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?

We’ve just launched CountryBrands.org which aims to be the definitive resource for logo identities.

It’s a little project we’ve wanted to do for a while and found the time in recent weeks.

We’ll build the database up over the coming month and each logo entry will include a downloadable file – we’ll try and find the best quality in each case.

We’re keen for feedback so please let us know what you think.

[UPDATE] Alex Bainbridge has posted a short review about CountryBrands.org on his blog

First a bit of blog housekeeping – we’ve added our latest Tweets in the right hand column. Or you can follow us at http://twitter.com/dottourism/

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?

mloovi translates your RSS feed / blog into 24 languages using Google Translate.

Complete the 4 steps and paste the widget code into your site.

No replacement for a human translation but a simple and quick way to open up your blog/feed to an international audience.  Could be useful for destination event feeds or travel offers. (via Techcrunch UK)

Will install on this blog and report back.

• Following on from their Family Fun website, Enjoy England have launched a similar campaign at www.monsterfamilyfun.com/

• UK based weather2flights.com lets visitors browse holiday destinations based on climate, routes and flight duration.
• Google Translation Center, a New Human Translations Service in the Making