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

Charlotte, NC — Screen Pilot, a digital marketing and technology firm, has several simple steps for marketing professionals to realize the benefits of understanding what is occurring in their online marketing world. If you don’t have analysts to decipher your company’s Internet marketing results, there are five easy ways to add clout to your marketing budgets. You might just be surprised at how underutilized your existing web reporting tools are.

1. Uncover Hidden Potential:
Marketing professionals need to customize the way they track their digital marketing campaigns. They should take a look at what kind of measuring tools they currently use. Are the goals that have been set for a web reporting platform meeting the needs of the company? By creating a list of must-haves, it’ll be easier to narrow down what the needs are and how they can be fulfilled and by which products.

2. Add Tracking To Your E-mail Campaigns:
You can add tracking parameters to your e-mail marketing activity that enables marketers to start tracking visitors and their actions once in your web site that are driven by e-mail efforts. Setting up to measure conversions, from shopping carts or other areas of your site that are important to you, will enable you to see which e-mail campaigns have higher returns on investment (ROI) than others. With this tip, you can now test scientifically based on the ROI and not solely on the click-through rates and engagement factors.

3. Are Your PPC Campaigns Set-Up Correctly?
If you have potential customers click on your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads and immediately leave your site, your advertising money spent is wasted. You could be missing opportunities if your web statistics aren’t giving you the whole picture about the visitors you get from paid search channels like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Reporting from search engines only goes halfway in educating you on how effective your PPC actually is. Set up your reporting to measure key performance indicators from paid channels. It can help you increase ROI and make intelligent decisions about how and where to spend your marketing dollars.

4. Don’t Rely on 3rd Party Reporting:
It is very common that the amount of clicks the advertisers say you have is different than what you receive. Countless times we are requested to create audit trails for costly marketing channels that report higher numbers of clicks from their networks than you actually receive. Using your web statistics platform correctly will tell you exactly what traffic you received from a specific campaign and the value of that traffic.

5. Track Calls from Campaigns:
If you sell product offline then you need to track the call volumes that are generated from each specific digital campaign and types. This will easily tell you how effective a campaign’s response is when people go online but don’t convert. Quickly what channels such as PPC, email, banner ads and other create calls and which don’t. By adding this new dimension it might make you adjust some efforts for best returns.

If your current tracking and measurement tools aren’t producing results, you may need to reconsider the platform.

In a bid to help the struggling travel and hospitality industry in Europe and the U.S., we’re launching a specifc QnA channel on Twitter which we will answer (in a Tweet) online marketing questions from sales and marketing staff at any flagged or independent properties. The Twitter channel to follow and post questions to is @HotelMktgQnA.

By posting a question or query or just general thought on the stream, Screen Pilot @reply to the query each day.

So if you ever wanted to know quick bits of info like the answer to “Should I bother with PPC on Bing?” or “Is a bounce rate of 40% on my emails campaigns good?” then follow this new channel at @HotelMktgQnA .

While you’re  there, go ahead and follow @ScreenPilot

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!

It is common to see on Twitter people eager to gain as many followers at they can in the shortest amount of time. It is believed that if you have a vast amount of followers it naturally means you have more “voice” in your tweets. Is this really the case?

The answer is no, and here’s the reason why.

Low-Value Followers: these are the people who follow you using automatons with the intent of spamming and self-promoting. They aren’t interested in you. They don’t care about you. These are the sort of people who use a temporary email address to sign up so they can get your freebie and disappear. Most of them aren’t going to retweet your posts.

The key factors to consider in your Twitter marketing:

• Who are the people that follow you? You need to consider who are the readers of your tweets. Are they interested in you or your business? Are they active users? Do they share links with you and give you feedback?
• Does your audience engage with you? A responsive audience connects with you, retweeting your links and answers your questions. They interact with your Twitter stream.

You don’t just want a large follower count, you want a group of followers who are responsive!

So who should you network with? People who work in your field and own websites that can send you links and traffic. Build relationships with a core group of influencers who are relevant to your business/website.

Next talk to your followers, share your links, give them feedback and support them. Over time, they will get to know you well enough to help you promote your product or services on Twitter, online and offline!

Twitter is such a viral way to connect with prospects and existing customers that many businesses are incorporating Twitter as part of their marketing strategy to promote a product or service. Businesses tend to have more than one person participating in the conversation on Twitter and that    can become difficult to manage.

Now there is a solution to the problem in HootSuite.

HootSuite is a professional Twitter client that allows you to manage multiple Twitter profiles, pre-schedule tweets, and measure your success. It’s the ultimate Twitter toolbox!

Some of the key features of HootSuite include:

• help your images go viral
• track statistics – show not only summaries but individual tweet statistics
• a company or organization with more than one contributor can be managed easily over various Twitter accounts
• create groups and embed columns
• automatically feed your RSS to your Twitter stream
• HootSuite with Ping.fm allows you to update your Facebook, WordPress, LinkedIn, and more
• schedule Tweets
• click on the search bar and locate current trending topics, search keywords and monitor your brand
• report spam
• and much more!

Some companies that are using HootSuite to manage their Twitter presence include: National Geographic, Disney, Fox, People Magazine, Dell, Huffington Post, TMZ, US Army, MSNBC and BET to just name a few!

HootSuite is currently free. All you need to do is go to HootSuite and sign up for your free account.

As much as there is a multitude of social media sites outhere, there equally seems to be a great deal of tools to help you figure out what’s going on with your brand names, reputations, etc etc. So we’ve picked a few of the best free apps to help you measure, monitor and generally navigate your way through the social media forest.

1. HowSociable? – A simple, free, tool that can measure the visibility of your brand on the web across 22 metrics http://howsociable.com
2. TweetScan – search for words on Twitter http://tweetscan.com
3. TweetMeme – View the most popular Twitter threads occurring now. http://tweetmeme.com
4. Addict-o-matic – A nice search engine that aggregates rss feeds, allowing you to quickly see the areas where a brand is lacking in presence http://addictomatic.com
5. Posterous – Posterous is the dead simple way to put anything online using email. http://posterous.com
6. Viral Video Chart – Displays top 20 most-viewed video (1, 7, 365 days). Includes view counts and charting.http://viralvideochart.unrulymedia.com
7. Pixelpipe – Upload photos, video, and audio files once through the Pixelpipe Media Gateway and distribute your content across over 100+ social networks, photo/video sites, blogs, and other online services. http://pixelpipe.com
8. eKstreme – is a keyword research tool with one simple aim: to find out who’s talking about a certain keyword.http://ekstreme.com/buzz
9. Keotag – making it easy for you to track if someone tags a page using your company or product name.http://www.keotag.com
10. Social Mention – search aggregation for various sources, from blogs to social sites. http://www.socialmention.com

A lot of brands and business have Twitter accounts, Facebook Fan pages and other social media site accounts. Are you making the most of them? Not only can a properly enhanced account or page profile give you that clean, professional look and feel, it can also help your SEO.  Popular social media sites means great link strength – that means if you have a link to your website from these accounts, then the text on your key pages will have an effect on your SEO strategy. For example, what do you have written in your About Us text on Twitter? The ‘About Us’ box is a great place to include relevant content and keyword-rich descriptions. But it’s not just about SEO, in fact, the reason why you have a social media presence in the first place, actually overrides the SEO benefits.

So, here are some quick tips you can implement today…

1. Ensure your About Us copy contains your keyword rich story. This is often identified in search algorithms as a key component of SERPs. Make sure your words are contained in this copy whether it be Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or Yammer sites and others.
2. Keep it fresh! Social media for brands is all about the here and now and things that can be acted upon.  Your Facebook page should contain things you want people to do, to take advntage of, to be rewarded for having followed you or adding you as a Fan.
3. Video and images: These digital assets are becoming more and more important in SERPs and social media. Posting video content into your social sites that’s relevant and that has viral opportunity will get circulated.
4. Social media isn’t a hard sell – make sure you don’t turn people off with pointless postings, content or hard sells. Remember, it’s social, the recipient will dictate for themselves what’s important and what’s not. Give them the content to make that decision on while at the same time building your brand and experience you want to deliver through content that supports this strategy.
5. Know what people are saying. Use sites like SocialMention.com to get quick and easy reports on content relevant to your brand.
6. Need more characters in Twitter? If you use the web based interface for Twitter, long URLs automatically get shortened using bit.ly so you don’t have to worry about long URLs – thus giving you more room for your message.
7. Take advantage of background images to ensure your key photography or product shots are upfront and center. Get away from boring standard backgrounds that look the same as everyone else’s profile pages.

In our next installment on the social media front, we’ll be covering some key tools you should be using today to ensure you’re monitoring and building your social media presence and opportunity. But if you need a hand giving your social media tactics a boost, get in touch.