The quality isn’t ‘epic’, but to me, this shows that livestreaming  the opportunity to provide unique and real time video connections that can show very interesting aspects of the resort industry.

I don’t check stats on my old blog very often, but when I looked last week, I saw a huge spike in traffic:

To cut to the chase, the Olympics Men’s Halfpipe event took place on February 17, and Shaun White won the Gold medal. How does that explain this spike? Well, last winter I wrote a post about the Silverton private halfpipe that Shaun was training on, and while it got a few views then, it was indexed nicely by Google. Indexed to the point where, according to Google’s webmaster tools, last week when searching for “shaun white private half pipe” my post showed in position 7 and when searching for “shaun white half pipe” the post was in position 8. Side note – after the competition, many major publications posted stories on this so my post is no longer on the first page of SERP (search engine results page).

I need to really look into why I wasn’t able to transfer this traffic to my new blog. However, this is such a classic case of the long tail of search that I had to write it up, as it clearly demonstrates that it’s hugely important to  create, publish and continue to create content online, because you never know when it might be of interest. Simply put, now is the time to “Publish or Perish!”

So, I decided to bite the bullet and I’ve put together a much more robust document, “Ski Resort Online – A Fairly Definitive List” to track as many of the different points of online presence for ski resorts as I could. I created it in Google Docs (let me know if you want to help edit) and here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

To view this document in full, visit  Ski Resorts Online – A Fairly Definitive List. And, if you see any resorts or accounts that I’ve missed, please let me know in the comments below – this is definitely a work in progress!

Happily, the IOC acknowledges that blogging is “a form of personal expression” and at they do permit (some) blogging by Accredited Persons at the Games. Now, to my understanding, anyone that participates in the Games, and gets any sort of credential, from athletes, to coaches, to volunteers is considered an Accredited Person – this is certainly a number that reaches into the tens of thousands. I’m sure more than a few of these people already have a blog and I know for a fact that there are many of them ‘micro-blogging‘ on Twitter or Facebook. I am sure that there will be more than a few Accredited Person who will post photos of themselves inside the venues and most likely of the events that are taking place in these places…what will the reaction of the IOC and VANOC be?

What gets me is how odd, and in some ways, nonsensical some of the restrictions are. Check this one out, according to the document the words “Olympic”, “Olympics” or similar can’t be used in a domain name (I get that), but could be used in a URL , but “only during the period during which these Guidelines are applicable”. So, go ahead and name your Olympic experience blog – MySitesName/myOlympicExperience but then it has to change after March 3, 2010?! Really, really odd and it doesn’t seem to further any goal, unless the IOC’s sole goal is to completely lock down any SEO for these words, and even they can’t do that completely.

In any case, it’s good to see this as a starting place and I’ve been interested to find the NBC has setup a page on their NBCOlympics.com site where they’re tracking a good number of American Olympians’ tweets.  Twitter itself hasn’t been left behind either as they’ve expanded their Verified account listings to include a special Verified Olympians list. I’m looking forward to a bunch of fun social media coming out of the games over the next few weeks!

It’s not the best time to be in practically any industry, but I feel like this is what I’ve been doing for most of my career and in particular now, (ie the subtitle of this blog, “don’t forget it’s all about fun”) – what about you?!

Hat tip to Seth Godin for posting about Lemonade.

• 1st half MVP – Snowmakers, because without their hard work there wouldn’t have been any good skiing and riding until perhaps January.
• Rookie – This one goes to our intern because she’s kicking butt and without her we’d have been really struggling on a number of different projects.
• Biggest surprise – The sudden imploding of Intrawest has got to be the biggest surprise surprise of the first half of the winter to me.
• Biggest Comeback – Mother Nature with her great work during the second half of January in bringing some wonderful snow during Sundance.
• Most rapid growth – Social Media usage by ski resorts, which has gone from just a few last season to pretty much each and every one this season.

Any other “awards” that you think I’ve missed? Let me know in the comments!

Photo credit:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/twinsparc/ / CC BY 2.0

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.

The other item that jumped out at me is this graph showing how big of a trough the trend of visits to travel websites is right now, is this typical for Fall/Winter or is it a sign that travel is still in a downward trend? Tell me what you think in the comments.