TripAdvisor is planning a television advertising campaign to introduce its hotel booking and community review site to a mainstream audience. The company’s co-founder and CEO, Stephen Kaufer, mentioned the plan in last night’s quarterly earnings call.
We're kicking off our upcoming Social Media Marketing Boot Camp with a special keynote presentation by Ella Chick (left), the digital producer at Anderson Cooper 360°. She'll discuss how the network uses social media for breaking news and leverages social media to draw attention to organizations and causes. Learn more about our program and register here. 
Google has reportedly reached an agreement with the European Commission to change its search practices after a two-year investigation on whether the search engine giant favors its own properties in the search results.
Travel review community TripAdvisor has acquired Jetsetter, Gilt Groupe’s luxury private sale site where professional travel reviewers cherry-pick the best local hotspots. Despite its similarities to TripAdvisor’s SniqueAway, TripAdvisor has no plans to shutter the newly acquired site.
TripAdvisor has announced a partnership with the global data company Factual, Inc. that will add more restaurant listings to the travel site. TripAdvisor is known for its candid reviews of hotels from real travelers.
TripAdvisor and Yelp are the two largest (and dare I say, best) resources for travelers. With millions of ratings and directories that expand every day, the services promise an answer to the difficult questions that travellers face. Where should I eat? What is this city’s best attraction? Where’s the beer?
For a while, I tried to use “Google Places”, now known as Google+ Local, to find nearby eateries or attractions. I felt the app user experience was faster than the competitors and it’s integration of Google Maps was more sophisticated. But a travel app is only as good as its content, and there were no reviews.
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Facebook’s Day of Reckoning: Second Quarter Earnings Report (The Huffington Post)
Today, Facebook will take the spotlight once again, for its first earnings report as a public company. The release of its quarterly financial results will be the social network’s chance to prove to investors that it can continue growing revenue from the ads it serves on its popular social networking site. The Guardian Wall Street will be hoping co-founder Mark Zuckerberg steps forward with some reassuring remarks during tonight’s earning call. After booking a $1.1 billion charge for share-based payouts to staff and early investors at the public offering, the social network is forecast by its lead bank Morgan Stanley to report a $673 million loss before tax. AP It needs to keep its nearly 1 billion users logging on as often — and for as long — as possible, interacting with each other as well as with brands. As a result of that disclosure and others, many analysts reduced their estimates for Facebook’s projected revenue and earnings. The Wall Street Journal The consensus for Facebook’s second-quarter earnings report is that the Menlo Park, Calif., company will report 12 cents a share of profit and $1.15 billion of revenue for the quarter, according to Thomson Reuters. “One of the most-challenging times to model a company’s financials is when it’s very young,” said Mark Mahaney, an Internet analyst who covers Facebook for Citigroup. Bloomberg Businessweek Investors will be looking to glean a few crucial facts during the conference call. Can the company spark revenue in those regions, such as Asia, with high membership growth? Can it make advertising work on mobile devices such as the iPhone, where users are increasingly accessing the service? Read more
Once an online destination for anonymous (and often brutal) hotel reviews, TripAdvisor has been working more closely with Facebook to make the site a friendlier recommendation engine and mobile app for travelers. TripAdvisor co-founder and CEO Stephen Kaufer explained the impact of the company’s social efforts in an earnings call on Tuesday night.
Normally, TripAdvisor reviews come from tourists who aren’t familiar with the areas they’re visiting. It’s valuable information in its own right, but for travelers who want to go beyond the touristy parts of town, the best advice often comes from the people who live there. Launched this week, TripAdvisor’s new Facebook app helps people find restaurants in their own neighborhoods.
Want to get away this weekend but don’t have a destination in mind? Wanderfly is a visual travel discovery site that creates personal recommendations based on your interests and budget. Founded in 2009, the site just got a whole new look and won the award for best design at the LAUNCH festival in San Francisco.
The Internet’s transition from user-generated content to user-curated content continues as Facebook adds some new apps to its timeline. The social network announced in a blog post this morning that timeline apps will be available for Foodspotting, Foodily, Ticketmaster, Pinterest, Rotten Tomatoes, Pose, Kobo, Gogobot, TripAdvisor and other emerging social networks.
