While I don’t own one, I like Road ID. For a company that sells such a simple product, I think they’ve done a stellar job of building a brand and giving their brand a face and personality. One of the things that RoadID does that I believe to be genuinely brilliant is a little thing that called the Facebook Fan of the Month. Every month, they choose a random fan (I believe one that has submitted a photo, thus encourage more submission) to be their fan of the month. Then, they stick that fan front and center on their profile pic for all of their 95,000 fans to see.

Here are a few examples:
   

I like this simple concept for a lot of reasons.

First, social media is all about connections, about community. Putting a fan front and center shows that community and customers come first. It’s not about the company, it’s about the fans.

Second, it does everything a normal profile picture would do. It has your logo, the product, and someone using it, plus all the extra benefits.

Third, every month this is done, Road ID is winning fans for life. Not likely you’ll see that one fan (along with their close friends and family) switching to Finish Safe tags anytime soon.

It is tempting to just copy and paste the idea into your own fan page, but I think that resorts are unique enough and have enough dimensions to their product that you can easily find an alternative that draws upon the same principles.

One Idea
Give away a random item (like a free meal at the lodge or cup of hot chocolate) to a random skier every day. Take their picture, and upload it as your profile picture with some sort of label identifying them as the daily lunch on us winner. The winners will get psyched on their free meal, their mug featured on your fan page, and might even tell a few people about it. Facebook fans may even hit the mountain with that small hope of winning themselves.

The pattern: put your fans in your profile picture and three things will happen: they’ll become fans for life, they’ll tell their friends, and having them there will help your brand.

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.