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):

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.

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Amazon is introducing a really neat feature to their nifty Kindle Fire tablet (affiliate link) called the Amazon Silk browser What’s neat about Amazon Silk is that Amazon is using the power of their huge server farms, and using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) to help process the more intensive activities via EC2 instead of on the Kindle thereby speeding the page rendering process and improving battery life. This should make any site that much faster and user loading friendly, but unfortunately the Kindle Fire isn’t out yet and that is the only device with this particular browser at the moment. That said, you can still download Opera’s mobile browser to experience some of the compression elements that Amazon Silk employs, but it sounds like Silk has a some more features that make it a browser to watch.

But a company posting a website isn’t able to control how an end-user accesses their site and not many are visiting with Opera mobile and none with Amazon Silk at the moment. So, in terms of websites there are some optimization techniques that larger sites can use, including the use of web accelerators such as Varnish or Squid. If you’re a developer or have some good coding chops, it should be relatively easy for you to configure and keep up this sort of software on your web server.

If you’re a weekend updater, have a more basic website then perhaps you need something a bit more basic. I heard about CloudFlare a few weeks ago via the Marketing Over Coffee podcast and installed it on the Resort Marketing Blog back towards the end of September. CloudFlare basically does what the fancy software options do, but with an end-user only needing to adjust a few simple DNS settings. Plus, they protect your site from abusive bots and spammers. It’s a really slick concept, that is quite complicated, but as an end-user it seems really simple and it just works, check out this dashboard showing a week’s worth of traffic to this blog:

Click image to enlarge

To be clear, I did add CloudFlare to this WordPress self-hosted blog through the W3 EDGE WordPress plugin. CloudFlare also offers their own WordPress plugin, which I don’t have any experience with but does look to be a bit more compact than W3 EDGE.

Good luck and keep that website humming!

Keep that Website Humming Along is a post from: The Resort Marketing written by Eric Hoffman.

All of the “Best of” this that and the other are starting to come out on in magazine’s and across the web, which got me to thinking a bit about which ski resort’s are doing the most interesting, innovative and effective things with their digital efforts – meaning their website, social media and interactive advertising campaigns. I know that I’ve missed some, so please add any resort that you think belongs on this list, and if you think a resort is doing something of particular interest  I’d love it if you described it in the comments. So, without further ado, here’s the list (note that this is for the 10-11 season as many resorts don’t have their 11-12 sites or campaigns fully implemented as of yet):

I haven’t added website or social links, leave a comment if you can’t find any of these online, and yep, I am a bit biased on at least one of the Resorts I included on here, pretty easy if you know me and if not please click here.

Favorite Ski Resort Digital Presence is a post from: The Resort Marketing written by Eric Hoffman.

My job is interactive marketing.

I use technology constantly.

Steve Jobs envisioned and made possible many of the tools that make my job easier.

It’s been enlightening to read through Steve Jobs’ Commencement Address at Stanford University in June of 2005, here are a few quotes:

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

 

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

A bit further on he noted:

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Wonderful advice again. Finally and simply:

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

RIP Steve Jobs, you will be missed, but your legacy, in accomplishments and in wisdom will live on.

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

Yes, La Niña, the weather pattern that brought many areas of the country more wonderful snow than what they knew what to do with is purportedly back again. To make sure I don’t cause any awful reversal of the weather gods, I’m off to drink a toast to them and do a few special sacrifices to make sure things stay on course. In the meantime, as I posted a clip of a great snowboard movie for the season already, here’s a ski movie, appropriately enough called, “Attack of La Niña” enjoy!:

Bring on La Niña is a post from: The Resort Marketing written by Eric Hoffman.

Airlines are raking it in with their fees these days…$1.38 Billion (for baggage and reservation changes) in the first three months of this year alone! Now, I don’t agree that airlines pay no taxes on the fees they collect from things such as checked bags, assigned seats, itinerary changes and those lovely ‘snack packs’. In particular, I find a statement from Spirit Airlines’ CEO Ben Baldanza in his testimony before the House Transportation Committee that checked bags are “not essential” to travel. Well Mr Baldanza, for anyone going on a vacation other than to a nudist colony, you might want to pack along a change or two of clothes, and if you’re taking a ski vacation I can think of a few other items to pack along as well.

This did get me to wondering if perhaps the airline fee-based model could work for the ski resort industry. In fact, here are a few ideas for fees that ski resorts could charge as well as a “lift ticket”:

• Parking Fee – how about charging even more for people who don’t pre-pay for their parking?!
• Man-Made Snow Access Fee – this would a great revenue producer in the early season, if you don’t pay, you don’t get to ski on the runs with man-made snow
• Grooming Fee – those fancy grooming machines aren’t cheap and the people who drive them don’t work for free, so why not a fee to ski the groomed runs
• Terrain Park Fee – jibs and jumps need a huge amount of building and maintenance
• Mountain Evacuation Fee – I figure this could apply to any number of things, from toboggan rides to lift evacs
• First Tracks Fee – for those who adhere to the “No friends on a powder day rule” and can afford to buy their fresh tracks
• Front of the Line Fee – lift-line cutting fee for those who hate to wait
• Gear Fee – you can ride the lift, but if you want to bring along a ski, pole or snowboard…pay up

What do you think about this shift to à la carte based pricing in the travel industry? Is it good, bad and what other crazy fees do you think a ski resort could charge for?!

Airline Fee Model for Ski Resorts? is a post from: The Resort Marketing written by Eric Hoffman.

With increasing traffic coming to ski resort websites and even people arriving at resorts directly from sites such as Google Places, Yelp and Trip Advisor, it becomes all the more important to make sure the data on those sites is as accurate as possible. In several recent articles, there has been discussion about the growing trend of information on crowd sourced sites such as these being inaccurate, whether by accident or via a more malicious reason.

Another element crowding is in the fact that so many people are randomly adding check-in type information that duplicates are unavoidable. A great example of this is Facebook Places (changing to something else soon I’m sure), but in just a few editing sessions on the Facebook Places Editor app, I’ve updated 275 places (almost all duplicate entries) just in and around Park City, yeah I’m a bit biased in trying to help out the local community keep our data clean.

Here are a couple of fake reviews and listing errors stories:

• Trip Advisor’s Fake Reviews
• Closed in Error on Google Places
• In a personal example, I dealt with a slew of bogus single star reviews on a Google Places business page which significantly lowered the overall review, not a fun situation when the entire “flag” process is automated and undocumented. To this day, I’m still not sure if it was a malicious effort or simply a database glitch.

Fake Reviews and Listing Errors is a post from: The Resort Marketing written by Eric Hoffman.

As the fall colors have come out in full force and the countdown to the coming winter season opening drops from months to weeks, it’s a great feeling of anticipation, but also one of remembering winter’s past. In particular those memories of sliding on snow in the valleys and hills on Minnesota…

• Some of my first recollections of sliding on snow are cross-country skiing on trails around my childhood home of Rochester, Minnesota in under bitter cold gray skies. But, I got the downhill bug on a little molehill which was called the Rochester Ski Hill and consisted of a warming hut, a Poma lift and two trails which I remember (not as fondly) side stepping to help groom them out. I also recall a lift ticket was something like a buck, but that little slice of fun closed many, many years ago.
• I loved school ski trips to the little resort in the Mississippi River valley called Mt Frontenac, now just a golf course, where I learned to make turns with tips from my elementary school teachers and figured out how to ride a tow rope and a t-bar (after plenty of trial and error).
• Finally, I have lots of great memories of making turns down the slopes of Welch Village (also in the Mississippi River bluffs) with the Rochester Ski Team and learning how to rip turns around bamboo stuck in the snow – I also learned that it’s not a good idea to straddle a flush (thank goodness I watched someone do this). But we also learned a lot of other great skills, like how to time our breaks in the lodge on sub-zero days so that someone was always coming down the course with the rest of us shivering in front of the heaters to warm up again. Of course, this is also where I had my first powder day, a 6 inch ‘dump’ that we skied all evening, even though we had no clue about what we were doing.

Favorite ski or snowboard memory from growing up. is a post from: The Resort Marketing written by Eric Hoffman.