Photo credit: Jeff Engerbretson

I’m speaking tomorrow at the North Lake Tahoe Chamber of Commerce Breakfast Club. I’m looking forward to hearing the key note speaker, Bob Roberts from the California Ski Industry Association as well as seeing my colleagues in the industry. I hope everyone is as excited as I am about the start of a new season. In my presentation I’d like to make three points that I’m passionate about and keep me up at night.

3 things that in my opinion can help your ski resort in today’s economy succeed. 3 things that we as marketers and business owners need to invest in, understand and encourage.

1. Invest in Customer Service. This is one sure way to generate positive word of mouth. In this tough economy our customers demand better than ever customer service. I continue to get disappointed every time I go to San Francisco and visit the retail environment there.  Invest in customer service training for your employees. It will pay off for your business in the long run. Track customer service with surveys. Award your best performing employees.  Establish benchmarks. At Diamond Peak we have a mystery guest program where I personally select a customer for the day to keep an eye out for employees going above and beyond their regular line of duty. Once they spot this special employee they hand him/her a card with $25 bucks they can use anywhere at the resort. Coming from the customer, the message is a lot stronger than coming from their supervisor. We don’t announce the program to our employees; we let word of mouth spread it every year.  This program is extremely successful. In addition, we have mandatory customer service training that is taught by our General Manager at the beginning of the season. With every ticket purchased we hand out a card asking our skiers to go online and fill out a survey. We pride ourselves on high customer service and it’s one parameter in the customer experience we feel is within our control. People like to be treated nicely. They expect it and demand it. They tell their friends about it. Don’t disappoint them. Understand the Power of One – that one individual can make or break their day and you can win or lose a customer for life.
2. Understand the power of Social Media and Word of Mouth Marketing. Now is the time to embrace new technology and the new ways people are demanding information and seeking to engage with brands. 44% of the online population is engaged on social networks. Close to 20% of the adult online population are word of mouth marketing influencers and this number is expected to grow in the coming years. Facebook is the number 3 website in terms of traffic, just past Google and Yahoo and before MSN, Live.com, Amazon, eBay and Graigslist. Your business needs to have presence on social media networks like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace, FourSquare. You need to have a blog. Start building your online community. Start practicing “permission marketing” like Seth Godin refers to it. Ask people for permission to market to them. Stop interrupting them. It’s a vicious cycle when you try to shout at people and interrupt conversations. Don’t use the traditional marketing approach in the new media – it won’t work. People will turn you off. They will stop following you and stop being your friend. The ski resort industry is in a good position to show how fun and memorable the sport is. Use new media to get the image out and tap into people’s emotions with videos, photos and more user generated content. At Diamond Peak we are actively engaging with people on social networks. We are having fun doing it while establishing trust with our customers. Once they trust us they will be more likely to come and ski at our resort too.  Join in the conversation. Friend us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter and watch our videos on YouTube. Let’s have some fun. Skiing is about fun.
3. CEOs and Business Owners – Encourage Smart, Honest, Aggressive, Transparent, Permission Marketing. Marketers – get 5-6 smart people in a room and start brainstorming how to increase your market share, create memorable programs, cut cost and stand out. Let’s be honest about our snow reports and ski conditions. Guess what? People can and will report ski conditions for us, right from the slopes. They will post videos, Facebook updates, Twitter posts, photos and write blogs about their experience. Now is the time to be more aggressive with our marketing efforts. The Bay Area is close and yet miles away when it comes to trying to convince a family to come and ski. We are competing for attention with other industries, other brands, other ski resort destinations.  It’s easier for a family to put the kids in front of the TV and play Wii or in front of the computer than to plan a trip to Lake Tahoe. Now is the time to build mind share. When the economy improves, and it will, they will remember us and the mind share will turn into a wallet share. Diamond Peak is known as Your Tahoe Place for kids and beginners. Diamond Peak has friendly staff. Diamond Peak created a new product this year called The Holiday Season Pass. Instead of blacking out the pass during the holidays when it may be the only time people can drive up for a ski vacation, we developed a product that’s good only during the holidays – 28 days for $249. That’s less than $9/day. Unheard of, right? Different? And finally, Diamond Peak has the most unique event in the Tahoe Basin – Last Tracks. We have some great programs in place for our customers to start the word of mouth marketing. You can discover them all at diamondpeak.com and help us spread the word – tell your friends and family about them.

To help with the networking and learning from each other I started a marketing chat room on Twitter with the hashtag of #mrktchat. It runs for an hour every Thursday at 2pm  PST. I hope you can all join us and we can all learn together as we are trying to figure out the new technology and tools available to us as marketers in the travel and tourism industry.

What are your thoughts? How are you getting ready for this season and this economy? What are you doing differently? What keeps you up at night?

1. The Power of One has become even stronger thanks to User Generated Content. Thanks to the power of social media one person’s horrible customer experience with your company can be seen by millions of people. Don’t let this happen to your company.

2. Are you listening on the social web? You should be monitoring what’s been said about your brand, your product and service online. There are many free tools to allow you to listen to what people are saying about you. If you catch something negative early you may be able to address the situation before it turns into a public relations nightmare.

3. Social media content gets high rankings on search engines. This could be good for you when you intentionally try to improve your search rankings with your social media efforts. It could also be very bad for you and take you a lot of money to correct as in the case of the United video.

4. Use social media to promote your excellent customer service. Social media can very fast turn bad customer experience with your company in a public relations nightmare. Many cases come to mind, such as Domino’s Pizza, Dell computer catching fire on YouTube or AOL not letting people unsubscribe from their service. However, social media can also be used to promote your brand in a positive light.

Below are two examples of how YouTube can become a very effective way to showcase how great your customer service is:

How about Southwest Airlines customer service videos on YouTube? There are so many of them that it was hard to pick just one that sums it all up. I found a video that shows a flight attendant rapping the safety rules prior to take off. It’s a great way to turn a not so pleasant experience into an engaging and entertaining experience on the airplane and one that customers will remember and talk about.

Here’s another great video of how powerful one individual can be to your brand and to the bottom line. Johnny the bagger came up with a simple idea to give something unique to his customers which transformed the whole grocery store into a welcoming and happy place for people while contributing to the bottom line.

5 lessons learned:

1. The Power of One can do wonders for your company or turn in a public relations nightmare. Customer service is all about how your employees engage with your customers. How pleased or dissatisfied your customers are with your product or service.
2. Make sure that your customers are beyond satisfied with your company and they recommend your services and products to  their friends and family.
3. Only after you have accomplished amazing customer service, you can hope to get referrals through Word-of-Mouth.
4. Word-of-mouth is free. With the right amount of word of mouth you may not need to advertise.
5. Make sure you measure customer service with surveys and Net Promoter Score and establish benchmarks for yourself. Without measurements you don’t know if your customer service has improved or worsened. There are plenty of ways you can measure customer service. Net Promoter Score is measured by asking your customers: ‘Would you recommend this service to your family and friends?”. You can calculate your promoters this way and know exactly where you stand and measure yourself against your industry averages.

Let me know what you think of customer service and how you are implementing employee training and measuring customer service at your business. I’m interested to hear.

In my full-time job as a Marketing Director for Incline Village General Improvement District I deal with daily challenges on how to communicate better with our customers, how to engage them and how to listen to what they have to say. We adapt our marketing strategies based on our customer feedback. As the Marketing Director for Diamond Peak Ski Resort, The Golf Courses at Incline Village, The Chateau at Incline Village, The Recreation Center and Tennis Center I have a responsibility to serve our customers by providing the best products and services for their money. To achieve this I need to listen to our customers. I’m starting this blog as an opportunity to engage more effectively with our customers. I also want to provide lessons that I have learned, research I have found and real life experiences all in one place for people who are interested in Internet marketing, social media marketing and web 2.0. I will continue to update this blog with all things marketing, Internet marketing, web 2.0 and social media marketing that I find interesting and worth reading. This is my personal blog and my thoughts and opinions are not associated with the organization I work for (IVGID).

I hope you enjoy my blog. Send me your feedback and let me know how I can make it better, what interests you and what you would like to read about.