To help hotels and resorts stay on top of mentions, chats or general dialogue that might be happening about their properties,  Screen Pilot, a bleeding edge digital marketing firm, have compiled a Top 5 list of free tools that can be used right now to keep tabs on the social media-verse.

-Social Mention (socialmention.com) is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content from across the social universe into a single stream of information. Social Mention monitors more than a hundred social media properties.

-WhosTalkin (WhosTalkin.com) is a social media search tool that allows users to search for conversations surrounding the topics cared about most such as property brand name. Search and sorting algorithms combine data taken from over 60 of the internet’s most popular social media gateways.

-Samepoint (samepoint.com) crawlers encompass every conceivable type of social media service. Categorization breaks out results by type of social media.

-Surchur (surchur.com) is the ultimate dashboard to right now. The surchmeter shows how popular a keyword is on different sources: surchur, blogs and twitter etc.

-Trendrr (trendrr.com) allows you to track the popularity and awareness of trends across a variety of inputs, ranging from social networks, to blog buzz and video views downloads, all in real time. Compare trends to one another, monitoring and evaluating across a variety of sources.

No matter what tool you use, interpretation of the data is a different ball game.  Screen Pilot’s social media services can help you translate what all these results mean. Not only does Screen Pilot position hospitality brands in the social media space, but we help track the impact and revenues generated as a result of social media and other hotel internet marketing efforts. For results, best-practice advice and incremental revenues visit screenpilot.com

According to PC World “Quickoffice” is one of the Top 10 Must-Have iPhone Business Apps”! If offers Office functionality on the iPhone with an impressive suite of features!

Quickoffice is available for iPhone and iPod Touch running on iPhone OS 3.0. Enjoy superior Microsoft® Word and Excel CREATE & EDIT functionality today in a powerful productivity suite. VIEW, EMAIL, and ACCESS attachments with the most popular file formats.

The core Quickoffice suite comprises four great programs which allow users to work on important documents such as contracts, business plans, sales presentations, financial reports and other documents sent as email attachments – directly on their phone. Plus, Quickoffice users can “push” their documents to a printer, fax, projector or back to a desktop with complete confidence.

Suite features:

• Open, edit, and create text (.TXT) files, Word (.DOC, .DOCX) documents, and Excel (.XLS, .XSLX) spreadsheets compatible with Microsoft Office 2007 for Windows and Microsoft Office 2008 for Macintosh
• Auto-save and auto-restore
• High-fidelity rendering and crisp characters
• Advanced notepad editor
• Intuitive cut-copy-paste compatible with the iPhone OS 3.0
• Set custom passcode lock to prevent sniffy people from running the app and much more!

Quickoffice is running a special offer of 50% off for the first 10,000 customers at $9.99 which is a steal! If you are on the go and work with Microsoft Office then you’ll find this app invaluable. To learn more and to take advantage of the special offer click here.

Social Mention is an alert tool that acts similar to Google Alerts but focuses it’s results from blogs, microblogs, networks, bookmarks, comments, images, news, video, audio and other social web information.

How can you search with Social Mention?

It’s similar to doing any search you would on search engines such as Google.  You just enter a phrase you’re looking for, a product, company name or person’s name and you will receive a daily email alert when your keywords are triggered.

You can also track your topic easily by setting up a Social Mention breaking news alert or RSS feed. For instance you can do a real-time search on a topic such as “Walmart Black Friday Deals 2009” and choose from a variety of sources and I chose for this example “Google News” and it returned the following results:

As you can see it’s pretty powerful with lots of information. If you would like to give it a try, click here!

As the Holiday Season is fast approaching many of us will be on the road travelling to visit family and friends. If you own an iPhone below is a list of 11 apps that could just help make your journey that much easier and pleasant!

These apps will help you locate the nearest gas stations, hotels and restaurants. They will also help you to learn more about the local scene and current weather conditions.

1. Mapsbuddy – helps make search on Google Maps easier. Quick shortcuts to finding gas stations, restaurants, post office, and many other things you’ll need for the road.
2. SimulTravel GPS – an innovative application that locates hotels around you to plan travel  while you travel. You can locate hotels that are not near your current location. There are over 35,000 hotels to choose from in other cities or near other airports.
3. Urbanspoon – if you can’t decide where to eat, shake your iPhone and Urbanspoon will pick a good restaurant for you to try. Keep shaking until you find a restaurant you’re happy with.
4. Yelp – Yelp the popular review-based social network also has an iPhone app. Use it to search for places to eat, shop, drink, relax and play then read reviews from an active community of locals in the know.
5. Road Trip – is the fastest easiest way to log your mileage and gas expenses. You can graph out trip expenses and even export the data in csv format into Excel. It has multiple currency support. It can also record your car’s information such as VIN, insurance policy number, emergency phone numbers and registration.
6. The Weather Channel – this app provides in-motion radar maps, traffic cams (select markets), improved graphics and more.
7. WifiTrak – this app will help you find FREE and open WiFi hotspots and public access points quickly and easily. Network list sorted from best to worst.
8. Road Trip Fun – this app contains a list of games that you and your family can play on a road trip! Helps keep the kids in the car busy whilst you drive! No internet connection is needed!
9. Flashlight – when you find yourself in a dark spot, Flashlight will illuminate where you are with a bright white light or you can customize the color of your choice.

When you have a team working from different locations and you need to collaborate on documents, DocVerse might be the tool you need!

DocVerse is a plug-in for Microsoft Office that adds functionality to the sidebar within Microsoft Excel, Powerpoint and Word. You can invite friends and colleagues to collaborate on any documents. As edits are made, the changes are synced to the cloud.

Apart from a hard copy, a web-based version of the document gets automatically save for team members to see making collaboration easier.

DocVerse also provides some great discussion and tracking features through the sidebar as well. It allows you to IM anyone collaborating on the document. You have the ability to track recent changes and who made them. There is a history tab that provides you with a larger view of the history of the document.

It’s real easy to use and great for employees who are already using Microsoft Office to get things done. Docverse is not free, however. It costs $49 per month for 10 users and 500 documents and $99 per month for 25 users and 1500 documents.

To learn more, watch the video below for a brief tutorial or visit Docverse’s website – http://www.docverse.com/

DocVerse from Amir Khella on Vimeo.