Here's your marketing, social media, and hospitality news for August 24, 2012

• Auto Brands Swear Twitter Ads Work:Twitter’s ad products (promoted tweets, trends and accounts) are very different than what digital marketers are used to with display and search marketing. But the ad model is working for a lot of brands. Auto brands, specifically, have been seeing a lot of success with Twitter’s ad products. (Digiday) 
• 2 Top Brands Succeeding at Instagram and What You Can Learn From Them:  It’s clear that Instagram has quickly become its own valid community in the social arena, and several major brands are taking advantage of that opportunity to grow their own unique Instagram followings. (SocialFresh) 
• Almost Half of Marketing Execs Surveyed Have No Interest in Pinterest: Pinterest may be the hot new trend in social media but 44% of the marketing and advertising execs The Creative Group surveyed said they had no interest in using the site for business. (Marketing Pilgrim) 
• 7 Photos That Play Best on Social Media: We are living in a photo-obsessed world. Everyone has a camera phone and nearly everyone posts their photos to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram Pinterest or all of the above. As a small-business owner, you can capitalize on the popularity of photos by posting them on your own social media pages. (American Express OpenForum) 
• 10 Google+ Circles Marketers Should Follow: It’s true that marketers tend to rely on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to remain at the forefront of industry news, but they also tend to neglect the full potential that Google+ offers as a news source. Adding key people to your circle and following the shared circles others have curated on Google+ can help fill your feed with relevant content that’s worth reading. (Mashable) 
• Fancy Yourself as a LinkedIn Expert? Better Add These 4 Tips & Tricks to Your Toolkit: Whether you’re a career climber, career coach, job seeker, business development consultant or professional speaker offering programs on LinkedIn, you should probably know these 4 tips and tricks. By adding these to your LinkedIn toolkit, you’ll prove that you really know your stuff when it comes to leveraging LinkedIn. (Business2Community) 
• Six Hotel Brands You Should Be Excited About Now: All this talk about IKEA getting ready to sweep Europe with a new chain of budget hotels got us thinking about some of the other cool brands out there. And it's a good thing there's so many of them—because while certain brands have managed to deliver on their promises, others have yet to open a single property. And yet we still remain hopelessly glued to the screen... Take a look at these six other hotel brands we're most excited about, and see which openings are coming to a theater near you.  (HotelChatter) 
• Foods That Countries Should Be Known For, But Aren’t (Yet): There are some places around the world that serve iconic food. Steak in Buenos Aires. Tapas in Barcelona. Sushi in Tokyo. Cheesesteak in Philadelphia. Poutine in Quebec. When you go to these places, you seek it out. You plan for for it to be part of your travel experience. But, there is a lot of great food that isn’t as well known. Some countries don’t have an iconic dish or their food isn’t even known or understood. And, in many cases the iconic dish is either not as good as its reputation suggests or there are dishes that are unexpectedly better the iconic one. (GoGoBot) 
• While Google, Tripadvisor & Yelp Squabble, GuestComment Revolutionizes Hotel Reviews: GuestComment today launches the first turn-key platform that allows hotel guests to share praise, complaints and feedback while onsite. Using a patent-pending system, GuestComment collects hotel guest reviews using interactive kiosks placed inside the hotel. All feedback is instantly sent to the hotel management, which can then acknowledge the praise, or address the complaint, before the hotel guest checks out. The onsite kiosks mean less fraudulent reviews, more happy guests, improved online reviews, and increase hotel revenues! (Marketing Pilgrim) 
• How Hotel Brands Are Using Clever Marketing to Keep Ahead of the Game:  We all know the hotel industry is a notoriously tough business. Stiff competition has been compounded even further by the onset of the worldwide recession. Tourists have drastically reduced in numbers year on year as the money pot dwindles. It’s an everyman for himself situation these days and if you want to stay ahead of the curve, you’ve got be ingenious, dynamic and adapt instantaneously to every situation. So what strategies are hoteliers around the world adopting in order to give themselves a fighting chance of riding this storm? (everythingPR) http://www.pamil-visions.net/hotel-marketing/237640/