Photo: davidbriody on Flickr

This coming week I’ll be joining a panel of ski industry professionals to discuss social media’s place in resort marketing as part of the ResortXpo Virtual event. The experience of preparing for this has been interesting. On the one hand, I know I’m immersed in the world of social media for work and in my personal life and I’m proud of the things I’ve accomplished for my company and excited about the connections I’ve made; but on the other hand this process has made me well aware of the things I’m not doing that I wish I were or the things I could be doing better.

I’m a little surprised, actually, when I think of how many more ways I could engage:

• Some I’ve never thought about before
• Some I’ve just never taken the time to set up
• Some I just don’t have the time to dedicate

In order to wrap my head around all the things I’d like to do, I thought I’d write out my thoughts on what I’d do in a perfect world – a world without budgets, deadlines or limited resources. Some of this I’m already doing; some of it has yet to be perfected, but I do hope to get there at some point. Perhaps as the use of multi-directional web connections becomes as mainstream as the telephone these things will all become commonplace elements of guest service for every company.

In the meantime, here’s my corporate social media wish list:

Blogging

• I’d blog regularly about what’s happening not only within my company but within my industry
• I’d recruit several of our key employees to blog and share their perspectives
• I’d recruit a few ambassadors from within our community to share their perspectives on our company, product and  industry like we did with our terrain parks blog
• I’d make sure I had a solid employee blogging and social media engagement guidelines document prepared and circulated but then encourage staff to engage with our guests
• I’d also use my Google Alerts to show me where people are discussing my company or product and make a point of commenting on every single one of them, just to let them know how much we care that they are writing

Photo/Video Sharing

• I’d put all my company’s photography on Flickr
• I’d divide up the content into relevant sets based on different activities and set each with appropriate permissions for use – media would be able to access the high resolution downloads from there instead of using an FTP site and messing with FTP clients or browsers to retrieve them
• I’d do regular searches for new images taken at the mountain and comment on them or say a quick hello and thank people for sharing them.
• I’d put all my company video files on YouTube or Vimeo or Viddler depending on where our guests are
• I’d make sure the profile was customized for brand consistency
• I’d ensure videos were put into proper playlists based on their content
• I’d spend time browsing through and favouriting videos that our subscribers/guests may enjoy and I’d rate and comment on every video that showed content from the mountain and, again, thank the contributor for sharing it.

Facebook

• I’d have a Facebook fan page for the company and for other relevant lines of business or niche segments
• I’d post relevant links regularly for those groups depending on their interest in engagement
• I’d encourage fans to subscribe to mobile updates from each Fan Page as they see fit
• I’d have a custom username for those Fan Pages
• I’d add several of our top Guest Services Representatives as admins on it so they could respond to guest inquiries in a very timely manner
• I’d also ensure every event at the mountain had a Facebook Event Page so people could easily share with their friends

Microblogging

• I’d use Twitter to share important information that isn’t necessarily worthy of an email but is interesting nonetheless
• I’d share information about events, promotions, news, and anything else going on
• I’d respond to every @reply and DM
• I’d re-tweet information of value to my followers and say a quick hello to everyone who mentions my company or product in a tweet
• I’d use Twitter Search to see what’s happening in my industry and set some comprehensive searches and throw the feeds in my reader just to keep track of what’s coming up
• I’d attend company events, take some fun photos, upload them to TwitPic and Tweet them out to show how much fun it is to attend mountain events both as a guest and as an employee
• I’d link my Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and even my Google Reader to Friendfeed to aggregate everything I share on the web in one place
• I’d check for comments regularly and respond to every one
• I’d go through my Google Reader items at least daily and share relevant links that would be of interest to our community; those would also then show up in my friend feed.

Corporate Website

• I’d ensure our social media touchpoints were clear on our site by adding visible graphic links to our various profiles – our blogs, Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube etc.
• I’d ensure every page of our website had a ShareThis widget to make it easy for people to share our content in whatever way they like to
• I’d ensure our media resources section had web-optimized press releases linking to relevant information, written with a little SEO in mind
• On the topic of SEO, I’d make sure every page of our site was reviewed regularly to ensure keywords, meta, title and URL was optimized and relevant
• I’d encourage people to share information about their visit to the mountain on review sites such as Yelp, TripAdvisor etc. or to submit it to us, post it on our blog, tweet about it or otherwise make it known
• I’d have a mobile website that listed only relevant “on the go” information

Digital Marketing

• I’d advertise every relevant product with targeted Facebook social ads
• I’d have an extensive PPC ad plan in place that also covered every product and service we offer
• I’d include recent social media updates in regular email blasts to our double-opt-in subscribers
• I’d utilize mobile alerts for relevant subscriber groups to share timely information as appropriate

The list above is my start. Obviously what I’ve listed is very top line and I could go into more detail about what to say, what not to say, who to friend, who not to friend, corporate branding, messaging etc. I could also go into technologies and tools I’d love to be using extensively within our organization – Skype, IM etc. or mention how all of this is irrelevant unless you’re listening in the first place… and there are even some great tools that automate the listening for you!

I’d love to hear from others in the industry about what they consider to be some “best practices” with regards to social media use by brands and corporate identities.

I’m sure there is much I still have to learn.