Since last May, Italy strongly reinforced its control about contests. Contrary to other european countries, italian authorities seems to be decided to inspect each contest launched in the country.
Even if the official rules has been registered in France, few international contest holders have been punished because of the non-respect of the local laws.

Reminder

When you organize an international contest, you must comply with the laws in each entrant country . So you have three options to launch your contest :

• Respect the laws and execute the necessary formalities
• Exclude Italy from your contest
• Not taking specials measures but risking sanctions

Procedure in Italy

If you want Italians to participate to your contest, you have to :

• Hire an italian fiscal representative
• 15 days before the launching of your contest, you must ask for an authorization at the Ministry of the economic development and register the  legal settlement.
• Pay a guarantee equal to the value (excluding VAT) of the first gift of your contest.
• Ask for a chamber of commerce officer who will control the setting of your contest, the end of the operation and the prize-giving.
• Pay a fiscal taxation : 45% of the first gift value ( excluding VAT)
• You can’t offer money, credit card, loyalty card, discount, or any gift which implies purchases for the winners
• Servers must be on the italian territory
• Winners have to testify to the prize-giving by writing a letter
• If no winners is selected, you have to give the prize to a charity

Fees between 50 000 and 500 000€ are planned for those who will try to make Italians participate to their contest without hiring an italian usher.
If you really want to organize your contest including Italy, feel free to contact us !

Complete edition of the competitions

Until now, you could not edit your campaign once it was lauched. It was a pity, especially if you wanted to change a couple of words. Now you can change everything even if your competition has already started.

However you should consider two things when you want to make a change in your competition:

• The rules : if you’ve made official rules, careful not to edit items in link therewith. For example, if you withdraw some prizes, they still appear in the rules then you will incur legal risk. You are responsible for the legality of your operation.
• The contest database : You should know that modifying your competition will also modify the database that you get when your campaign is over. For example, if you add a question in the middle of the contest period, participants’ responses will appear in the database only from the moment you entered this question. You will not have the answers from previous participants, because for them, this question did not exist.

Sharing customization

We reorganized the way you can customize your shares while giving you more freedom (Only for the Premium plan and the photo contest):

By email:

• Enable or disable email sharing
• Give or not additional chances to win for each share (5 maximum).
• Email customization: Subject and message body. You can use the tags {firstname} and {lastname} of the sender to make the message more personal. You can also include the URL of your choice in the message or choose the {url} tag that will be replaced by the URL of the contest on your Facebook page (or custom URL ending by kontestapp.com if the competition is not installed on Facebook).

On Facebook:

• Enable or disable the automatic form filling with Facebook Login.
• Enable or disable friends invitations on Facebook.
• Enable or disable sharing on Facebook with customization of the message. You can also include a custom URL in the dedicated field. If you do not complete that field, the URL will automatically be the URL of the contest on your Facebook page (or custom URL ending by kontestapp.com if the competition is not installed on Facebook).

On Twitter:

• Enable or disable sharing on Twitter with customization of the message. You can also include a custom URL in the dedicated field. If you do not complete that field, the URL will automatically be the URL of the contest on your Facebook page (or custom URL ending by kontestapp.com if the competition is not installed on Facebook).

We still have no phone for a few days but it should get sorted out very quickly!

Here is a picture:

However, a brand can post a link on its page in order to invite people from Google Plus to enter a contest hosted somewhere else (on their website or on Facebook for instance).

Consequently, Kontest competitions could not be installed on Google Plus pages. Fortunately, you can still install your campaigns on your Facebook page, your website and on mobile phones!

How to run a successful contest on Facebook and the web »

We hope you had a great time with us and we look forward to hearing from you.
You can sign up now on the Kontest platform, it’s totally free!

Don’t hesistate to send us an email thanks to the contact form if you need any information.

EXTRA BONUS :

Sixty applications are out and will increase the number of social interactions among members but also from members to brands. We already knew the Deezer and Spotify applications, today Dailymotion, Cinemur or Tickmaster are now on Facebook. Others like l’Equipe are scheduled to gradually enrich this brand new collection of applications.

To use them, you can go on the dedicated Facebook page.

On January 24, 2012 at 7pm, The Green Man pub in London will host a Social Media London meetup.

Arnaud Robin, Online Marketing Manager at Kontest, will speak at the event to share the best practices for people who want to hold a contest on the web and social media. He will introduce examples and tips to help you running successful interactive marketing campaigns.

We look forward to see you there!

For more information, simply visit the meetup page.

Shared management of the contests

Your life is simpler: multiple users can now edit the same contest. For this, it is only necessary that the users are administrators of the fan page for which the contest was created and have their account Kontest synchronized with their Facebook account on the platform.

So if you edit your contest, all the changes will also be applied to the accounts of the members of your team working on the same fanpage.

Improved installation system on Facebook

It’s now possible to:

• Choose to install the contest as a landing page (for users who are not already a fan).
• Choose the name of the contest tab on the fan page.
• Transfer the contest from a fanpage to another (if you installed it on the wrong fanpage, for example).

No more fumbling in your fanpage settings on Facebook, everything is available on the platform!

Kontest follows with attention the evolution of these terms of use and ensures that the platform complies with them at all times.

This feature disappeared in favor of a new approach: it is not possible to massively send messages to the fans, however, you can very well contact them individually. The sent messages will be directly visible in the users inbox like a message from user to user.

The users are notified of the reception and if they reply, you too will be notified as a fanpage administrator. A user can also send you a message if you choose to enable this feature in the page settings.

Directly contact your fans will let you:

• Answer questions from users in private
• Thank and reward the most loyal fans
• Manage a crisis situation by inviting a fan to chat in private rather than writing posts in public
• Maintain a personal relationship in one channel (it remains on Facebook, you avoid the installation of an email contact form)

Of course, this feature was not created to send messages to all your fans in order to sell your product. Use it to manage your one-to-one marketing in a better way on the social network!