Sunday River won, Loveland was close behind, a now Arapahoe Basin skiers have been making turns for about 30 minutes. Social Media was huge in this year’s Race to Open. Updates, feedback, buzz, you name it was generated and controlled, mostly through Facebook. Here is a few things I thought were really impressive about how these resorts used their Social Media sites.

1) Alan Henceroth’s Blog Post Responding to Anonymous
Arapahoe Basin’s COO & CP, Alan Henceroth has a blog. Which, alone, is something I’d love to see at other resorts. As we all know, blogs can be commented on by anyone. Some undisclosed skier posted a scathing rebuke of A-Basin’s method of informing the public about progress toward an opening day. Rather than just delete the comment, Alan not only published it but wrote a public reply. Extremely impressive and effective.

2) Loveland’s Visual Updates from Day 1
Dustin Schaefer, Loveland’s social media/group sales guy, deserves a raise. He’s been up at all hours of the night with the snowmaking crew documenting the entire process with awesome photos and videos. His opening day photo album alone was liked by over 110 people.

3) Loveland’s Facebook Wall Monitoring
Head to Loveland’s Facebook page wall. Count how many comments haven’t been replied to by someone from Loveland. Last time I checked, I got 2, both of which were blatant self-promotion posts trying to capitalize on the buzz. Impressive stuff.

4) Props from Fellow Resorts
This really impressed me. It was a race, glory to the winner, but there is a ton of class and camaraderie from within the ski industry. I counted around 10 resorts congratulating Sunday River on Friday via Twitter, Al Henceroth congratulated Loveland and even told his skiers to warm up there on Sunday before their opening today, and a few more on Facebook. Great to see.

You’ll notice I didn’t talk much about Sunday River. They tried hard, had some fun little photos and videos, but just didn’t have the people there to monitor these sites. When I checked on Saturday, I counted 10 people that had asked about whether or not they’d have rails on Sunday and not a single one had been responded too. They seemed to do a little bit of catch up but some replies came two days after the original post.

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.