As part of Social Media Week, the Pappas Group engaged experts about the best approaches to building a hospitality brand online and help any business find a leg up on industry competition. Here are the top 5 things we learned.

Instead of defining what a social business executive is, we decided to list 10 hints that you're not a social business executive.

To collaborate with the ethos of value exchange, we must embrace social collaboration. We live in a connected world, where businesses must be able to change and adapt in order to achieve sustainable growth. Washington should take a lesson.

Combine the changing nature of business today with the macroeconomic stress levels that exist and we are sure to face an unavoidable fact for 2013 -- selling stuff will be much harder than before.

Summary of fact: people are more mobile and social and spending more of their time connected that ever before. And yet so many businesses, notably in the B2B space, have customer service and support organizations that are not ready for the mobile, social, and hyper-connected era.

If, as a job candidate, you haven't built up your personal online brand -- accomplishments and most importantly beliefs and values -- you risk becoming irrelevant to any forward-looking employer regardless of your domain expertise.

How can you capture the benefits of strong branded signals across your web presence? Consider taking all of the following steps.

How important is it to control your brand's message online? Just look at McDonald's in Canada's "Our Foods. Your Questions" website, which pulled back the curtain to address one customer's question about why their food looks so good in ads, and not so good in real life.