You may never have heard of Nick Trotochaud and, outside of this post, you may never hear his name again. To some, Nick would be a punk snowboarder, sporting an uber-baggy tall-T and spending all day sliding rails in the park. Recently, however, Nick did a simple thing on Facebook that I think all of us can learn from. Here’s how it worked.

On December 2, 2010 at 2:01pm, Nick posted this status update:
Nick Trotochaud: post a trick you want me to do this weekend and ill try and get it on film and give you a shoutout. the opportune word here though is TRY haha.”

On Sunday, December 5, 2010 he posted a short, simple video where he sits down with the list of tricks suggested by his Facebook friends (there were more than 35 ideas) and gives a shoutout to each person and the trick they suggested before cutting to the footage of them doing that trick.

Then, for the people he gave a shoutout to, he posted the link to the video (not just tagged) on their wall so they could hear their shoutout and see their trick.

See what I mean? Simple. Nick is not the next Shaun White, in fact there are a lot of snowboarders that are quite a bit better than him, but I don’t know their names like I know Nick’s. In a world full of “almost pros”, Nick is doing an awesome job of marketing himself, of separating himself from the rest of the up-n-comer crowd.

Now, you likely aren’t the only ski resort in your area and there are probably other resort that are bigger and better than you, but maybe Nick’s video can help you stand out the way he does.

People love to hear or see their name up in lights and I think this style of video hits that nail right on the head. The pattern I see is this:

• Let your fans generate perfect content by asking them what they want to see
• Create what they tell you to and give them a shoutout in the content itself
• Post it on social media sites and tag them / send it to them when you do

Any ideas on specific ways to try out this pattern at a ski resort?

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.