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?

There has been another round of conversation regarding the changing face of PR in recent weeks.

• Does the Thrill of the Chase Make PR Obsolete? from Steve Rubel, a high profile long time blogger and senior vice presient of Edelman Digital. He laments at the deluge of off base email pitches he receives in a changing PR landscape. He deletes 99.99% of them. I receive on average 10 a day – the vast majority are not relevant to the online area that this blog focuses on. It’s frustrating that the senders do not take the time to do a little bit more research. See also Hotel Blogs rants about PR

• Mike Arrington writes more (from a tech startup angle) on the subject at The PR Roadblock On The Road To Blissful Blogging and the 150+ comments provides views from all sides. He comments that the people writing about startups is much more varied now but the approach to engage them is wide of the mark.

• From a travel PR perspective Neil MacLean has written a guest post on the Travolution Blog. We work both with private and public sector organisations directly and with PR agencies. In our experience, only a very small minority market and carry out services that Neil rightly comments a modern PR agency should; online copywriting, web monitoring, search engine marketing, analytics and basic web development.

• An Econsultancy post this morning from Drama 2.0 Is PR broken?

They interviewed a number of overseas travellers in London to learn about their search habits. I’ve embedded the movie below.

The video focuses on the need to provide multilingual sites for international travellers.

Oban (who specialise in multilingual SEO and international SEM) are working with EyeforTravel researching online travel habits. Take part at www.faceofglobalsearch.com and win £250 of travel vouchers.

I’m going to be a tad critical on the quiz.

Oban has previewed in a blog post some of the results and indicated that so far, the three most popular sites for travel research are Google, TripAdvisor and Alibabuy. The question only presents these three sites to select from. Although there is a text field where the user can enter any site I’m not sure how often that would be used.

Perhaps a longer list or drop down of popular travel sites may lead to a more accurate cross section of preferred sites.

For the game itself I only got as far as Anchorage!