-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

Between December 2008 and December 2009, the percentage of US mobile phone subscribers with unlimited data plans increased from 16% to 21%, with several phones now requiring an unlimited data plan subscription at the time of purchase. During the same period, smartphone ownership increased from 11% to 17%, while 3G phone ownership increased from 32% to 43%. (via MarketingCharts).

Smartphone Penetration Rises in 2009

Smartphone penetration continued to climb in 2009 as consumers were presented with a growing number of smartphone handset options. Among the high-profile smartphone introductions in 2009 were the Palm Pre, Motorola Droid, Motorola Cliq and others.

In December 2009, smartphones were owned by 17% of US mobile phone subscribers, up nearly six percentage points from December 2008. Among smartphone operating system (OS) platforms, RIM retained its lead with 41.6% market share, followed by Apple at 25.3% (up 8.5 percentage points from the previous year) and Microsoft at 17.9%. Google’s OS share (5.2%) gained considerably in the final months of 2009 and is poised for continued growth in 2010 with the introduction of new devices featuring the Android platform.

Verizon Tops Among U.S. Mobile Network Providers

The largest four mobile network providers, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile, combined to account for 80% of the entire US mobile subscriber market in December 2009. Verizon led as the largest service provider in the US with a market share of 31.2% in December, followed by AT&T with 25% share. Sprint and T-Mobile each captured 12.1% of the market.

Motorola Continues to Lead OEM Market in 2009

Motorola led the OEM (original equipment manufacturer) market in December 2009 with 23.5% of devices owned by mobile subscribers. While many of these handsets are legacy devices, Motorola has also made a more recent splash in the market with the introduction of the Droid and the Cliq. LG captured the second largest share of the handset market with 21.9%, up two percentage points from the previous year, followed closely by Samsung with 21.2%, up 2.7 percentage points. Apple captured 4.3% of the OEM market, up from just 1.9% share in December 2008, as the iPhone continued to gain traction last year.

Symbian Leads Global Smartphone OS Vendors

Symbian was the most popular smartphone OS by shipment volume in 2009, according to findings from technology market research firm Canalys. Although Symbian’s share of the global smartphone market dropped from 52.4% in 2008 to 47.2% in 2009, Symbian’s shipment volume grew 4.8%, from 74.9 million units to 78.5 million units.

Other findings on smartphone OS 2009 shipment volume from Canalys include:

• Although the Google Android OS only shipped 7.8 million units in 2009, this represented 1073.5% growth from 663,500 units in 2008. Global market share grew from 0.5% to 4.7%.
• Microsoft, the third-most popular smartphone OS by global shipment volume in 2008, lost 26.4% of its volume in 2009, dropping from 19.9 million units to 14.7 million units. Market share declined from 13.9% to 8.8%, and Microsoft slipped to fourth place in smartphone global shipment volume.
• Apple, the fourth-most popular smartphone OS by global shipment volume in 2008, traded places with Microsoft to become third-most-popular in 2009. Apple OS shipped 25.1 million units globally last year, up 82.9% from 13.7 million units in 2008. Market share grew from 9.6% to 15.1%.

About the Survey: Data is taken from the comScore 2009 Digital US Year in Review.

We’re pleased to announce a new price point for self-managed SMS marketing and promotions.

Say for example you’re in charge of your hotel’s internet marketing, then bolt on or low cost DIY SMS marketing solution starting from just $125/mo per keyword plus per message costs of $0.10.

Use the keyword in your print collateral to drive subscriptions for golf promotions, restaurant promotions or anything else to target a local, last minute audience.

And if you ‘re interested in SMS marketing, why not talk to us about your overall  hotel mobile marketing strategy – from mobile web to tracking performance on mobile initiatives, we’ve got the mobile experience that others don’t to take you down the right path.

RESERVE YOUR KEYWORD NOW for $125/mo plus messages – Get in touch to check availability on keywords

If you’re looking to dip your toes in mobile marketing, then we might suggest the following:

• Create mobile micro sites for property that  acts as informational content PLUS landing pages for mobile marketing efforts
• Set up an SMS Direct Response keyword which people can text into to receive text messages back from the brand (e.g. Text ‘keyword’ to 95495)
• Apply some funds to test mobile PPC for relevant lines of business (rooms, restaurant etc)
• Create a mobile banner ad campaign and drive users to your newly create mobile web landing pages.
• Use our phone call tracking to measure volumes of calls made from mobile marketing efforts

RESERVE YOUR KEYWORD NOW

Where do the feeds come from? Google announced official partnerships with the following web entities; Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca to power their aggregate real-time feeds.

Get a first look at the new search interface and some sample searches.

So the big, very big question is what does this mean?  More spam unfortunately. More attempts by affiliate marketers to skew the system in their favor and more automated recycling of posts to always have a presence in real time results. It’s not going to be a bed of roses while the search engines get to grips with reputation management of the contributors that author content on these new partners. We know that Twitter’s user profile management is basic at best. Silly algorithms that weight banal factors as negatives or positives can easily be circumvented and before you know it you’re being stuffed with affiliate cookies and pimped malware for having clicked on what you thought was a legitimate real-time search result from your ‘trusted’, favorite search engine Google.

Moving away from the pessimistic side of what will happen, there will be advantages. More so for mobile search’s integration of real-time results. That’s another post however.

Anyway, real-time is  rolling out over the next few days and when you have it, you’ll see it just happening withing your search results.

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.

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

By the way, they’re actually celebrating their 50th Anniversay so if you’re looking for a Palm Springs escape, maybe a spa weekend with the girls for Christmas to prep for all that shopping, then check out their 50th Anniversary deals.

Riviera Resort & Spa

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.

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!

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.