Robert Payne

Anyone that knows me or visits this blog from time to time has a pretty good inclination that I like to ski. Fortunately for me, I also get involved with a certain amount of ski resort marketing as part of my job. One resort in particular that I work closely with is Heavenly Mountain Resort.

Heavenly has a great team of individuals over there who are busy pushing out a lot of great content in the form of blog posts, Flickr photos, and video. Why? To bring as much of the mountain experience to you as possible. I can tell you that it works, and if you want some more education as to why it works you can read this post and the post it links to as well.

Another cool example of social media comes from another one of my favorite Lake Tahoe ski resorts – Alpine Meadows. They have put together a really cool social media page that lays out all of the various places you can interact with them. Sites include:

• Twitter
• Flickr
• YouTube
• Eventful
• Broadband Sports
• del.icio.us
• Facebook

Why so many? Because people are individuals with individual preferences. They want to learn, experience, and interact with a brand in the channel they see fit and enjoy the most. Alpine and Heavenly are simply doing their best to satisfy those preferences, as well as understand their customers better. They will probably add more, for there are more.

You can find me on all of these sites. Unfortunately, I can’t be on the hill all the time, but the next best thing is hopping online to interact with the mountain, finding out what is going on, and getting stoked for the next time. The social media tools these two ski resorts are making use of help me do it.