By Max Starkov: Last year, HeBS Digital proclaimed that 2013 would be the Year of the Three Screens in Hospitality — desktop, mobile and tablet — and advised hoteliers to get ready for the “three screen explosion” and work hard to deliver a customized and user-friendly experience across these three screens. The explosion of the mobile and social media channels and the emergence of the new tablet channel have created not only new user behavior but also new information needs in each device category, requiring hoteliers to create and manage digital content across three distinct distribution and marketing channels (desktop, mobile, tablet).

By Nicolas Bordas: “Personal Branding” is a concept that is easy to mock (if you haven’t yet seen The Onion’s send up of the term, I recommend it). Indeed, for many, including respected colleagues of mine in my industry, the idea of “personal branding” seems mushy at best: where a brand can be applied with consistency and scale to a product or service, it cannot be relevant to a person who is complex and multifaceted. I do not disagree with this rationale. However, I believe that personal branding is important to understand for anybody who lives, works, and socializes in our world today. This makes sense: in an age where we are constantly branding ourselves on social media (including LinkedIn) and where the average worker remains at their job for 4.4 years, creating a personal brand is an essential skill in marketing oneself.

By Rieva Lesonsky: A recent survey shows economy-stressed customers are fed up with businesses. Here's how to keep enraged customers coming back for more.

By Chris Owen: What if we could travel back in time 17 million years to when the Grand Canyon was just forming? Would we have believed that the national monument, now nearly a mile deep in places, would some day be a major tourist attraction? Probably not. But time and the forces of nature that come with it, along with the effect of humans on the planet, have a way of changing what we see – sometimes dramatically.

By Mike Waite, VP marketing with Market Metrix: 93% of global travelers say their booking decisions are influenced by online reviews. 53% of travelers say they won’t book a hotel that doesn’t have online reviews. And it’s now pretty well proven that improvements in online reviews lead directly to higher bookings, average daily rate (ADR) and revenue. So what hotel wouldn’t want to improve its TripAdvisor page rank!?

By Alan Campbell: Since I have been travelling this week, I have been partaking in one of my favorite pastimes, that is, sampling the fine restaurants in the area. I say this because in a news bit on CNN there was a well-known restaurant that was shut down due to food poisoning and it got me thinking about kitchens.

Now that the national hotel occupancy rate is approaching its long run averages and scarcity has returned in certain markets and property types, guests have to pay more to rent rooms. However, after the guests have checked in, managers are struggling to get them to spend more on the additional services and amenities offered by hotels. This finding comes from the recently released 2013 edition of Trends® in the Hotel Industry, the annual compendium of hotel operating statistics prepared by PKF Hospitality Research.

By Tim Dale: Recently, Mark Zuckerberg and his crew released their third pillar to the ever-changing Facebook platform with Graph Search. Joining the Newsfeed and Timeline, Graph Search was born into a lot of hype, questions, and concerns about its impact on online searches, marketing, and privacy. Good people of the Hotel Industry, let me guide you through what this means for your business.

If you guessed Google and Facebook were the most-visited websites across the globe, you'd be right. But did you know Baidu.com, the leading Chinese-language search engine is sixth, ahead of Twitter, Amazon and LinkedIn? Or that about 20 percent of the 2.4 billion Internet users make their way to Yahoo! every day?