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After 10 years at Diamond Peak I’m moving on!

Posted by Milena Regos on August 4, 2011

Today is a big day for me as I announce my resignation as the Marketing Director at IVGID where I spent the past 10 years of my life skiing, golfing, playing tennis and most of all creating remarkable branding and legendary marketing campaigns together with a bunch of fun loving and genuine people. Surrounded by the beauty of Lake Tahoe, it was my dream job and a dream that came through.

The time has come to close this chapter and open another one which is pursuing my marketing and entrepreneur dreams, and helping other companies in the world achieve similar and bigger successes through clever marketing, smart social media and connecting with customers online – the purpose of Out&About Marketing.

I’m very proud of what Diamond Peak has accomplished in the past 10 years. It took an incredibly strong team to make all of this possible and I’m proud and fortunate to have been a part of it.

• Branding – Your Tahoe Place for Kids was born and grew to be a perfect match for the ski resort resonating extremely well with our guests. Lila Lapanja, who learned to ski at Diamond Peak at the age of 2, featured for years on our billboards is now a part of the U.S. Ski Team’s Development Team — an honor bestowed on only 10 women in the country. Someone once said: “Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department alone”. Many, many people were involved in this process from within as well as from the outside, EXL Media and Whistler Creative to mention a couple.

• Happy Customers – Happy customers is why businesses continue to exist not because of billboards or marketing. Diamond Peak is fortunate to have many happy customers who relate to the branding message and enjoy their time at the resort. The resort has received hundreds and thousands of positive testimonials over the years: “…your employees are the BEST!”, “the view will amaze you”, “great skiing for everyone”, “this place is wonderful”, “five star experience”, “kid friendly”, “This is a fantastic place for new skiers and especially families with kids to come and enjoy the beauty of the Sierras together!”

You can read all of the reviews on Yelp here. Our guests love Diamond Peak and they keep coming back for more. It’s not unusual that we will see 3 generations on the mountain. All these testimonials just confirm what we, the staff at Diamond Peak already know – it’s a special place. I will definitely miss the view from the top of Crystal, loving referred to as the “office view”:

• Record Breaking Revenues – all that love and positive feedback has resulted in great business for Diamond Peak. Without sharing our numbers, I just have to say we had a fantastic 3-4 years ride during tough economic times in the midst of two bankrupt states.

• Major Capital Improvements – I saw a few gigantic projects at Diamond Peak, starting with a new high speed lift, a major upgrade to the Base Lodge and a brand new Skier Services Building last year.

Top Station of Crystal Express

Base Lodge Remodeled

New Skier Services Building

• Multiple Marketing Awards – throughout the years, we enjoyed receiving many marketing awards for creativity, cohesive marketing campaigns and social media from the American Marketing Association, ADDY, Hermes. Again, it took a great team to make this possible!

• Special Events – we had so much fun creating and executing from wacky (Dummy Downhill), to fun (Poker Run), as well as competitive (Vertical Challenge), early morning races (Uphill Race), cause related (Special Olympics, Race to Beat Cancer, MS races), kids focused (terrain park comps) and of course a ski resort is not a ski resort without some alcohol related special events (Absolut party, restaurant promotions and Last Tracks).

• Friends for Life – I’ve met amazing people over the years and too many to list them all here.  Just to mention a few from the main crew at Diamond Peak: Ed Youmans, our fearless leader, who’s off to a new challenge in New Jersey, Mike Bandelin, happiest guy on the mountain, a natural born leader whom I admire, Bee Ferrato, the ever smiling, kids loving Kiwi, Jay Abdo, our super sales manager with a dry sense of humor, Barb Archer, whose fate brought her to Diamond Peak and the sport of skiing and she’s mastering marketing and web, PK, Jack, Brian, Tom, Dave, Dennis, Carl, Walter, and many other folks from the entire company. You guys all rock. It was a pleasure to work with such professional and happy people. Keep up the positive attitude and don’t let a couple of bad characters get to you.

As for me, it’s time to move on to what I have always aspired to do in my life and run my own business. I’m going full speed ahead with Out&About Marketing and pursuing my other passions in life of being in the outdoors, staying healthy and fit and enjoying life to the fullest.

Chao for now.

Categories: Blog Life | 24 Comments »

Is your ski resort ready for the season? What keeps you up at night?

Posted by Milena Regos on December 1, 2009

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?

Categories: Blog Customer Loyalty Customer service Customer Surveys Customer Training eMarketing Events Facebook Interactive marketing Lake Tahoe Marketing Recession marketing Ski industry Social Media Social Media Marketing Twitter Video Web 2.0 Word of Mouth | No Comments »

Diamond Peak Facebook Contest a Huge Success

Posted by Milena Regos on September 27, 2009

Facebook is the Number one source of traffic to Diamond Peak Ski Resort‘s website for the last month, following a well thought out social media strategy, planning, fun contest and a great execution.

Based on our Google Analytics reports, Facebook surpassed traffic from Google and from our own domain name in the past one month. How did we accomplish this success? I can’t give you all the details, as the information is confidential but I can tell you that traffic from Facebook surpassed traffic from online places where we actually spend money promoting the resort. I should also add that we purchased pay per click advertising on Facebook for our season pass sale yet the total amount doesn’t even come close to the overall advertising budget we have allocated to promote our season pass sale. Considering it’s season pass sale time and we actually invested marketing dollars to promote it,  I consider the incredible amount of traffic from Facebook as a proof that social media really works. Some of the important elements that went into creating this successful campaign were:

1. Social Media Strategy – We spent time creating a social media strategy based on our business and marketing objectives. And I don’t just mean spend a day. We spent months creating our social media strategy. We didn’t just create a Facebook page for the sake of using this new tool. We actually thought about it first,  created a strategy with our objectives in mind and executed it well.

2. Staff involvement – social media is free but it takes time. You will need to find people on your staff who can help with the content. You can’t do everything on your own. Teamwork is important when it comes to continuing the conversation on social media.I have to thank my team for seeing the value in social media, putting in the hours to really understand it and staying on top of it. You guys are great!

Diamond Pete on Ellis Peak

3. Engaging content – we ran a contest on Facebook for a month with “Where is Diamond Pete“, the mascot for the resort. Pete went to different places, such as Hawaii, West Shore of Lake Tahoe, the Reno Air Races,  all along North Shore and various places in Incline Village and Diamond Peak. We took photos of Pete and posted them on Facebook. People guessed where the photo was taken and the winner of the day received a small gift of appreciation from Diamond Peak. At the end of the month (the contest is not over yet), we are going to pull one winner – the person who had the most correct guesses each day and was the first to identify the location. This person is going to win a Holiday Pass to Diamond Peak and a season locker to their favorite ski resort.

4. Giveaways – although they are not mandatory for engaging content, people love getting swag. As there is a chance to win something much bigger at the end of the month, there is even more motivation to participate every day.

5. Follow up – On a daily basis we log in and engage with our followers. Our followers have increased dramatically since we started running the contest and they engage with Diamond Peak daily. It doesn’t take much time to monitor the contest and respond to people. It shows that you are actively engaged and excited about the contest.

We have planned some excellent contests for the near future. Become a fan of Diamond Peak on Facebook today so you don’t miss out.

Let’s discuss social media measurements. You can measure many things in this example: number of fans on Facebook, number of people who participated in the contest, traffic to the website, and by using the Facebook insights you can get a lot more hard data on your visitors. I’m not sure how to put hard numbers behind people’s engagement with Diamond Peak in Sep. It’s still summer and besides our season pass sale, there is not much else going on right now on the mountain except for the busy work that goes into making sure the mountain is ready to open. We are keeping in touch with our customers, listening to their suggestions and getting them excited about the ski season. We are creating relationships and strengthening existing ones. That’s why it’s called Social Media – Social.Media.

What do you think about this contest? Have you heard about any other fun contests on Facebook or on social media that have been successful? How do you measure your efforts?

Categories: Blog eMarketing Facebook Marketing Measurements Ski industry Social Media Social Media Marketing Web 2.0 | 9 Comments »