Posts tagged social networks for ski resorts
Social Networks for Ski Resort – Google Places
06 months ago
by Eric Hoffman
in series
Looking back, it’s been a long time since I’ve added an update to the ongoing Social Networks for Ski Resort series, so with all the Google+ buzz going on, I decided to veer off and review Google Places.
If you don’t know what it is, Google Places is “local rating and review feature” and is also a way for businesses to have some control of how they appear in Google Maps, and has been around in an evolving form for some time. It got a social component added in towards the end of last year in the form of what was then called Hotpots which is now completely integrated into Places. Google Places is also undergoing some changes in terms of how content is aggregated to a businesses’ Places page. In a recent post of Google’s Lat Long Blog, it is explained that Google will now only include Google user reviews in the Places listings as well as making it easier for Google users to add their reviews.
Of course one of the most important reasons to ensure that your business has an updated and fully filled out Google Places profile is the fact that Google serves up the places data using geo-location tagging to huge numbers of mobile users, over 150 million as of last March, and growing incredibly fast when you consider this:
There are now over 500,000 Android devices activated every day, and it's growing at 4.4% w/w
@Arubin
Andy Rubin
So without the 4.4% w/w increase that Mr Rubin notes, in the approximate 4 weeks since then, Google has added 14 million additional Android users. Android’s maps integration has only gotten tighter and tighter with each update.
This evolution and in some respects cleaning up of Google Places leads me to think, and also have some hope, that Google is looking to use existing Places pages as a way to bring brands into Google+. I don’t know that is indeed in the roadmap, but I believe it could solve a number of issues that I’m seeing on Facebook Pages – notably a lack of consistency and an incredible number of duplicate pages. Google+ though is just a part of why a ski resort needs to be vigilant with keeping their Google Places profile up to date. Have you updated your Google Places page recently and even more importantly, have you claimed it?!
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Social Networks for Ski Resorts – LinkedIn
011 months ago
by Eric Hoffman
in series
This is another post in the ongoing series on “Social Networks for Ski Resorts“. I have to say that this series is actually getting more fun to write as I check off the more obvious social networks and delve into ways to leverage networks that aren’t in the news media daily or don’t seem logical to “link” to a ski resort (yeah, bad pun, I know). So without further pathetic attempts at humor, here are some thoughts on LinkedIn…and it’s 90 million members in over 200 countries.
The clear opportunity for a ski resort with LinkedIn is to use it as a recruiting tool. Most resorts probably won’t look to recruit ski & snowboard instructors, ski patrollers or lift operators using LinkedIn, certainly wouldn’t hurt to try, but it’s a fantastic resource for recruiting more business savvy candidates in middle or upper management. It can also serve as a great way to introduce a resort to perspective employees via LinkedIn’s “company” profile page via which people can see recent “news” blog posts and even peruse current and new employees.
The recruiting angle is easy, but what about groups? There are groups groups with people eager to share their knowledge in a wide variety of topics, including:
- Business & Ski (members only)
- Ski Industry Marketing and Sales Travel Professionals (members only)
- The Resort Marketing Network (members only)
- Ski Resort Operations (members only)
Don’t be bashful, ask to be a member and you’ll surely be invited in.
And yes, I admit it, I’m not a power LinkedIn user, so I’m sure that these ideas are probably just scratching the surface for what options exist for ski resorts to promote and network on LinkedIn, what other ideas do you have? Please let us know in the comments!
Social Networks for Ski Resorts – Klout
01 year ago
by Eric Hoffman
in series
This is another post in the ongoing series on “Social Networks for Ski Resorts“. To be clear, Klout isn’t a social network, it’s actually one of many ways to measure a person’s “influence” via their social network presence. There have been a few travel centric promotions that have keyed off a users’ Klout rating to provide high-ranked individuals with perks or freebies, probably the most prominent of these being Virgin America’s use of Klout to promote their new Toronto routes.
The use of Klout to check on a job applicant’s background generated some very interesting discussion on this post on The BrandForward Blog. Klout has also been the topic of a recent Twitter chat which discussed how Klout might be used to procure travel upgrades. The main question, is does a ski resort need to use a service such as Klout to help benchmark which “social influencers” get special attention – lift tickets and the like.
There are a number of tools that offer “social influence” ratings similar to what Klout provides, but does a ski resort (or any business for that matter) need to use a service, such as Klout, to determine how they offer benefits to influencers? First off, does having these “influencers” getting free or upgraded product really benefit the resort? I don’t know. But I do think that a “really great day on the mountain” tweet or Facebook status update that directly influences a small group of dedicated friends or even better, friends that ski or snowboard is just as good if not better than an update from a social media influencer. Second, if brands do indeed shift to providing more comps and deals to social media influencers, I think that it wil only be a matter of time until some get a letter from the FTC in regards the guidelines that the FTC released just over a year ago. Klout does publish an “Influencer Code of Ethics“, but is every business going to truly step up to the letter of the FTC guidelines until they see some compelling reason to do so?
Klout is also branching out beyond just Twitter, it also connects with Facebook and is in beta for LinkedIn. As it continues to expand into other social networks, can Klout be a way for businesses to graph and rate the social web? Or will each business need to find ways that best fit within their strategies and goals in order to best track who they should be work with in the social space? I lean towards the later, but I do think that as things scale larger and larger in social, that ratings systems like Klout, but can adapt to a businesses’ individual needs will fill a needed void.
Social Networks for Ski Resorts – Foursquare
21 year ago
by Eric Hoffman
in series
This is another post in the ongoing series on “Social Networks for Ski Resorts“. The big buzz this past year in social network marketing seems to have been about geo-location. Foursquare is one of the largest of the geolocation centric services with about 3 million users and about 15,000 businesses offering “Special Offers”.
PCMR Foursquare business listing
The key things to note about Foursquare is that while it is still a small social network, it offers businesses a great opportunity to hone in on some of the unique opportunities that geo-location offers. For a ski resort, the business opportunities are pretty much limited to offering check-in specials for customers at on-mountain restaurants. Once a resort claims and or creates their venue page using the Foursquare business management tools, they can offer specials based upon (copied from the Foursquare biz page):
- Mayor Specials: unlocked only by the Mayor of your venue. Who’s the Mayor? It’s your single most loyal customer! (the user who has checked in the most in the last 60 days) (“Foursquare has deemed you the Mayor? Enjoy a free order of french fries!”)
- Check-in Specials: unlocked when a user checks in to your venue a certain number of times. (“Foursquare says you’ve been here 10 times? That’s a free drink for you!”)
- Frequency-based Specials: are unlocked every X check-ins. (“Foursquare users get 20% off any entree every 5th check-in!”)
- Wildcard Specials: always unlocked, but your staff has to verify some extra conditions before awarding the Special. (“Show us your foursquare Swarm badge and get a free drink!”)
There are lots of opportunities to get creative with ways to drive customers to various on-mountain restaurants with these options, but I’d love to see more ways to drive users to ride a certain lift – by having users check-in at the base of top of said lift, or perhaps visit, and check-in at, every terrain park, but I don’t see these options currently available in the base venue package on Foursquare. There are additional opportunities that brands that Foursquare has special arrangements with, see: http://foursquare.com/thedewtour, http://foursquare.com/visitpa and http://foursquare.com/redskinsdotcom to see some examples.
The drawbacks to using a service like Foursquare is that all of the ways to interface with it require a web connection and using most of the mobile apps also requires a GPS or other location acquisition method . Only so many skiers and riders will have devices with them that allow for this and as I’ve discussed before, how many people will want to be pulling a phone out of their pocket on the slopes and is this something that really adds (or detracts) to the guest experience on-mountain?
To wrap up, I haven’t seen any examples of ski resorts using Foursquare, even ones that are just using the specials tool, have you? Let us know in the comments if you have.
Social Networks for Ski Resorts – Flickr
01 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
Social Networks for Ski Resorts – Ning
01 year ago
by Eric Hoffman
in series
There are a plethora of quality choices that allow a brand or resort to create their own social network and until this past weekend, I’ve considered Ning to be one of the best of these. In particular, I’ve been impressed by the community that Steamboat Resort has built there that they call My Steamboat (or perhaps ‘Your Vacation Planning Community’, I’m a bit confused on its title). There are nearly 2,000 members and the site appears to have a good level of engagement between the resort and those members.
Here’s the thing, this past Friday, Ning announced that they will be eliminating their free platform to concentrate solely on paid products. Hopefully Steamboat is already a “paying Ning Creator” so they won’t have to wait for pricing to be announced for their social site that they’ve worked quite hard to establish. In any case, this is a clear example of how dependence upon a third party for services like social networks is an exercise in trust and something that can change at any time.
This all said, I have to say that I really like what Ning provides as a social platform. We’ve done a number of experiments with closed Ning communities (primarily online focus groups) at the resort and they’ve all been exceedingly successful. The setup is very simple and the administration tools are easy to work with and it’s quite easy to build in corporate branding as well.
I hope that Ning doesn’t get pushed down by the glut of publicity that their business model shift is getting as I think that it is a great service, just one that the end users need to be able to know that it will exist in the future and not be priced too high or have services reduce unnecessarily.
Social Networks for Ski Resorts – Yelp
12 years ago
by Eric Hoffman
in series
I recently read the story “You’ve Been Yelped” in February’s issue of Inc. magazine and it prompted me to get back to writing my Social Networks for Ski Resorts series that I’ve been neglecting.The article does point out some of the short comings of a user review site like Yelp, but it also nails the benefits of the network for a business that takes advantage of the tools that Yelp provides for business owners.
If you’re not aware of what Yelp is, it’s a social review site that has a core of active members that are typically quite frank, or perhaps brutal, when it comes to reviewing all sorts of local services. The nice thing is that once you ‘claim’ your business listing, you get the ability to reply to reviews either publicly or via a private message to the reviewer. Yelp even provides a great Business Owner’s Guide that will help an owner or manager respond appropriately to reviews. This is quite important because as the “You’ve Been Yelped” article describes, Yelp contributors can be quite opinionated and if they are messaged in a way that they feel is not appropriate, they are more than likely to respond publicly and vociferously. Resorts can also post additional information including photos to their profiles which once created will give you measurement of page visits and the option to post “offers and announcements” in addition to the opportunity to create a Yelp ad.
So cutting to the chase, which ski resorts do I think are using Yelp well? Easy answer, not many at all. As a matter of fact, in a quick survey of ski resorts on Yelp I found that only my friend Milena Regos at Diamond Peak was publicly responding to user reviews (I haven’t even done any as of yet), and only a few resorts, mostly in the Tahoe area had posted “offers” to their Yelp profiles. I’m sure there are more ski resorts that are engaging with their customers on Yelp, I just haven’t been able to find them. If you know of some, please let me know in the comments section.
Social Networks for Ski Resorts – Facebook
32 years ago
by Eric Hoffman
in series
Continuing my series on “Social Networks for Ski Resorts,” let’s talk about another marquee player. Facebook is one more “no brainer” social network that ski resorts should be using. As with many of the social networks, the question is not if, but rather how?
In my mind, Facebook is one of the best social networks for ski resorts because the tools and the community are very well established and easy to use. Creating a fan page is quick and easy and the various tools to import blog posts, images and video are just as simple to setup. Facebook also offers up “Insights“, a nice analysis tool for fan pages The one big quirk with Facebook is that because it’s a closed network, there are limits to how a brand can interact with it’s fans and possibly the big on to me is that it’s not searchable for brand mentions in the Facebook network.
Which ski resorts do I think are using Facebook well?
- Diamond Peak – I know the Marketing Director here and think she’s doing a great job of using a variety of things, but in particular a “Where’s Waldo” style contest to drive interest and engagement on the Diamond Peak Facebook fan page.
- The Canyons Terrain Parks – It’s great the way The Canyons is using this terrain park centric fan page to create a high level of engagement with the core audience for their park users. I also like how they are posting ‘behind the scenes’ things to really keep visitors coming back for more.
- Whistler Blackcomb – With well over 18k fans, this is the most ‘faned’ of any of the ski resort fan pages that I’ve found on Facebook. Lots of interaction, contests and info keep the feed fresh.
- Valle Nevado – It’s not just North American resorts than are doing good things on Facebook, check out the action on the fan page for this Chilean favorite. My spanish is awful, but from the volume of posts and comment, this page is doing great.
Social Networks for Ski Resorts – Youtube
22 years ago
The Conversation Prism by Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas
I’ve been noticing lately how many ski resorts now have a Twitter account and perhaps a Facebook fan page, but most aren’t leveraging many of the other great social networks that are there just waiting to be used. To that end, I’m going to start a series that I’m calling “Social Networks for Ski Resorts”, posting my thoughts on some of the myriad of other social networks that are just begging to be used. I’ll start with a social network that I think all ski resorts should be using – YouTube.
YouTube’s reach is tremendous, it’s the 2nd most popular search engine in the world, after it’s big brother Google. But even more importantly, it’s possibly the best way to show off a ski resort’s most valuable asset: people having a great time skiing and riding.
What to do? Create a YouTube channel, customize the look to fit your resort and start uploading. The content a ski resort might shoot for video on YouTube can range from the obvious, snow conditions, to ski school tips, to customer testimonials to just about anything that’s fun, topical and related in some way to the resort. A secondary YouTube option that I think is important is to try to find content shot at your resort that’s already on YouTube and favorite it so it shows on your channel – there’s nothing people like more than being acknowledged.
To wrap up, I’m going to list a few ski resorts that are doing a good job of using the reviewed network, so here we go:
- Alpine Meadows – Nice consistent use of graphics at beginning and end of each clip, upbeat, fun and regular postings.
- Vail Resorts – I’m not sold on having the corporate entity upload all of their videos and then use separate playlists for each individual resort, but the quality of the videos is so good and consistent that I wanted to include them.
- Mt Bachelor – Disclosure: this is a sister resort of where I work, but I love how they use their YouTube channel to communicate “inside information” in a way that is fun, interesting and helpful to both the resort and their customers. Check out their most popular video, “Storm Recovery…” and you can see that it’s long, at over 7 minutes, but has tons of views at nearly 12,000.
If you have other ski resort YouTube channels that you like, please list them in the comments. And, stay tuned for more social networks for ski resorts.
