After last week’s Facebook Offers update, it looks as if several more companies are getting on the ball as they prepare to push out their own versions of deals, like Foursquare – who’s supposedly going to display personalized coupons come July – or enhance current deal offerings, as with Google who recently released a Google Maps update for Android devices which includes support for Google Offers.

Watch this video for more details on how Google Offers works with Google Maps for Android and find out how your hotel can get started for free:

Besides all that’s happening in the social and local offers space, there were a couple more articles that caught our interest this week. Check out this week’s wrap-up below:

• What do mobile business travellers want?
• 5 Ways to Benefit From Customer Testimonial Videos
• Distribution Strategy: Shifting Share in a Competitive Market
• Hotel photos: Quality or quantity?
• Consumers now pay more attention to online reviews than word-of-mouth

What links would you add to our list? We’re looking for input on what articles you’d like to see more of. Feel free to leave a comment and let us know what we’ve missed this week.

Facebook brought a lot of new changes and updates to the social marketing sphere this week, including the proclaimed “life-saving” addition of an Organ Donor status, customizable action links for app developers, as well as rolling out Offers to more business Pages. Were you one of the businesses that saw this latest update appear in your status update box yesterday?

However, apart from the social giant’s (seemingly) endless updates, we still managed to keep our eyes on a few other interesting topics this week as well.

Here’s our weekly round-up of hospitality and digital marketing articles of interest:

• Google repositions Hotel Finder atop organic search results
• Email Marketers Better Prepare for Mobile Opens, New Study Finds
• US Hotel Profit Recovery is Widespread
• How Does Social Media Affect Website Search Rankings? [INFOGRAPHIC]
• Booking.com Adds Urgency to Purchases with Real-Time Shopping Data

What other articles did you see this week that were particularly noteworthy? Leave us a comment to let us know which topics you found most interesting.

This week in particular has brought big changes, both in and outside of the VIZERGY office. Internally, we celebrated the promotion of Phil Faircloth (previously our Director of Client Marketing Services) to the well-deserved position of Director of Operations.

And, as always, we continue to watch as each new week never fails to bring exciting news to those of us dealing with digital marketing in the hospitality industry. Not only were we able to see Twitter break the standing TPS (tweets-per-second) record with a new all-time high, but we also witnessed yet another big change for marketers everywhere: Google’s new anti-spam algorithm.

Here’s our weekly dose of the best articles relating to hospitality and the challenges, changes, and news surrounding digital marketing initiatives:

• Video Is a Rising Star Among Content Marketers
• Has Timeline Increased Engagement on Facebook?
• Bookings on the hoof: the last-minute traveler in a mobile world
• High-tech hotels a hit with geeky guests
• Who do travelers trust most for trip information?

What did you find most interesting this week? Leave a comment to let us know which articles we may have overlooked.

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With so many online channels for properties and marketers to tackle, email marketing is frequently forgotten, or at least not prioritized.  However, email should still be a key component in properties’ online marketing strategies.

With your website, mobile website, SEO, PPC, social pages, local profiles and much more to integrate into your property’s digital marketing, it’s easy to forget what sometimes seems like an archaic form of marketing – email.  But just because email has been around since the advent of the Internet doesn’t mean it’s ineffective.  Quite the contrary actually, as Reuters reports that 85% of global online users communicate via email, trumping 62% that communicate via social media.  Furthermore, according to eMarketer, 47% of U.S Internet users have a positive attitude toward email, more than any other form of online advertising.

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With a beautiful holiday weekend behind us, we were able to get quite a few projects accomplished in our offices this past week. We began an early promotion of our latest white paper late last week focusing on local and mobile marketing strategies for hotels across the globe (download your free copy here). We also announced the roll-out of several new Facebook products designed specifically for hotel Pages on Timeline.

With more great projects in the work, we took some time to root out some of the latest and greatest news articles in the hospitality and digital marketing sectors.

Take a look through our list of interesting articles from this week:

• Video Boosts Brand Engagement, Site Visits
• Email continues to drive buying decisions
• 6 Ways to Integrate Print with Your Social Media Marketing
• Nielsen: Consumer Trust in Traditional Media Ads Fall, While Confidence in Mobile, Social and Online Rise
• Checking In? Hidden Ways Hotels Court Guests Faster

What articles did you find most interesting this week? Let us know in the comments below.

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