Ever since a Ukrainian friend mentioned them I regularly drop in on the website of Art Lebedev Studio, Russia’s leading design studio.

Whether it’s their constitution, product design (see Optimus Maximus Keyboard, GLONASS Satnav) or their diversity of work there is always something inspiring to browse. Of particular interest is the process section that accompanies each project.

Their less than common approach (”The only principle we follow is just two words: No bullshit.”) has not hindered success or size. A team of +200 work with the country’s largest corporates including Yandex (largest portal and most popular search engine) and Gazprom (largest company in Russia).

Both sites proudly display Art Lebedev’s logo and link at the bottom of their pages. I like the way these projects sit equally alongside fridge magnets or an identity for a baby club in their portfolio.

The studio founder has clearly succeeded in passing down and maintaining his design ideals and approach to running a company. I’d like to know how they juggle their approach with client’s differing views on online marketing. The only interview I could find points to a negative attitude to SEO and marketing.

Most recently I was drawn to a website design for a luxury hotel, the Felix Zawojski. The site has been crafted with wonderful attention to detail.  Take a look at these sketches and renderings, view panoramas or watch footage of The Great Train Robbery in every room.

The identity creation points to guests feeling as though they belong to a royal family – the website design certainly serves up a luxurious experience. However, you won’t find an online booking facility, e-newsletter sign up or special offers.

Perhaps that lends itself to the exclusivity. Although, with such care taken to educate and pamper the visitor, surely these features would further help retain and convert site prospects?

(“Design Will Save the World” is the studio’s motto)

Thought I’d share a few links on some brand monitoring services.

These are tools to help monitor who is saying what about your brand.

And opportunities to monitor product/destination keywords and then provide information/feedback to those networks and online communities.

For some background, read this article for an introduction to online reputation management.

And the three tools:

• Google Alerts – free and will help you gain an idea on what level of paid tool suits you.
• Online Reputation Monitor – three pricing levels starting from £5/month. Free trial.
• trackur – One of the more feature full programs. Free trial available.

I’ve not tried these yet but here are two tools specifically aimed at hotels.

• Review Analyst
• Hotel Protect

10 Reputations All Hotels, Resorts & Inns Should Monitor Online

Any others you’d recommend?

• The blogosphere has been awash with iPhone 3G talk for the last few weeks. No doubt one of the most exciting things to keep an eye on will be the travel applications and GPS tie ups. To date there are 139 apps listed on the Apple site, although this should increase quite quickly as I’ve read there is a backlog of apps waiting to be cleared. Plenty of releases from the usual suspects with some suffering from poor reviews, perhaps as a result of rushing them out.

• Tim at Maastricht Hotel School is carrying out academic research on how the hospitality industry is using online marketing. As well as finding out what techniques are being used, he is trying to determine the perceived benefits of the different methods. You can complete the survey at www.rshotels.com/survey.

• As part of its regular series, E-consultancy reviewed Travel.co.uk, the recently launched package holiday comparison site. They followed up a few days later with an interview with the marketing manager. Alex at Musings also ran a detailed review ‘10 things about the travel.co.uk website‘.

A super overview of a great email newsletter example from Kayak. Justin from aweber.com highlights the building a relationship approach over the hard sell so often seen. Kayak also uses basic segmentation and personalisation very well.

Email marketing case studies from the Hotel and travel industry from Email marketing reports.

I recently came across this June editorial from HOTELS magazine (Thanks to Jens).

“Travel 2.0 – As the Internet evolves, latest tactics and new rules change the way hotel marketers reach customers.”

It looks at a number of examples that demonstrate the importance of online experiences that add value to hotel web sites and build communities.

In this post I’ve pulled together some of these examples and a few others. Unfortunately the article does not link to the external sites mentioned.

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