Posts tagged flickr

Social Networks for Ski Resorts – Flickr

1 year ago

by Eric Hoffman in series

This is the next in a series of posts in which I am reviewing “Social Networks for Ski Resorts.” There are a huge number of ways to share photos online, but Flickr is one of the largest and most established and has some unique features/benefits that make it hard to bypass if you have a business that is looking to share photos online (personally, I’m not sold on their video option at this point).

First off, Flickr is owned by Yahoo! so you can (pretty much) rest assured that the site will be up and your photos accessible for years to come. Now, the key to this is to understand that if you are planning to post more than 200 images, then you’re going to want to purchase their “Pro” account. It’s just $25/yr and allows for unlimited uploads for images up to 20Mb apiece, using a nifty uploader application, I’ve been able to upload literally hundreds of images totaling well over 1Gb all at one time! All images are stored in high res format and Flickr even resizes for various download options. Here’s my one caveat: I’m a bit perturbed to have just learned that Flickr has now limited their stat reporting for Pro users to the past 28 days, which is a negative, but hopefully not a harbinger of changes to come.

In any case, uploading images to Flickr is easy, tagging is simple in the uploader, EXIF data can be readily included (geeky camera info) and geolocation tagging can be added through a nifty map interface. The overall user interface in Flickr is a bit problematic and many of the navigation and editing functions aren’t as intuitive as they could be, but additional integration with the Picnik online image editing application is very much appreciated by those who don’t have Photoshop (or perhaps don’t want Photoshop) on their computer.

Flickr is also a tremendous resource for Creative Commons licensed images via their Creative Commons search option. What this is means is depending upon what usage you intend for an image – business blog post or the like, you can search for images that Flickr users have allowed you to use with simply giving them credit, many even allow you to modify the images if you’d like. In fact, this is how I get many of the images that I use in my blog!

In closing are a few Resorts I’ve found using Flickr and using it well:

Alpine Meadows – lots of photos, consistent posting, and I love that they have a gallery of employee images.
Big Bear – great quality images, organization is just chronological, but they’re consistent.
Moonlight Basin – basically just used Flickr for their Photo of the Day postings, but they did also include several Video Snow Reports.
Diamond Peak – doing a great job of keeping images coming, even in the offseason, with photos of some construction that they’re doing.
The Canyons – an example of a way to promote lodging and weddings via Flickr.
Mt Snow – I think it’s awesome how they posted a chunk of photos of their employees thanking everyone for a great season.

If you think there are other resorts using Flickr in unique, or well-executed manner, please let me know in the comments!

Photo credit: Flickr user Zanastardust via creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic

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Inbound Marketing for Ski Resorts

2 years ago

by Eric Hoffman in article

In my San Francisco Inbound Marketing Takeaway post, I noted that I was putting together some thoughts on how to leverage inbound marketing in the resort industry. Finally, over a month later, here it is!

Inbound marketing is essential for any business because the ski business is seasonal and the participants so passionate the opportunities are tremendous.

The content element of inbound marketing is an aspect that ski resorts can easily leverage. Most are already taking lots of photos and videos, the next step is to publish them to social sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube. Even better, give customers a way to publish their own content to a common channel that can be displayed on a page on the resorts’ website. For example, the photo above was taken by a guest at Park City Mountain Resort and tagged so that I could find it and insert it here via Creative Commons license rights.

Another technique is to use blogging and micro-blogging platforms to convey current conditions with more personalized information than is possible using snow report pages, emails or texts. Through the use of hashtags (the # sign) resorts can even leverage reports from guests and aggregate them in a common stream. Resorts should be sure to use these techniques to interact/engage with their customers as well as to direct them to useful and relevant content. In addition email should be integrated with these efforts and with segmentation and triggers it can really continue to personalize communications with customers.

Lastly, resorts should be very strategic in how they do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on their web content and make sure that the keywords and phrases that they’re optimizing for are directly in line with their overall business strategies. By this, I mean that rather than optimizing for general terms like “ski resort” a resort should optimize for more specific items, like “best beginner terrain park”. They should also tag appropriate photos with this and create a video showing off their park – of course a blog post and some tweets linking back to this content this should be done as well to fully leverage the inbound marketing potential of this content.

These are just a few quick examples for resorts and I plan on drilling down further on more specifics on using networks like Flickr, Twitter and YouTube. Are there any additional social networks out there that you think are just ripe for use by ski resorts?!