I sometimes feel I do too much critiquing and too little suggesting. Like, somehow, I’m the 400 pound, mullet-sporting guy on his 3rd beer at the baseball game yelling at the 2nd baseman to hustle. So, every once in a while on a Wednesday I’ll try to balance the scales a bit and put my own ideas up for display, analysis, and critique. (view all ‘WID’ posts).

You’ve got a social media manager at your resort who, all season long, stretches their creativity to come up with unique, fun, interesting, and engaging content for your fans and followers. Some of that content is produces by your skiers and is pushed to your followers through shares and retweets. This content has a unique voice and feel about it because it’s coming from a unique source each and every time. It saves the social media manager time and typically accomplishes just as much good.

With so much content being created around your resort, I wonder if there’s not a way to organize and optimize this flow. Here’s what I was thinking.

The Format
You create a simple app that allows users to submit status updates, photos, and videos for the resort. These can also be added via a web interface (or maybe a mobile-optimized interface would be enough). All of this content goes into a feed that the social media manager keeps an eye on, approving the content they like to go live now (or at a future date/time) on the resort’s social profiles.

The Credit / Cycle
To submit content, a user must first link his/her Twitter and/or Facebook accounts to the system. The system would also append a link to a “how it works & submit your own” page, thus driving more people to get involved in the content creation process. Because the person that created the content is tagged in the content, the old “name up in lights” principle will be in full effect. Meaning, they’ll want to share it with their friends / family to show how cool they are and the desire to create/share grows.

The Leaderboard
The system also tracks the engagement on each piece of content in the form of retweets, favorites, shares, comments, likes, views, etc. so, after a few weeks, the social media manager has a leaderboard of who is creating the most popular content with a ratio of how many of their submissions you’ve actually posted. This rankings would also show up next to new content in the approval feed, helping the social media manager make better decisions about which content to share.

So, the gist is this:

1. Resort fans / followers create most of your content – photos, statuses, videos
2. Someone at the resort monitors the feed of new content and approves the items that should go live either now or in the future
3. Each creator is assigned a ranking or score based on how much feedback their content gets
4. This is used to make the process easier of approving and choosing the best stuff to share.

Will it work? I don’t know. Is it better than just retweeting or sharing stuff? I don’t know. But if each (or most) piece(s) of content drives people to continue sharing, there is a feedback mechanism to identify where the best content comes from, I wonder if something like this could not only help a resort share awesome content, but also make social media easier for smaller resorts with limited resources and get your fans more involved in content generation as well.

Still early on this one. Any brilliant ideas out there on why this would or wouldn’t work?

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.