Our work for Mahindra Homestays has been featured by IndiaSocial™, a showcase for the social media landscape and opportunities in India.

It covers our approach, impact and learnings.  I thought I’d share our six guiding principles of social media activity in the case study.

• Be honest – we act responsibly and truthfully when representing our brand in social media
• Be interesting – we ensure we communicate worthwhile, engaging messages that people enjoy
• Be open – we communicate in an open, collaborative and sharing way with the people who engage with us
• Be dynamic – we strive to demonstrate innovation, originality, enthusiasm and a clear sense of purpose in communications
• Be committed – we are dedicated to keeping our activity regular, timely and relevant
• Be strategic – we plan and execute communications intelligently for maximum results

Read the case study or view the full list (including one other from the travel sector from Cleartrip)

We’ve launched a blog for Mahindra Homestays, offering high quality Indian Homestays.

The blog is all about celebrating and discovering India – encouraging travellers to experience something different.

Let us know what you think – we’d love the feedback.

Highlights include:

• Series of Things To Do articles. Delhi, Jaipur, Agra, Wayanad, Cochin, Kewzing and Udaipur.
• Monthly photo competition
• Video tours of the Homestays
• Special offers
• Previews of the latest homestays

Along with the design and development we’re also helping with content creation and blog promotion.

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?

Great blog about blogging to promote your business. The author, Mark White ( aka The Blog Coach), is running a three part mini-series looking at the planning phase of setting up and starting your business blog.

First up is ‘What you do want to do with your blog?‘ – a great primer before diving in and creating a blog because you feel you have to. Along with the more marketing focused efforts where businesses push their services and products Mark includes the following handy little diagram to suggest a range of other blogging uses.

(Hat tip to Social Media good guys Nixon McInnes)

Talking of blogs, here are the shortlisted ‘BEST CONSUMER BLOG AWARD’ category from Travolution.

* Travel Rants (Darren Cronian)
* TravelMail Blog (various authors)
* Viator Blog (various authors)
* Everything-Everywhere (Gary Arndt)
* Select World Travel (Lee Harrison)

Exciting news over at Wordpress – earlier today they posted a sneak peak at the upcoming version of Wordpress – looks great!

“Twitter for Location” from Yahoo’s Brickhouse – Fire Eagle. “Fire Eagle is the secure and stylish way to share your location with sites and services online while giving you unprecedented control over your data and privacy. We’re here to make the whole web respond to your location and help you to discover more about the world around you.”

Follow Techcrunch coverage
Dopplr post announcing integration

Limited functionality but aimed at developers to start building applications before a full launch.

Best Geek Hotels in the World 2.0 from Hotel Chatter

Simple translation tool - Jesse Gardner posted this tip on how to offer your site in many languages. The translation is automatically done by Google Translation and is by no means a replacement for human translation. But it may be useful to those with little budget as a way to give international visitors a basic understanding of the site content.