Preliminary numbers from the 2011-12 Winter Season have been released by the National Ski Area Association, and boy do they stink…down 15% to 51 million, or back nearly to 1991-92 levels…wow, that was the season I moved to Park City and was a long time ago!

Other interesting items of note:

• 50% of resorts opened late this past season
• 48% of resorts closed early this past season
• Lowest national average snowfall since the 1991-92 season (interesting coincidence?)
• The biggest YoY drop was 17.6% drop in 1980-81, but there was a 22% increase the next season (reason for hope?)

Winter 2011-12 Results is a post from: The Resort Marketing written by Eric Hoffman.

A recent post in HotelMarketing.com about Starwood committing 75% of its marketing spend to digital media sent me back to reading this great deck about the power of digital marketing. The question I see now is how much digital spend are you putting forth? Are you ahead of the curve, or behind? Are you concerned or excited?! I’m excited and think the opportunities in digital are only getting better…post your thoughts in the comments, thanks!

How Much Emphasis on Digital Marketing? is a post from: The Resort Marketing written by Eric Hoffman.

I had a conversation with a friend recently which reminded be about some advice that a pro photographer gave me years ago as we were considering transitioning to digital. “Reformat your memory cards often.” I don’t know that this is as essential as it might have once been, but I do know that I’ve heard more stories about lost photos and video as we all are using our digital cameras and phones for our only devices and it’s certainly a potential horror show situation if you lose a slew of photography or video for business or personal reasons, so here are a couple of key things to think about:

• Reformat digital media cards often to start with a clean slate – do this after you’ve transferred your media of course!
• Backup, backup, backup. A friend just mentioned that her phone wiped itself and she only lost 2 photos due to having backed up recently.
• On the backup note, I backup using Time Machine, but I also automatically push all of my photos to Flickr and videos to YouTube – using the private setting until reviewed – for safe keeping.
• Don’t transfer images or video when the camera’s battery is low and don’t remove a card until the operation you’re performing is finished.
• If you have any other tips or suggestions – please leave them in the comments below!

Digital Content Advice is a post from: The Resort Marketing written by Eric Hoffman.

The winter of 2011-12 will not go down in the record books (at least not in a good way) as it was one of low snow totals and warm temperatures for most almost all areas in the US. It certainly goes to show that the winter mountain resort business is one which can never be absolutely accurately predicted as it truly seemed like, with the business climate picking up, leisure travel in a rebound and after a solid 2010-11 winter season that this might be a winter to remember. Well, Mother Nature showed that she still plays a major role in the winter mountain resort business cycle and by waiting until well after the December Holiday season to bring snow to most mountain locales, the weather did have an impact on those vital holiday bookings along with business throughout most of the remainder of the season due to in part to a perceived lack of snow and perhaps the want to simply stay home?

What are lessons we can learn from this? Here are a few quick hits:

• It’s impossible to accurately predict exactly what the business levels for a season will be like – sometimes things are close to estimates, but other times…
• Be flexible (have a plan B/C/D, because once things start to change from where you thought they would be, you need to be able to shift your priorities and efforts.
• People will still come and will still have a wonderful time. I spoke with many people on the mountains here in Utah who were having a wonderful time skiing and riding on manmade snow only. Perhaps they didn’t ride the closed runs at other times but they were excited and happy to be on the slopes, in the mountains and didn’t have a care that off-piste runs weren’t open.
• These are the times to shine for a ski resort’s customer service, both on and off the hill, because a blip in customer service can really get magnified in these sorts of situations. I heard a waiter at a local restaurant commenting during a snowstorm recently that he was “over winter” to a table of visiting skiers/riders. What a way to bring them down about the new snow!

Winter winds down is a post from: The Resort Marketing written by Eric Hoffman.

I’ve posted impressive avalanche videos in the Resort Marketing Blog before, but no wet snow avalanches yet. Until now, check out these two separate clips about this monster which took out a ski lift in France last week:

A news segment – click the “CC” button to get English subtitles

And even crazier, here’s a video shot from the lift taken during the slide, yikes!

Use this as a reminder that wet snow avalanches, while not as impressively fast as their dryer snow counterparts, can still be very powerful and destructive and deserve respect – be careful, in particular if you’re heading out into the backcountry this Spring!

Slip Sliding Away is a post from: The Resort Marketing written by Eric Hoffman.

One of the benefits of living and working in Park City is its close proximity to Salt Lake City and the benefits of a metropolitan area – like professional organizations. A great new(er) organization in Salt Lake City is SLC|SEM, a group dedicated to search marketing – a fairly geeky specialty but one which is increasingly important as travel planning shifts more and more online. I’ve meant to get to one of their monthly meetings but between work and family commitments I’ve been unable until this past Wednesday, which happily was an event which featured a talk by Danny Sullivan, the head of Search Engine Land, and evidently an ardent snowboarder who has discovered that Utah does indeed have the “Greatest Snow on Earth.”

Danny opened with a nice rundown of how search engines have evolved over the years, which he highlighted via the Periodic Table of SEO Ranking Factors:

The Periodic Table Of SEO Ranking Factors

This is definitely a useful visual summary of the various ranking factors that go into search engine rankings and one that is continually evolving.

From here the talk moved to current state of search – obviously Google dominates, but social search is evolving (although frustratingly fragmented with Google on its own, Twitter off to another side and Facebook in with Bing) and mobile is another fast-moving area with apps providing a very interesting space for search to evolve further as well. He mentioned using Foursquare as a discovery tool, or shaking the Urban Spoon app as ways that search has moved from the “Search Box”.

He also provided some insights in how people are using search on their desktops vs mobile including this great comparison by time of day from Google Inside Search (scroll the video to the below noted times):

Scroll to 5:16 to see desktop search graph by time of day

Scroll to 6:12 to see mobile search graph by time of day

He also offered up several more examples such as showing the bump in Valentine’s Day restaurant reservation searches on mobile vs desktop in the days leading up to Valentine’s Day – certainly something one might expect, but it was interesting to see hard supporting data.

I also found the way Danny dissected personalized, in particular with geo-location to be interesting in that he noted the flaw in trying to offer local search results to a searcher when they are looking for results that are out of area. If he was looking for “snow report” while he was in California still, would he want any California area resorts’ snow reports? Probably not, but how does a search engine gather enough signal to serve up the correct results – tough issue and one that they’re doing incredibly well at, at least not yet.

There was also an Inside the Actor’s Studio-style questioning in which Danny described his least favorite thing about search, which was “Inbound Marketing”, but only in the way that people throw the phrase around without delving into (or maybe really understanding) the various online marketing strategies which form it.

I’d highly recommend attended an SLC|SEM event in the future, particularly if they continue to put up speakers of the calibre and interest of Danny.

Update 3/5 – here’s the deck from the presentation:

Checking in with Danny Sullivan and SLC|SEM is a post from: The Resort Marketing written by Eric Hoffman.

Priorities. It’s something that we all balance continually in our personal and professional lives. And I’m sad to say that this blog has dropped a bit in terms of its importance in both areas recently.

• For one, this truly is a blog that is personal in that I write posts on my time and it is a personal perusal of topics of interest to me.
• I prioritize projects that I’m working on for my day job well above creating new posts for this blog.
• As my daughter has grown and has become more active, I find myself spending more time with her (and my wife) and less at my keyboard during evening and weekend hours.

These items aside, I still see plenty of reasons to keep typing away and with a few months (busy at that) away from the blogosphere, I will be back on a weekly basis with Resort Marketing blog posts.

Priorities is a post from: The Resort Marketing written by Eric Hoffman.

Wow. I’ve been so busy with the start of the ski season that I’ve neglected the Resort Marketing Blog long enough that the Travelers commercial folks were able to edit and post up the ad that they filmed partly in our backyard just 3 weeks ago…very cool (and yes, I will be back blogging on resort marketing topics soon):

(updated on April 19, 2012 due to Travelers making their update ‘private’)

If you’re wondering, the song is What I Want for Christmas by Orba Squara

And it’s up… is a post from: The Resort Marketing written by Eric Hoffman.

As it’s the week before the Resort is scheduled to open, things are ramping up. Just in case it weren’t busy enough, our household had a rather unusual activity happen over the last week. We had a national tv commercial filmed in our backyard!

To my understanding, the location people were looking for a nice backyard with a fence around it, and strange as it seems, our backyard fit the bill. The process was remarkably smooth, but also remarkably fast in that our door was knocked upon during lunch on Friday, the location people spent perhaps 10 or 15 minutes in our yard, came back the next morning for about an hour, after which we chatted that evening about details and signed paperwork on the Monday which lead to set up on Wednesday and filming on Thursday and Friday, whew! We certainly don’t expect this sort of thing ever happening again in our yard, so we took a ton of photos and thoroughly enjoyed the experience of having our backyard transformed into a Hollywood set.

The interesting part is that I’m sure that this would never have happened if we didn’t live in a resort town as I know the commercial filmed each day on Main Street here in Park City and I’m guessing that they just needed to figure out a place to shoot the rest of their scenes – which became our yard. In any case, here are some photos documenting one of the more unique few days that we’ve had at our house!

Life in a Resort Town is a post from: The Resort Marketing written by Eric Hoffman.

Working in the interactive marketing often gives me pause about how much technological intrusion into our daily lives is right. I try not to judge, but this product seems like it might cross the line in terms of bringing too much technology into the ski or snowboard experience. That and the fact that I have enough troubles keeping goggles in good shape and de-fogged to have to worry about a screen inside the goggles! In any case, here’s a nice video about the new Android equipped MOD and MOD Live goggles via engaget, let me know if you’d use these in the comments:

Technology Overkill? is a post from: The Resort Marketing written by Eric Hoffman.

There aren’t many spare moments these days and so it was with a lot of jumping in and out that I watched the unveiling of Google+ pages. It seemed to roll in fits and starts because the Create a Page feature wasn’t quite ready when Google started promoting it. This led to many of us wondering what the story was and as the issue wasn’t clearly lined out, I even questioned why expectations weren’t clearly set as it seems that the delay was due to the sheer volume of data centers and servers that needed to get updates pushed out to them. Now, everyone has access and it seems like many brands are starting the process of figuring out exactly what Google+ pages will do for them.

Having spent a few month on Google+, it definitely seems to me that the stream, integration with other Google products like YouTube, Picassa and obviously search that Google+ pages have a lot of potential. As with any channel, it will definitely be up to the end-user/brand to effectively and creatively use the tool. But I think that there are lots of creative directions that one can go, and the nice part is, it’s not a land rush as Google is not giving away although we should all be paying attention to Direct Connect and ensuring that your brand name is ready as it becomes more “readily available”. To learn more, check out the video below:

Release the Hounds – Google+ Pages are out is a post from: The Resort Marketing written by Eric Hoffman.

It’s hard to believe, but another year of blogging has flown past, making this blog officially 3 years old as of today. If you dare, take a peak at the first post ever (be warned, it’s a rough one), and Happy Birthday to the Resort Marketing Blog. Keeping it short, here’s my goal for the coming year:

Hope you’re doing the same and I hope to see you on the slopes and on the pages of this blog – cheers!

3 Years of The Resort Marketing Blog is a post from: The Resort Marketing written by Eric Hoffman.

It seems like the good folks at Google like to change things up, even in their bread and butter search segment, which they did last week. If you missed it, it’s that some of us signed into our Google accounts are getting redirected to https://www.google.com, note the “s”. Most are certainly in favor of more security, in particular with companies like Google which have a large volume of our preferences even in innocuous things such as search. But what Google has done is taken the step of stripping referer data from links referred to from pages that are search via SSL connection. This just clicked last Tuesday and I can see an appreciable uptick of what Google now call “not provided” keyword searches in a Google Analtyics account report:

Sorry for all the redacting blurring.

If you want to look for yourself, it’s under traffic sources/search/overview and then select “keyword” in the viewing selector. And if you want a deep dive on all the implications on this switch from the best in the business on search, check out this post on Search Engine Land.

Google Search Changes is a post from: The Resort Marketing written by Eric Hoffman.

Just a quick thought: “Will the NBA lockout be a benefit to ski resorts?”

I’d say “yes”.

Sure a lot of NBA basketball fans might not be skiers or snowboarders, but if the lockout does extend out over the busy Christmas – New Years time frame, I’m hopeful that more people will be hitting the slopes as opposed to checking out the traditional Christmas triple header basketball game. And that’s just people who live within an easy drive of a ski resort. What about those folks that do buy season tickets? They certainly have discretionary income and will have some of that coming back into their pockets, why not invest it in getting to the slopes and having some fun? I wonder what a package name for these folks would be…

• Trade the Court for the Slopes
• NBA – Nothing But Altitude
• Slamma Jamma in the Mountains
• 3-pt Shots < Face Shots
• Backboards for Snowboards

Ok, these might not be quite the grabber they could be, but you get the point, get basketball fans to take some of their hard-earned cash and put it into buying lift tickets as opposed to NBA basketball tickets – why not?

NBA Lockout Boon? is a post from: The Resort Marketing written by Eric Hoffman.

I heard about this presentation via the Marketing Over Coffee podcast (you’re probably thinking podcasts, who listen to those anymore, but I like to listen to them when I’m on the treadmill, helps to distract me from the monotony of running in place) and it’s a great example of how content gets shared and engaged with on Facebook users’ walls. Enjoy “Feeding the Beast: Maximizing your Facebook Newsfeed Value” from Justin Kistner of Webtrends:

The Facebook News Feed is a post from: The Resort Marketing written by Eric Hoffman.