An effective tool could be, if used correctly, a newsletter.

A newsletter allows you to talk directly to those customers who already like or use you.  They may have already worked with you, or they may have chosen to hear what you have got to say.  What better audience could you ask for?  I get either positive feedback or sales from each newsletter I send.

Newsletters (like all engagement) can backfire if you don’t get it right – consider the following points:

1. Interest

Think about who you are talking to – what do they want to hear?  I try to include both news about Concise Training as well as tips & tricks that my audience might find useful.  It is important to make sure that your newsletter is easy to read and interesting.

2. Contacts

To whom are you sending your email newsletter?  Ask permission to add somebody to your list to avoid being thought of as a spammer.  Encourage people to join up to your newsletter through your website as well as using other forms of Social Media.  I have grown my contact database slowly and carefully over the past year or so.  I get few unsubscribes and a good percentage of clicks and opens.

3. Regular

Decide how often you are going to send the newsletter and stick to it as much as possible.  I send my email newsletters out monthly – quarterly may work better for your business.  It is a decision based on your resources, your availability of interesting articles and your audience.  Once you have decided on a timescale – stick to it!  Yes, it can be a pain having to write it – but make the effort – the results make it worthwhile!  In an ideal world, you would map out what was going to be in each newsletter 6 months in advance!

Think about the time of the week you send your newsletter out. Is it appropriate to send it out in the evening – or would your audience be more attentive during the week?  What day is more likely to work for your audience?  You may want to send the same newsletter out to different samples of people at different times to test the audience.

4. Professional

Remember your newsletter reflects your brand and values of your company.  A newsletter full of spelling or grammatical errors can be worse than no newsletter at all.  Take the time to check that the words are correct and the links work.  If you can, include your brand, colour and logo.  As a starting point, I would recommend creating your own newsletters using MailChimp which is a great application, free to send to up to 2,000 contacts.  Due to time constraints, I now outsource my newsletter to David Burn of Marketing Research Projects.

5. Measure / FollowUp

Once you have sent the newsletter out, don’t forget to check who clicked on what link and how many times the newsletter was opened by the same person.  This might be a clue that you ought to follow up this person with a call?  Compare the click through or open rates over time – identify any newsletters that were / were not successful as try to identify why.

How successful have you found your email newsletter? – or why have you decided that this form of marketing isn’t for you?  Let me know.

Have you ever looked at the CountIF function in Excel?  I think it is one of the most useful functions available for quickly analysing data – and it has become even more useful in the 2007 and 2010 versions of Excel.

In its simpliest form, the COUNTIF function will allow you to count the number of rows which meet a certain criteria.  In the following example, I want to count the number of sales greater than £1000.

To do this, I put the following formula into a blank cell, =COUNTIF(G2:G13,”>1000″).  This will return the answer of 3.  I have had several clients who have used this function to analyse the results of survey data.

In Excel 2007, the COUNTIF function has been made even better!  COUNTIFS allows you to count the number of rows based on two or more criteria.

So, in this example, we could count the number of rows where the Total Income is more than £1000 and the product sold was a Monitor.  The formula would be = COUNTIFS(G2:G13, “>1000″,C2:C13, “Monitor”).  This will return the answer of 2.

What do you think, when would you use the COUNTIF or COUNTIFS functions?