Over the years resorts have had a few videos that you could say have “gone viral” at least in the context of ski. Because for an industry like ours viral is a few hundred thousand views, not a few million.

For example, remember Ratatouille, Liberty’s snowboarding opossum?

That video eventually reached more than a million views and got a handful of mainstream coverage including Good Morning America.

When I covered this video 7+ years ago, Liberty’s Zack Koneffko had this to say:

“People love animals…combine that with something a little off the wall and it makes for a possible internet hit. I also understand that it takes a little bit of luck as well. Obviously it wouldn’t have received the attention it has if Good Morning America had not played it.”

The only downside here was the obvious one: something like this is fun to celebrate as a marketing team and numbers are mind-boggling for a resort like Liberty, but they don’t really move the needle for any one resort.

The Lesson
But there’s a lesson here. A lesson that many things besides skiing, like animals, can lead to much more sharing than a typical video can. So if that’s one goal and your other is to highlight more of your resort, I think you’d probably end up with something that Silverstar put together.

Yes, there are puppies – crazy cute ones at that – but there’s also ski school. And it’s that blend of the non-ski stuff that may help it reach a slightly broader, less-core audience that led the view count you can probably see above.

if you can’t, as of writing on December 7, they’ve reached 275,000 views on Facebook alone.

SilverStar’s Oscar Gordon was kind enough to send me a few details as well. Here’s the story:

“…8-week-old Bernese Mountain puppies were not only introduced to snow at SilverStar Mountain Resort for the first time but they surprised a group of 5-year-olds who were enjoying their first day on their ‘Rippers’ SnowSports program…Soon after, a group of Bernese Mountain Dogs from the surrounding area of the Okanagan surprised SilverStar’s village. ..The event was recorded and posted on SilverStar’s social media Sunday night and has since receive over 1 million views with thousands of comments and ‘shares’ with many excited reactions.”

Building on lessons from the past and wrapping in a bit more of the resort’s story put them in a position to not only have a good chance of getting mainstream coverage, but also benefiting from that coverage once they had it.

Speaking of which, the list of coverage so far has been really, really solid includ

Good stuff and kudos to all involved on the concept and edit.

The only Bernese Mountain Dog missing it seems was Loveland’s/Dustin’s Parker!

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.