This week; UpTrade your gadgets, the battle cry of a generation and men in labour.

Take a little break and enjoy some of this week’s wonderful things on the web.

UPTRADE: A chance to swap your old gadgets for a VAIO Duo 11 from Sony.

YOLO: The Lonely Island are back with a new album.

RENTED: Will the rental girlfriend become the male equivalent of the Hermès Birkin?

ADVISED: Invaluable life lessons from the babes on Toddlers and Tiaras.

EXPOSED: Google Maps teaches us a little more about the elusive North Korea.

ANONYMOUS: Un-cloud your files in cement.

EXCITED: Baby Rhino ‘Bys’ trots around at Poland’s Warsaw Zoo.

OUCH: Two men experience simulated labour pains.

CLEVER: Entertaining facts about dinosaurs and some great brand content.

WONDERFUL:  Hilarious children’s drawings.

(Image via)

This week; unhappy otters, Subway caught short and social developments.

Take a peek at what’s been happening on the Internet this week.

ENUNCIATE: The agency pronunciation guide.

ALTERNATE: Facebook design idea.

INADEQUATE: 11-inch footlong sub.

FAIL: Google Analytics in real life.

ADORBS: Sisters gain a million likes and a puppy.

DUBBED: NFL bad lip reading.

SIZZLING: Cool down with 1001 things to do this summer.

HILARIOUS: Self-loathing otter.

ZUCKERBERGED: Facebook unveils new search engine.

GAME, SET, MATCH: Win tickets to the Australian Open Men’s Final.

(Image via)

We Are Social Australia is looking to add the right people in a range of roles across the business.

We’ve grown dramatically, both globally and here locally, where we’re working with some of the biggest and most socially ambitious companies in Australia - and now we need more great people to join us in our Sydney office.

We are looking for;

• Front end Developers – Mid level
• Back end Developers – Senior level
• Digital Producers
• Account Managers
• Account Directors
• Social Strategists
• Community & Content Managers
• Social Media Researchers
• Interns

How to apply;

Send us an email with your name and the role you’re applying for in the subject line.

Attach your CV, and then introduce yourself in no more than 400 words – tell us your background, examples that clearly demonstrate your proven track record – links to work if possible, and importantly, why you want to work at We Are Social.

We suggest adding links to LinkedIn and your social profiles.

We look forward to hearing from you.

We Are Social featured in The Australian
Our MD Julian Ward had some choice words in an article in The Australian this week, discussing the benefits of social media for brands;

“The ability to actually maintain attention with a consumer is immensely valuable, especially when other channels are less able to do this.”

“The challenge is crafting a content and editorial strategy that holds value and continues to intrigue and engage those on the receiving end. As a brand, do you want to answer customer questions or do you want to be the most talked about and engaged brand within your category?”

To find out more on how you can be engaging with your customers, and finding new ones, drop us an email.

1 in 5 viewers start watching a show after hearing about it in social
According to a Horowitz Associates poll of US heads of TV households conducted in January, 19% had begun watching a show after reading about it on a social network or blog.

Facebook holds IPO, share price drops
Facebook held its IPO on Friday, with the company listed on the NASDAQ. Despite the share price returning to the initial $38 price after the first day of trading, this was partly due to the banks underwriting the share price to stop it falling below $38. Regardless, 421.2 million shares were sold valuing the company at a whopping $104.2 billion, a price which has since fallen significantly in early trading today in New York.

General Motors suspends Facebook ad spending
General Motors, America’s biggest automaker and 3rd biggest advertiser, in an interestingly timed move announced last week that it will stopped buying Facebook ads for the forseeable future. Industry reaction has been mixed.

With Forrester also saying Facebook doesn’t pay enough attention to marketers, this can’t have helped Facebook’s first day of trading. Ironically, a source close to the GMhad said their move was partly due to Facebook telling them to prioritise community management over ads. Something, it should be noted, that GM is still wisely planning to invest $30 million in.

Facebook redesign mobile apps
Facebook has updated its mobile apps so that images will now appear larger and at a higher quality in a bid to improve engagement.

Facebook also acquired Lightbox last week, once hailed the ‘Instagram of Android’ – perhaps in a bid to assure investors that Facebook will do what it takes to win in the mobile-centric future of social networking.

New Facebook Page Manager App
Managing Facebook Pages on a mobile has long been difficult, but this could all be about to change: Facebook is testing an app called Facebook Pages Manager which should make all of this far easier. Good news for marketers.

Twitter re-launch recommendations
Moving forward, new Twitter users will now receive a number of auto-generated recommended followers from the Twitter ecosystem. According to Twitter:

These tailored suggestions are based on accounts followed by other Twitter users and visits to websites in the Twitter ecosystem. We receive visit information when sites have integrated Twitter buttons or widgets, similar to what many other web companies — including LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube — do when they’re integrated into websites.

Interestingly, viewers will also be able to view tweets from these users in an example timeline.

Twitter teams up with Nascar to enhance hashtags
Twitter has teamed up with Nascar so that consumers worldwide can create a “complementary live race experience”. The Twitter page will combine race-related tweets and photos giving behind-the-scenes exclusive for individual races. In effect, for one advertiser (Nascar), they’ve made a pretty radical change to the hashtag experience:

Up until now when users click on a hashtag, they are shown a page littered with tweets which have included that particular hashtag. But in Nascar’s case, Twitter will curate those tweets through an algorithm, and by hand to give users a behind-the-scenes look at the race.

Twitter hits 10m UK users, 140 brands have used promoted products
For a company that has only had an office in the UK for one year, Twitter is going from strength to strength. It’s now reaching 10 million UK users of which 80% are active on mobile. 340 million tweets are sent per day and brands have bought into the product: 140 have used Promoted Products in the last year.

Tony Wang from Twitter UK gave Marketing Magazine an interesting Q&A about Twitter’s advertising approach going forward – it’s worth a read.

YouTube video views are falling
Since December, views on YouTube have fallen by 28% – but it’s an intended consequence of the Google-owned site’s shift from a video search engine filled with snack-size content to a full-fledged, couch-potato-optimized entertainment destination. At YouTube, the “view” is out and “engagement” is in – although time spent on the site hasn’t risen like execs will have hoped:

New Google+ study reveals minimal activity and weak user engagement
A new study has shown weak user engagement and minimal social activity on Google+, giving greater credence to the theory that it’s just a ghost town. Google has refused to give metrics for the Google+ active user base, probably because compared to other social networks it has far less activity. A study showed that within a sample size of 70,000 public posts, the average post receives less than one +1, less than one re-share and less than one reply. Another problem is that users don’t return to post again:

As the report sums up:

At the end of the day, Google+ simply does not show the same level of ravenous user adoption and engagement that we’ve seen in other social networks.

Pinterest is worth $1.5bn – at least according to investors
Pinterest has recently gained $100 million of funding from Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten in a simultaneous attempt to increase revenue (which is currently minimal) and mark a shift away from big American tech players; the deal values the company at $1.5 billion.

Quora raises $50M valuing the company at $400M 
Quora has raised $50 million from its co-founder Adam D’Angelo and other investors including Peter Thiel and Josh Hannah, both of whom are familiar with the online Q&A space, valuing the company at $400 million. It will be interesting to see what it invests in to try and grow the daily active user count again.

vKontakte loses important court case
vKontakte, Russia’s largest social network lost an important court case last week, which ruled that the site’s proprietary file-sharing system – and arguably its biggest selling point – is illegal and breaches copyright. Facebook has long struggled to even come close to over-taking vKontakte, but the fall-out from this court ruling may well help Facebook.

Ronaldo stars in Facebook challenge for documentary
Football star Cristiano Ronaldo took part in a live-streamed Facebook challenge last week called #RonaldoLive which tested his ‘sporting expertise’. The live-stream came from a testing facility in Madrid, in which Ronaldo had to receive, control and shoot a wave of footballs from chutes suspended above his head.

The first 100,000 people who connected to the #RonaldoLIVE Facebook app were automatically be entered into a competition to challenge Ronaldo, giving them the power to choose which goals he shot into.

Manchester City partner with Foursquare
English Premier League champions Manchester City have partnered with Foursquare, in the social network’s first official partnership with a football team. What the deal means is that City fans can now check in at the Etihad Stadium, City Square, City Stores and other official venues in return for special offers on merchandise and food and drink. They’ve also launched their own badge.

Foursquare launch two new badges
Foursquare have launched two new badges for two of the year’s biggest sporting events. Saturday night’s Champions League Final had a badge which users could obtain simply by checking in and using the words ‘UEFA Champions League’ and the Olympic Torch Relay also has a badge. To acquire the badge, users have to check-in to the nearest Olympic Torch Relay venue when the flame passes through their city.

Ikea turns to Pinterest to promote new range
Ikea are promoting their new Indian range of products partly through Pinterest. They’ve built a micro-site to draw awareness to the new range which includes an option to view a showcase of the range on Pinterest. As it’s a flat-pack campaign, you do actually have to build the pinboard for this one.

Intel launches employee curated digital magazine
Intel have launched a digital magazine which will allow many different staff members to chip in. Intel iQ is a social-publishing platform which resembles a digital magazine. A story gets to the iQ front page when a certain number of people recommend it, and as recommendations grow, so the size of the story on the front page increases. Intel have said they expect the number of contributors to the site to grow to thousands, which is really quite impressive.

Wickes rolls out first social media campaign
Wickes, the DIY retailer, has made its first foray into social media with the launch of a Facebook app which allows fans to create a sharable digital portfolio of their DIY projects. It’s based on the idea that people are very happy when they complete a project. It seems a bit useless – papering over the cracks of a lack of a real social media strategy.

Welcome to your weekly round up of the biggest stories in social – grab yourself an Instagraham cracker and let’s get started…

1. Domino’s increases social media effort
Domino’s Australia are letting their Facebook fans decide what the next Domino’s pizza will be: from toppings to dough, the fans can decide what the “social” pizza will taste like. How the pizza will turn out is anyone’s guess, but it appears Domino’s may have another social hit on its hands. Who knew pizza could be so shareable…

2. Facebook’s global takeover
eMarketer predicts that there will be 1.43 billion social network users in 2012, which amounts to a substantial share of the world’s entire population. 1 out of 5 people will use a social network this year and Facebook is a key reason for this. Facebook has rapidly expanded into India, Indonesia and Brazil who now join the US and Mexico in the top 5 Facebook countries:

In fact, if Brazil maintains its current growth it could easily jump from fourth to second place, as soon as next month, having already taken over Google’s Orkut which had been leading in Brazil since 2004.

Facebook is also doing well in Japan, where they now have 10 million monthly active users. This figure has doubled in the last 6 months.

3. Blogs are not dead. There are 6.7m bloggers, half aged 18-34
NM Incite have released research that shows that consumer interest in blogs continues to grow with over 181 million blogs at the end of 2011, up from 36 million just 5 years ago. Not surprisingly this mirrors a growth in bloggers – 6.7 million of them publishing through blogging websites such as Blogger, WordPress and Tumblr whilst another 12 million write blogs using their social networks. The question is, who are these bloggers? Well, half are aged 18-34 and the majority are women, over 2/3 of which are mums.

4. Social media ads ‘justifying hype’
ZenithOptimedia have boosted their forecast for 2012 global internet adspend by 4.5%, now predicting a spend of £2.2bn. The sudden rise of social is evident in a revision to its US forecasts, which had pegged social media spend for 2012 at $1.33bn (£851m) in December, but now predicts $3.42bn (£2.2bn), partly due to $1bn (£640m) of display spend being recategorised as social media spend, and partly due to the medium growing faster than previously thought. Jonathan Barnard, head of forecasting at ZenithOptimedia, said:

Social is justifying its hype now. A third of all display impressions in the US are social. Advertisers are learning to be less interruptive.

5. Facebook updates Timeline Page ‘beginnings’, adds recommendations and launches Mobile app stats
Facebook has added the option to describe the beginning of a page as ‘created’ or ‘launched’. The original options ‘founded’, ‘started’ and ‘opened’ are still available but these new variations make a lot of sense for the different types of entities that run pages on Facebook.

Facebook have also introduced a recommendations feature for place pages that have switched to the new Timeline format. These are displayed in a box beneath friend activity and include a prompt for people to write their own recommendations. These are only available to pages that are associated with locations so if a brand wants to enable this function page owners have to provide an exact address in their About sections.

Another development from Facebook is the launch of a new Mobile Referrals dashboard in App Insights which helps understand the traffic an app receives from Facebook mobile sources. This features data on total mobile app clicks and source, demographic and device breakdown amongst other insights.

6. Facebook Timeline Apps and foursquare’s new Facebook look
In other Facebook news, 3,000 Timeline apps have spawned since Facebook launched the platform 3 months ago and last week Foursquare among others such as Nike and VEVO unveiled theirs. These new launches are likely to persuade more brands and startups that Timeline app development is worth their investment, meaning that soon there will be even more apps channelling user behaviour into Facebook’s content feeds and ad targeting engine. Pinterest is a key example of the success of Timeline apps as it has seen its Facebook userbase grow by 60% since it launched its Timeline app in January. The Onion definitely wins the award for the most amusing integration below:

Foursquare’s Timeline app has a new look for check-ins, badges and mayorships. This features check-in photos showing up full size, a summary of a user’s past month foursquare activity and if a person checks in a few times these will display as a story rather than separately. Neat!

7. The expert’s view on Twitter’s acquisition of Posterous
Twitter recently announced the acquisition of blogging platform Posterous. The exact details of the deal have been kept secret but Econsultancy have brought tohether various expert views to discuss the motivations behind the takeover and what it means for both Twitter and Posterous including those of our very own Mr Jordan Stone.

8. Pinterest is now a top 30 US website
As we all know, Pinterest has been the subject of much attention recently and this is set to continue with the news from Experian Hitwise that it is continuing to rapidly grow. After cracking the top 60 list of US websites six weeks ago they have now entered the top 30. The site received more than 103 million visits in the US this February, which was up 36% on January. With revelations the company is working on an iPad app, growth seems unlikely to slow soon.

9. Instagram announces news of Android App launch
The Instagram is gearing up to launch an Android app, which was flashed briefly at the SXSW Interactive conference in Texas last week, meaning their 27 million userbase is set to increase dramatically.

10. McDonalds #shamrocking has greater success than #McDStories
Following the #McDStories debacle where McDonalds’ own hashtag was hijacked by disgruntled customers, the company are back and seem to have learned a valuable lesson by creating a somewhat more successful meme. Taking its inspiration from Planking and Tebowing, customers share pictures of themselves doing a jig whilst holding a shamrock milkshake. See example below…

 The Week According To The Internet:

• Obama-thing Of The Week: Obama Loves You Back
• Tumblr Of The Week: Hipster Branding
• Viral Video Of the Week: Itchy & Scratchy: The Complete Saga

Welcome to the final Tune-Up of 2011, the illustrious number 19. Not quite as good as number 100, which the UK just celebrated (congrats!), but certainly not without merit…

Here are the Top 10 stories in social media this week;

1. Facebook announces top trends of 2011

Facebook Australia are hosting a nice metrics app which shows the top status trends (above), most popular people, brands, characters, movies and television shows from Australian Facebook users in 2011.

If you’re wondering what a Skrillex is, it’s a dubstep thing, apparently.

It all looks very nice, but where there’s smoke, there’s Google, and not one to miss out on a bit of stat action;

2. Google lists top Australian search terms for the year

Google have published their annual Zeitgeist – the hottest trends on Google.com.au over the past year.

Apparently, we’re a nation of cake-eating, mine-craft playing plankers. But no-one else is allowed to call us that.

“Siri, where’s my cake pop?”

3. Social networks used by over three quarters of consumers
A new study from Ofcom produced some interesting findings about the state of social:

Social networking is a global phenomenon, with over three quarters of consumers in the markets we surveyed saying that they have visited a social networking site, with the majority saying they visit them on a daily basis.

This is much higher among 18-24 year olds, with eight in ten (83 per cent) visiting on a daily basis.

Social networking sites are most popular in Italy, with 91 per cent ever having visited and a quarter visiting over five times a day (24 per cent), while in the UK eight out of ten (79 per cent) have ever visited with one in five visiting over five times a day.

UK consumers are more likely to access social networking sites on a mobile phone than other countries, with 43 per cent of those with social networking site profiles saying they do so compared to just 30 per cent in the US.

More widely, the UK is Europe’s most digitally aware nation (second only to America) and this is underlined by Britons spending more time online, owning more smartphones and even watching more TV online.

Nonetheless, perhaps the most interesting graph in the whole report is how different age groups use social media to share news. The graph underscores how young people are ‘always active’:

4. Companies look to expand social media spend in 2012
An interesting bit of research from Grant Thornton highlighting how although just 43% of companies worldwide currently use social media, 61% plan to increase their usage, with it breaking down by country as follows:

The quicker growth amongst BRIC countries is backed up by the latest research from KPMG, which suggests that brands are keen to use social media in those markets as a cheap and effective way to boost brand awareness.

Judging by another survey, it seems the increased spend will go – unsurprisingly – mainly on Facebook and Twitter campaigns:

5. Facebook hits 1 billion – and rolls out timeline worldwide
According to Gawker, Facebook will make one billion Dollars in profit in the calendar year 2011 – double its profits from the previous year.

More to the point, it’s limited outgoings means Facebook is swimming in cash.

These extraordinary profit figures mean that if and when a Facebook flotation does come, the social network will be valued at a least 100 billion Dollars. And that’s a lot of money.

In other FB-news, a long time after it was announced, Facebook Timeline is finally available worldwide.

Once users activate Timeline, they get a seven-day review period to check what goes on the Timeline before it goes public.

Timeline is also now available on iPhone, Android and Mobile Web.

6. New Google+ updates and changes to Hangouts
With the end of the year just a few days away, Google have decided to launch some new updates to Google+.

First up, they’ve added the option to ‘change the volume’ of Circles, so that the overall stream can be better weighted to your interests:

They’ve also updated Brand Pages in a really positive way: they can now have multiple admins with a notification flow to enhance Page management, and they also have launched an aggregated count of all users who have engaged with a Page:

They’ve also launched a whole range of updates for Hangouts including video Hangouts on mobile which are designed to make them more accessible. To whom is another matter…

7. Facebook considering new ad formats
AdAge reports that at the end of March, Facebook is planning its first push into mobile advertising – by putting Sponsored Stories into the mobile News Feed.

It’s an interesting development as Facebook believes its userbase will be growing on mobile, meaning that this is almost certainly the first of several steps.

Judging by a post on Inside Facebook, the social network has also launched a new premium ad unit, allowing brands to post Coupons on their Pages and then push these through traditional Facebook social ads.

8. KLM to introduce in-flight matchmaker zone
Dutch airline KLM’s latest social campaign is a deft touch: customers will be allowed to see fellow passengers’ social media profiles, and based on their interests can choose to sit together.

9. Heineken launch social Christmas tree – and hire We Are Social
Heineken have launched a Facebook campaign where fans can send a Merry Christmas message to 16 friends in a sendable graphic. These messages will then come alive on a real tree in Singapore.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=9sWPBpRLqq0

In even more exciting news, Heineken have hired We Are Social (that’s us…) to work on Bulmers and Jacques, two of their cider brands. We’re looking forward to working together.

10. Sherlock Holmes film utilises Stephen Fry’s Twitter following
It’s not original using celebrities for endorsements, even in social, but this one caught our eye for its inventiveness: Stephen Fry has been posting Holmes-esque cryptic clues on his Twitter channel to promote the new Sherlock Holmes film, and the first person to crack them each day wins a prize.

A good campaign, well executed, without any elementary mistakes.

The Week According To The Internets:

• Push This Button Of The Week: Make Everything OK
• Viral Video Of The Week: How Santa Uses Siri
• Single-Serving Tumblr Of The Week: Comic Sans The World

1. The ARIA Awards all of a Twitter

On Sunday night We Are Social helped the Australian Recording Industry Association or ARIA celebrate their 25^th Annual Awards night. On the night the We Are Social production unit was on the red carpet pumping content live to Australian music lovers on Aria’s social channels. The Awards ignited passionate discussions on Twitter, with 9 out of 10 trending topics on the night being driven by the Awards. Aria was mentioned in 12,848 tweets with over 25% of tweets being conversational @replies or retweets.

In the lead up to the event, We Are Social created a Facebook public voting app to give the fans a voice on the night. The app attracted 5,000+ votes for Best International Artist, Best Australian Artist and Best Australian Live Artist.

2. Australian modern day love story takes social media by storm

GetUp, the Australian grassroots lobby group, launched a campaign to legalise same-sex marriage.

The campaign is spearheaded by a 2 minute YouTube video called ‘Love Story’. Within 48 hours of going live the video received over 1 million views. It has had over 1.8 million views to date.

The video caught the attention of key influencers, including Stephen Fry who tweeted it out to his 3.4 million followers. Subsequently, stories have been written about the campaign all over the world.

The campaign drives people to sign an online petition. The petition will be delivered to the ALP National Conference, where the Labor Party will decide on their stance on same sex marriage.

3. Is the news industry going down the toilet?

David Higgins, News Limited’s Innovations Editor, certainly thinks so.

It’s no secret that the print industry is scrambling to adapt their business model to ensure their survival. Recently at the Walkley Conference in Brisbane, Higgins told a packed room that the industry needs to go much further though and find new audiences in new places.

“I think we should be taking this more seriously and getting over to our correspondents the idea of telling stories in ways we are not used to doing, allowing us to go into environments and to markets, particularly young people who are not reading as much journalism as we would like.”

“There’s a shocking lack of innovation. We’re going down the toilet. Our lunch is being eaten by companies like Google and Apple… if we’re serious about having a secure future, we need to put investment into this technology, taking it more seriously.”

“We’re starting to see this sort of thing at News Ltd. We need to take our craft and our products out into the market.”

Watch this space.

4. Digital coming of age

According to a Digital Diaries survey, by the time most kids in the West turn eleven, they have already moved onto mainstream social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Japanese children have the lowest social network penetration out of the surveyed countries.

5. The Anatomy of Facebook

In collaboration with researchers at the Università degli Studi di Milano, Facebook have released a pretty impressive account of the social network’s digital anatomy. Their study covered all 721 million active Facebook users at the time – that’s more than 10% of the global population.

Using the ‘six degrees of separation’ model, which states that, on average, any two people are separated by no more than six intermediate connections, the study found that six degrees actually overstates the number of links between typical pairs of users; the average distance in Facebook between users is 4.74 hops. That’s down from 5.28 hops in 2008. Therefore, as Facebook has grown over the years, representing an ever larger fraction of the global population, it has become even more connected. How social is that.

6. Mobile social networking continues to grow

Research by comScore has found that the audience for mobile social networking in Europe’s five largest markets grew 44% in the last year. comScore Europe vice president for Mobile, Jeremy Copp, says that this growth has been “driven largely by the growth in smartphone adoption, making it easier than ever for users to stay connected and engage in social activities while on-the-go”. 46.8% of this audience access social networking sites daily, and Facebook remains the most popular site, with an average monthly audience of 39m mobile users in Europe during September.

Apps are pushing the growth of mobile social networking, with a doubling in the number of people using them for social networking compared the previous year. However, most mobile users still access social networking sites via a mobile browser. comScore’s study also reveals that 44.3% of mobile social networkers reading posts from brands. Furthermore, more than one quarter reported receiving coupons, offers, or deals on their phones.

7. Comments more valuable than likes

EdgeRank used Facebook metrics to figure out the value of comments and likes, finding that for every comment a post gets, it received an average of 15 clicks, compared to just 3 for every like. This means that a comment is roughly four times more valuable than a like, reinforcing the importance of creating engaging content that will stimulate discussion. Day of the week is also important, with posts on Wednesdays having the best shares and clicks ratios.

8. Google’s new organisation of a brand’s Facebook pages still a little off

Google algorithms now organise a brand’s Facebook pages by name, grouping together results as below:

Although this has resulted in a number of strange groupings, this is still great news for brands. If they have an overarching Facebook brand page, their smaller pages can now be found more easily by users. It also adds site links to individual pages as well, which should drive more traffic to these pages.

9. Google+’s big players

Another reason to dust off your Google+ account – Barack Obama is on the site now. This is big news for the social network, since Obama’s social media clout is pretty sound and is often touted as a major factor in his successful first presidential campaign. And yet the lack of excitement surrounding Obama’s arrival is rather disappointing – his first post had just 110 shares after 12 hours. Furthermore, Britney Spears is now the most followed person on Google+, with 773,805 followers. Obama has only 7,346. Come on, Barack, get your act together.

10. Hotel owners fear blackmail from Tripadvisor users

We all know the damage a bad review can do, and it seems that some Tripadvisor users are leveraging this to try and get free upgrades, refunds and extras from hotels, despite nothing being wrong with their experience. More than 80 hotel and bed-and breakfast owners have reported being subjected to such threats from customers, and thousands more have claimed fraudulent reviews. Tripadvisor have spoken out against such practices by its users.