With Facebook Places jumping into the geo location game that Foursquare pioneered, now is the time for resorts to plant their flag... literally. The goal is to get visitors to "check in" and broadcast to their networks that they are at your resort... ie indirect word of mouth marketing. The most obvious motivation for users to do so is for them to connect to their other friends who might also be at the resort, and with a little imagination I think any resort can come up with additional incentives.

The Vail Resorts family of resorts (Vail, Keystone, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, and Heavenly) forsaw this opportunity and developed the Epic Mix application - both mobile and desktop. This takes social a few steps further by connecting on-mountain RFID data embedded in lift tickets to track stats and broadcast. The app combines this with social interaction to connect with friends on the mountain, and share experiences out to Facebook, Twitter, and the Epic Mix network. They also pulled the "badge" game concept from Foursquare to reward users for on-mountain accomplishments. Very cool.

You may lack the budget to afford Crispin Porter and the throng of developers needed to build such a custom application. The good news is that you don't need to. There are free tools available.

Facebook Places

In August 2010 Facebook launched the location based service. Rather than explain it, here's a good article. The first part is the Places page. Seamingly redundant to Pages, Facebook all on their own setup a Place for every business they could. If you search under your business name, you'll likely find a Place entry in addition to your Page. The first thing you need to do is capture control of your Place. Here is a PDF of the instructions, but note that the process is already different since they published this. Once you do, you can merge your Place and your Page. That is key.

Your goal is to get your customers to habitually pull out their phone and checkin every time they hit the mountain, the restaurant, the spa, the bar... etc. Consider rewards for most checkins, or a separate ticket line for customers who checkin to Facebook Places. Signage Why? Everytime they do, that event is broadcasted to all their friends. Average user has over 300 Facebook fans. You do the math.

Foursquare

The joke is that Foursquare has more people in the media using it than real people. Its ahead of its time and will surely die soon. I expect Facebook (who considered buying them earlier this year) with Places will effectively take care of that. I would't invest much in it, but just understand the underlying "badge" plus "location" proof of concept aspect of the service. Badges are earned when users check-in.. for example, the person that checks in the most at a location earns the Mayor Badge. Some locations reward the Mayor with free coffee, 10% off, etc. Imagine similar incentives for most vertical feet, hitting all black diamonds, etc. Expect to see this game concept applied to Facebook Places.

Ok. Be good to your customers and share the love....

Read Dave Gibson's full blog and watch the video.

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