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)

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.

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?

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!

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.

Each theme page is going to become quite long as more experiences are added. As these grow, perhaps the site could integrate a tag cloud (see below for a wiki definition or view Flickr’s popular photos tag cloud) onto each page to highlight the diversity of experiences along with their popularity.

For example, I’m a keen cricket fan and have read two related comments. I think it would be useful if i could click a ‘cricket’ link that would filter the relevant comments.

*A tag cloud is a visual depiction of user-generated tags used typically to describe the content of web sites. Tags are usually single words and are typically listed alphabetically, and the importance of a tag is shown with font size or color. Thus both finding a tag by alphabet and by popularity is possible. The tags are usually hyperlinks that lead to a collection of items that are associated with a tag.

How social media like Flickr and You Tube has become an influence on destination selection from the Tracking Tourism blog

Student survey on The Impact of Online Social Networks on Hotel Search and Referral Behavior

New York Times article on New York City’s first global advertising campaign – watch the video

Site visitors are encouraged to upload videos of themselves in their favourite places at Visit My Baltimore.

My own perception, rightly or wrongly, is a large city in Maryland with high crime levels and an odd sounding baseball team. (A few years living in Chicago gave me an early love for the game) So quite a limited and imbalanced view then!

Personal experiences like this can help alter perceptions and the amateur video production adds to the authenticity. I think it’s a great idea. Stories create emotion and are easy to remember. People buy on emotion and stories are easier to relate to than copy on a DMO or related site.
For anyone who has used video sharing sites like YouTube the layout and functionality should be familiar.

Users create an account, upload a video and give it a description, category and assign it any number of tags. Below each video are links to some of the places mentioned for further reading.

Below that are thumbs of related videos. Site users can sort the 70 or so videos by rating or category. The one above from Steve is his own irreverent tour of the city with an emphasis on food spots. He also shows us where to park for over an hour for a quarter (or 15p!).