Using social media for marketing is easy, right? Hardly. Even social media gurus don’t get it right every time. In an effort to learn from others’ mistakes, here’s some insightful errors and lessons from within the ski industry, including one of my own.

Rufo, nxtConcepts--What I meant to say was…
Issue: Trying to be funny on Twitter. After just a few months on Twitter, I decided to joke about a non-ski industry client that was e-mailing more than 60 images, one at a time. I thought it would be funny. However, another client that followed my tweets was put off.

Lesson: Thankfully, Nate Wolleson, marketing director at Snow Trails, Ohio, called me to explain how he interpreted the tweet. Wolleson said, “If this is what you are saying about them, what are you saying about us”? I learned two lessons. First, be authentic when you write, but think twice about trying to be funny in 140 characters or less. Second, if you do write something, attempting to erase it may only call more attention to your gaffe. Instead, leave it, but follow it up with a comment clarifying what you meant to say or correcting your mistake.

Mt. Bachelor—Turning the Tide
Issue: A few years ago, a challenging relationship between the resort and the local community moved from offline conversations to online. Once online, negative sentiment rapidly spread from blogs to mainstream media. Once mainstream media took notice, they started reporting conversations as fact. Before 2008, the resort did not have a person or policy in place to refute comments or address conversations about the resort.

Lesson: It took Bachelor years to recover. By 2010, the resort had changed its culture from ignoring to interacting. Through frequent participation and by replying to most posts, the area turned the tide from mostly negative comments to positive ones. According to former marketing director Alex Kaufman, “The last year or two were daunting. Many of the conversations were not fun, but necessary. Our goals were to help 98 percent of the people reading and watching make an informed decision, and have the media report correct information.”

Diamond Peak—Laying the Ground Rules
Issue: After creating a resort Twitter account, the employee that managed the account left the company and deleted the page and the profile. The resort not only lost all the contacts and content, but also all the momentum of the account.

Lesson: Without a documented social media policy in place, things like this can happen. Milena Regos, marketing director at Diamond Peak Ski Resort, recommends, “Although there can sometimes be a blurry line, when it comes to personal vs. company social media accounts, it is critical to have a policy in place to spell out what you consider that line to be. Do your research and understand the repercussions of allowing employees to engage in social media on company time.”

Anyone working with social media should know that errors are inevitable. It comes from being human. To me, the measure of the success is dealing with the aftermath—that is the lesson you walk away with.

KEEP THOSE WINTER WEBSITES UPDATED
I’m a ski journalist on assignment to write 80 detailed resort reviews for a new website. Visiting the “media rooms” of five leading North American resorts, I found content that talked of “new for the 2006-7” season. In another I diligently used info in the media “dining out info” section, only to find that a quarter of the places listed had closed down. I don’t want to name names, but we are talking about two of the top five ski resorts in North America here! Come on guys, get your act together, it would only take a half day each year to make sure the facts you’re displaying on your sites are up to date.

—Patrick Thorne, Editor, www.skiinfo.co.uk and www.snow24.com



RIGHTFULLY MAD IN MAD RIVER MOUNTAIN
In reading your latest issue of SAM (“Best/Worst Advertising,” May 2010), I was very disappointed to see Samantha Rufo and others place Mad River Mountain under the category of “Facebook Blunders.” In early March, Samantha contacted my marketing director to ask about this “Fan” page, which was news to us—it wasn’t our doing! We explained this to her, and have been trying to have Facebook remove this page. It is extremely disappointing and frustrating that you still included Mad River Mountain in the story.

—Joshua Faber, General Manager, Mad River Mountain, Ohio


We do apologize for our blunder--which indeed it was! Samantha had given us several examples, and we did not inform her that we were using this one in particular. That makes this error more our fault than hers.
As Sam notes in her Speak-Out above, we all make errors.—Ed.