Take it or Leaf it

Melbourne in Autumn is spectacular. With the temperature dropping a little, the winter fashion hitting the stores and the city filling up with colourful Autumn leaves. We’ve decided to celebrate not only Autumn, but also the city of Melbourne in our latest competition.

Here’s how to win:

• Become a Fan on our Facebook Page
• Go to a favourite hangout or landmark in Melbourne (or your hometown)
• Take a creative or funny photo of yourself or a friend holding an autumn leaf (or leaves)
• Post it to Caroline Serviced Apartments Facebook Page: Here’s how to do this!
• Get all of your friends to ‘Like’ your photo. Fan Photos can be found on the left hand column, beneath our photo albumns, information and list of Fans.

The photo’s with more than 50 ‘Likes’ or votes will all be included in our Autumn YouTube Video as finalists and also go into the draw to win…..

• Two nights accommodation in our 4.5 star luxury apartments
• A surprise ‘Welcome Pack” on arrival
• A winery tour of the Yarra Valley for 2 people
• 4 x Daily Metcards (Public Transport passes)

Anna from our Brighton property getting into the Autumn theme

In this competition we would love for some of our in-house guests to get involved:

To be instantly included in our finalists, you must take a photo within one of our apartments at either South Yarra or Brighton. Show off your room, your balcony or your view!

All finalists will be announced on Monday 10th May via our YouTube Channel, and the winner will be chosen at random from the finalist entries on 17th May 2010.

Only one photo entry per person, so get creative and have some fun… and send us your best autumn leaf pic!

• For a Summary of the competition Requirements, check this PDF: CSA Autumn Leaf Competition Summary
• For Full Terms and Conditions, see this PDF: Take it Or Leaf it Rules

What's for breakkie?

We’re getting so excited about all the new projects that we’re working on to add value for all of our guests when they come and stay with us. Today, I’m heading around the corner to Church Street in Brighton to chat to Tim, the friendly manager of Rembroza Restaurant. We’re going to set up a deal for our guests to enjoy an all inclusive accommodation package with a yummy breakfast at Rembroza. Mei-Li & I also met with the lovely owners of the Fawkner Bistro last week and are setting up a similar arrangement for the guests at South Yarra.

Anna & I (at Brighton) are putting together special surprise packs for families who come to stay with us. We brainstormed the question “why do people come to stay in Brighton?”, and aside from the obvious answers of ‘our lovely service’, ‘great location’, ‘excellent housekeeping’ etc, we came up with more of a broader answer – ‘lifestyle’. We decided that the beach is a key ingredient of this lifestyle offered in Brighton. So we’re giving every family a beach kit to help them explore the gorgeous sandy shore-line. Over the next few weeks we will also be adding a few more little extras in for guests to enjoy as the weather warms up – so watch this space!

Lifestyle PLUS at gorgeous Brighton and Dendy Beaches

And it’s not just our guests that are benefitting from our networking and social media efforts. We are also working on a new e-book which will include ‘hits and misses’ that we’ve experienced within our social media marketing campaigns. We’re hoping to help other small to medium businesses get on board with social media platforms to help their business grow. It’s not as scary as it may seem, and we’d love to connect with more local businesses, or accommodation industry professionals.

Our latest competition was cooked up a couple of weeks ago when Mei-Li and I were working on Marketing with Sam at ThinkTank Media.

We aimed to develop a competition that was kind of unusual, without being too difficult or time consuming for people to enter. We wanted the prize to be something totally worthwhile, that would encourage people to give it a go…. but you have to watch the video to find out what you could win!

We had so much fun creating a video for the competition to upload onto YouTube-(because the ‘acting’ was so terribly bad)! We’ve been promoting the competition on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and our Blog. We’ve received a few entries so far and are amazed at how many views the video has received. We are certain that Caroline Serviced Apartments are getting more well known, as our Followers and Fans increase daily. We also feel that having such an unusual competition will help cement our company in people’s minds if ever they do need accommodation in Melbourne. They may remember us as the one’s who are making an effort to reach out to future guests in a very different way (so far we have not found any other accommodation provider in Australia who is running anything similar to this). What are you waiting for? Get creative and show us your ‘mug-shot’ before November 9th.