We at NSDesign are so excited that we’re down to the final day(s) of our “Twelve Days of Twitmas” for another year.

Tuesday – “New Year – New You”

On Tuesday, we gave away two tickets at one of Scotland’s top personal development coaches – Jack Black. The 2 tickets were for his upcoming “The Best of MindStore” in Glasgow on 3rd March. It will no doubt be a life-changing experience to all who attend.

Then Garrett Ramsay (@garramsay) offered up a three-hour, business coaching session focusing on sales. No matter what business we’re in, we can all improve our ability in sales, no doubt…

At the end of the day @HarperMacleod, took away the MindStore prize and @LomondBeauty gets the three hours with sales genius Garrett.

We would like thank Garrett and Jack for the Twitmas giveaways and congratulate the winners. Let us know how it goes you two!

Wednesday – Was all about the body

Body Butter that is, courtesy of the lovely Miss Polly. I had been admiring her work at a recent craft fair, and so when we were arranging Twitmas prizes, I immediately thought of these darling tins of Body Butter.

Given the sore feet I’ve been having lately – I’d been wishing I could win the Peppermint Tootsie Treatment. Sadly I couldn’t win but the people who do win these little pamper pots were – @anniegburns, @flofoxes and @BruceDevlin. Congrats to all three of you. I sure hope that you or your special someone enjoy these silky-smooth body butter treatments.

Thursday – Our penultimate prize

For this year’s penultimate Twitmas giveaway there was not just one but two bottles of wine – red and white courtesy of wine guru @pieterrosenthal from  corkandbottle.co.uk and www.lovethatwine.co.uk. Pieter was kind enough to hand pick a bottle of Lomond Sauvignon Blanc and a red Gran Sasso, Montepulciano d’Abruzzo too.

Congrats go to the winner of the Gran Sasso @Thomassimpkins and @Mickles20. Please check out his new video How to Decant Your Christmas Port.

Two-Day Finale

So here we are on the final days of Twitmas and to give more of you an opportunity to win, we have several fabulous prizes to give away. We are just so excited about it as Gary explained in his last blog and so grateful, and I’d like to reiterate the special thanks to Alan Tennant – Regional Director of Hotels.TV Glasgow.

Good luck today to all who follow @nsdesign – and thank for your participation!

Happy Twitmas one and all!

For the past week, we’ve been running our annual “12 days of Twitmas” fun.. partnering up with our clients, friends, and local companies, to offer Twitter users a chance to win some festive freebies. All good fun, while helping promote the businesses involved.

Last year, our Twitmas Grand Prize was a break at a beautiful cottage in France. Hard to beat, but this year, we think we just have.

Our 2011 Twitmas grand prize – isn’t just 1 prize.. but THREE. Giving more people a chance to win, and experience a real taste of luxury!

Starting on Friday (23rd December), we’ll be promoting prizes from without doubt, 2 of Glasgow’s best hotels – The Grand Central Hotel, and the ABode Hotel on Bath Street.

Both are offering one lucky Twitmas winner the chance of a free double or twin room on a “Bed and Breakfast” basis for an agreed date in 2012. If ever you needed a city break, now’s the time!

Then we move to Saturday – Christmas eve… and an exclusive offer from The Douglas Hotel on the fantastic Island of Arran! One final Twitmas winner will receive a TWO night stay, complete with breakfast, and a bottle of bubbly on arrival thrown in too! A perfect romantic getaway perhaps, allowing you to start 2012 in true style!

We’d like to thank all three of the hotels for agreeing to take part in this year’s Twitmas fun, but a very special thank you also to Alan Tennant – Regional Director of Hotels.TV Glasgow. Alan has been critical in securing these prizes, and so a massive thanks for helping us better our grand finale prizes!!

Follow @NSDesign on Twitter to ensure you don’t miss a thing..!

Best of Luck, and Merry Twitmas when it comes!

Wow, what a fun prize was on the cards today for Day 8 of Twitmas12! Well in my opinion anyway.

It was the cutest little Cardboard Radio and MP3 Speaker.

The radio’s design is simple, environmentally-friendly and I think it has great appeal.

Tune into your favourite radio station or simply plug your iplayer/ MP3 in and enjoy.

Love the concept of this one.

We thank Maia Gifts for providing one of these to  give away on Day 8.

We’d like to congratulate @grahamorriss for scoring this cool, simple gadget.

Now don’t forget, we’ve still have four more days of #Twitmas12…and I can’t say too much just now, but I can tell you that you’ll have some good chances to win some goodies on the final day. Thanks to some kindness of others, we’ve outdone ourselves this year!

Keep an eye on @nsdesign on Twitter to be in with a chance of some of our final yuletide goodies.

Hey all, it’s Thea here again and so begins week two of #Twitmas12 – our Twelve Days of Christmas giveaways via Twitter.

To recap:-

Day 5, on Friday, we had our first ever #FollowFotographers on Twitter – with prizes from not 1, not 2, but 3 photographers!! Our wonderful photographers in question were: @AFraserPhoto, @MarcdeRidder &@RonYoungPhoto.

• alasdairfraser.co.uk – gave away 3 x photo sessions inc 7×5″ print
• circleinlight.co.uk – is donating 2 free VR panos for your website
• ronyoungphotography.co.uk – free family portrait photo-shoot & CD of the images

Winning the voucher from @AFraserPhoto for a free photoshoot & 7×5 print were @LCbeauty @SandraCub and @garyckerr! Well done all 3! Then, @globalaudit won an amazing Virtual Reality Panoramic images for a website from @MarcdeRidder. Finally our congrats to @tracyknixon – for winning the free family portrait photo-shoot & CD of the images from @ronyoungphoto.

Day 6 – It was a variety of hosting, domain packages and Master Class places courtesy of,  well, NSDesign…so congrats go out to @LornaK_uk, @auld_guy @Glasgowbud1965 and @headphonaught too. Well done to you guys!

Day 7 – Our colleagues from the Luggage and Bag Shop donated some electronic luggage tags so your bags will never be lost again. What a brilliant concept!  The two lucky travelers who will benefit from the tags are – @almac1965 and @UtopiaScotland

Now don’t forget we still have a whole week to go on our Twelve Days of Twitmas! There are some real Christmas Crackers still to come. You’ll definitely want to keep following us right the way through the week until the grand prize on Christmas Eve!

Something a little different for Day 4 of Twitmas12…some VIP, courtside tickets to see the Glasgow Rocks Basketball team play.

I can tell you, I am not a big sports fan (either playing or spectating), but once I caught one of these games I was hooked. I’d defy anyone to not have fun night – right there amongst the action.

Congrats go to @idgamez – who picked up those four VIP tickets. Well done you! Hope you enjoy whatever game you see – and hope the Rocks Win it!

So tomorrow, for something completely different once again – we have  not 1, not 2, but 3 photographers offering photo sessions.

The fun continued yesterday, Day 3 of #Twitmas12, and this one was for the kid in us all (whatever age we are!)

Thanks to @TopXmasPresent1, we had a fantastic BOP-IT XT game to give away. This game will provide hours of fun to today’s winner and improve their hand-ear coordination as well.

In order to win today’s prize all participants had to do was to visit  Top Christmas Presents, and mention another Top Present this festive period.

We want to thank everyone for taking part in Day 3 of our Twitmas12 giveaway, to Top Christmas Presents for offering the prize for us to give away, and finally to congratulate today’s lucky winner of the Bop It XT -abigailedkins.

We’ll see you again tomorrow morning for Day 4 our Twelve Days of Twitmas!

Twitmas12 continued all day long with not just one but two sets of giveaways! Something for him and something for her as it were!

First up we had some gorgeous scented candles from our friends at the Gifts from Fairies online shop. Today’s winners had to tweet their desired selection from a few different scents made by the Sandy Bay London Candle Company.

Wow, this was something I wish I could have won but alas – I was ineligible so this lovely prize went to @martyc1991 (Big Apple candles

Thanks to Creative Fairy @giftsff for taking part in #Twitmas12 and for interacting with the participants as it went on. A good use of personal touch there, I was impressed.

For the boys we had some  beautiful, unique, handmade thistle cufflinks courtesy of our friends @scotsgifts (Worth £46!) For those hoping to win the cufflink their mission was simply to RT (that’s re-tweet in case you didn’t know): >> “Handmade thistle gifts – made in Scotland from @scotsgifts #Twitmas12″.

Of the many who did – it was @busybee2011 – who won!

Congrats to both our winners. Well done!

Hey there it’s Thea here, we’d like to thank everyone for taking part in DAY ONE of this year’s #Twitmas12 campaign…

With very special thanks to a donation from our friend and client, Alan Mitchell from straightfromthecask.co.uk, Day One of this year’s Twitmas12 launched with a rare, 12 year old, award-winning bottle of Black Bull Whisky from the Duncan Taylor Whisky Shop.

We thought, what better way to kick off the Christmas spirit than, well with some special spirits:

“This Black Bull 12 year old, the deluxe blended Scotch from whisky specialists Duncan Taylor Scotch Whisky Ltd has been awarded a gold medal for Best Blended Scotch Whisky at the 2011 Scottish Field Whisky Challenge.”

Congratulations go to our first winner - Michael Loftus! We hope that you enjoy the lovely Whisky for yourself, or give it to the very special Whisky-lover in your life.

Thanks again to all who took part in day one. It all kicks off again in the morning with a new prize from our clients and friends! Something for him AND something for her! I’m Thea saying See ya!

Hey everyone, Thea here again. We have all heard the phrase – “it is better to give than to receive”…but with Twitmas12 – our clients, friends, and associates benefit from both!

For those not in “the know”, each year around the festive period, we at NSDesign come up with a new, innovative, “festive freebies” to giveaway through Twitter.

These goodies are often fun, novel, and relevant to our audiences. While last year we started on 1 December and ran it right up until Christmas Eve, giving away a week’s accommodation, this year though, we’re starting it a bit later and doing our version of the “Twelve Days of Christmas” um, I mean Twitmas.

Like last year, we had all kinds of great big and small prizes to giveaway and this year is no different! There will be more booze, a variety of gifts, VIP event tickets and more! Though we’ve most of it taken care of, we’re currently looking for just a few more donations, and would love it if you would consider donating something to the Twitmas cause!

For this, your company will be featured heavily through Twitter (linking directly to your site) – in Tweets and Re-tweets, on our blog, and likely on Facebook page too!

Last year, ALL of the donating companies saw at least a 300% rise in website traffic on the day they were featured on Twitmas, with some seeing traffic up x25!

See more information, on the mechanics of the campaign and the benefits of taking part, in our Social Media case study (using Twitter for Seasonal Marketing).

Contact Gary if you wish to be involved! We’re really looking forward to kicking off in just a few days! Be sure you’re following @nsdesign on twitter to be kept up to date with each day’s prizes and be sure to keep an eye on the hashtag #Twitmas12 for all the excitement of the campaign.

Happy holidays!

So a while back I wrote a wee blog about QR Codes. Well, I thought I’d follow that one up a bit, as last week I attended the October New Media Breakfast about them.

The speaker of the day was Jim Divine from Cyberlogo.

Citing the rise of handsets, Jim urged the use of QR Codes, specifically ones containing logos, to connect with clients.

Some great examples were shown -  such as Jim’s own Twitter-inspired cyberlogo (Pic right), one for T3 Magazine, and one for Cake Decor (Pic left: a chocolate chip looking logo) and a make-up company too.

Possibilities are endless.

BEST IN SCAN

If you’re looking for a good scanner (of the many out there) – Jim recommends i-nigma. (I immediately downloaded it and began scanning on my Blackberry. Worked a treat).

Or if you’re an iPhone person Optiscan might be the one for you. (From iTunes: “Optiscan lets you create, scan and share QR codes straight from your device”.)

Like the sound of that.

One of the great advantages of these QR codes is their versatility. You don’t have to link to just a site, you can link to your V-card details, a calendar event, an SMS or a direct dialer to a phone number.

Another advantage is you can, through many QR code creators, update the link as time goes to keep it fresh. There will often be a charge of this, so get your initial code from a place that will allow changes if it’s one you’re going to be updating.

Personally speaking, I find QR Codes challenging. They don’t always work for me and that can be frustrating. In fact on this page on Jim’s site I couldn’t even get them to load! That said, with Gary’s iPhone they often worked better. (So more fool me for having a Blackberry I guess).

Finally if you are considering using QR Codes yourself, take a look at this piece in the Drum recently to make sure you’re not ‘doing it wrong’.