Vail Resorts has abandoned its traditional advertising strategies in favor of a new in-house social media marketing operation. This operation uses social media platforms like YouTube to constantly engage with skiing enthusiasts in real-time. Vail Resorts operates ski resorts across Colorado and California/Nevada and has seen social media accelerate consumers' decision making about visiting resorts.

1. Ski Resorts & Social Media
Case Study and Workshop
Essentials of Tourism Destination Management

2. The Web is slowly but steadily undergoing a metamorphosis as more and more users are
able to create, share, and distribute content on the Web. This shift toward "user generated"
content represents one of the biggest changes of the Web since its inception in the early
1990's. This paradigm shift has resulted in a surge in popularity of websites that
enables users to build social networks and share content.
Collectively, these types of websites are referred to in the media as Web 2.0, to distinguish
these from the so-called Web 1.0 sites that host content from established providers.
Essentials of Tourism Destination Management

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4.  Social media continues to influence how consumers interact with destinations
and share content every day.
 Social media plays an important role in how consumers
discover, research, and share information about destinations.
 In fact 60 percent of consumers researching about destinations
through multiple online sources learned about a specific destination
through social networking sites.
Essentials of Tourism Destination Management

5. Vail Resort and Social Media: Reinventing Ski Resort Marketing
Vail Resorts is the leading mountain resort operator in the United States.
Vail Resorts operates the mountain resorts of Vail, Beaver Creek,
Breckenridge and Keystone in Colorado, and Heavenly, Northstar and
Kirkwood in the Lake Tahoe area of California and Nevada
Essentials of Tourism Destination Management

6. Vail Resort and Social Media: Reinventing Ski Resort Marketing
"Social media is playing a major role in accelerating the decision cycle of consumers
who patronize ski resorts. As a result, one of the country's largest such companies -
Vail Resorts - has abandoned its long-time advertising strategies and practices. In
their place, the billion-dollar-a-year corporation, which operates five major resorts
and twenty hotels, has built a new in-house marketing operation that uses social
media and other digital venues to constantly engage skiing enthusiasts in real time”.
Essentials of Tourism Destination Management

7. Over the last years, we have witnessed an explosion of networked video sharing
as a new killer Internet application.
YouTube was founded by three ex-PayPal employees: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed
Karim. Launched in May 2005, YouTube has become the most successful
Internet site providing a new generation of short video sharing service.
Essentials of Tourism Destination Management

8. Traffic
• Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month
(Vimeo, founded in 2004, “only” has over 70 million unique monthly visitors)
• Over 3 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube
• 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
• 70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US
• YouTube is localized in 43 countries and across 60 languages
• In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views or around 140 views for every
person on Earth
• Millions of subscriptions happen each day. Subscriptions allow you to connect with
someone you're interested in — whether it's a friend, or the NBA — and keep up on
their activity on the site
Source: http://www.youtube.com/t/press_statistics?hl=en-GB
Essentials of Tourism Destination Management

9. Mobile and Devices
• Traffic from mobile devices tripled in 2011
• More than 10% of global YouTube views come from mobile devices
• 3 hours of video is uploaded per minute to YouTube from mobile devices
• YouTube is available on 350 million devices
Source: http://www.youtube.com/t/press_statistics?hl=en-GB
Essentials of Tourism Destination Management

10. Social
• 500 years of YouTube video are watched every day on Facebook, and over 700
YouTube videos are shared on Twitter each minute
• 100 million people take a social action on YouTube (likes, shares, comments, etc)
every week
• More than 50% of videos on YouTube have been rated or include comments from
the community
•Millions of videos are favorited every day
• Clicks on the ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ button on YouTube have doubled since the start of
2011. For every ‘dislike,’ we get 10 ‘likes’- people like to tell other people about the
stuff they love.
Source: http://www.youtube.com/t/press_statistics?hl=en-GB
Essentials of Tourism Destination Management

11. YouTube, and its competitors, allow content suppliers to upload video effortlessly,
automatically converting from many different formats*, and to tag uploaded videos with
keywords.
Users can easily share videos by mailing links to them, or embedding them on web pages
or in blogs. Users can also rate and comment on videos, bringing new social aspects
to the viewing of videos. Consequently, popular videos can rise to the top in a very organic
fashion.
The social network existing in YouTube further enables communities and groups. Videos
are no longer independent from each other, and neither are users. This has substantially
contributed to the success of YouTube and similar sites.
* YouTube accepts uploaded videos in WMV, AVI, MOV and MPEG formats, which are converted into .FLV (Adobe
Flash Video) format after uploading.
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12. Distribution of YouTube Videos’ Categories
Source: CHENG, DALE and LIU (2007)
Essentials of Tourism Destination Management

13. YouTube places a cap of 10 minutes on video length. However, users with “director"
accounts are able to post content that is longer than 10 minutes. But only a few videos
exceeded the 10 minute limit.
The average video duration in YouTube is 4.15 minutes with a median of 3.33 minutes.
Source: GILL, ARLITT, Li and MAHANTI (2007)
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15. Snow.com; Vail Resorts (9 Oct 2005)
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16. Amazing Ski Season at Vail (10 Sept 2008)
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18. Breckenridge (9 Jun 2006)
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19. Heavenly (25 Nov 2006)
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20. Top 10 Greatest Hits (22 Apr 2007)

21. Northstar (19 May 2008)
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22. Vail (1 Mar 2006)
Nighttime Snow Tubing Vail - new lift and tubing hill at Adventure Ridge
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23. Keystone (9 Feb 2009)
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24. Beaver Creek (2 Jun 2010)
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26. Jackson Hole (16 Jan 2007)
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28. Whistler Blackcomb (5 Dec 2006)
Essentials of Tourism Destination Management

29. Whistler Blackcomb XXS
by Switchback Entertainment
A day in the life of a miniature Whistler, the biggest little ski area in the world.
This video documents a bird's eye view of teeny, tiny Whistler Village
and surrounding Whistler Blackcomb mountains, making it a real life snow globe.
Essentials of Tourism Destination Management

30. Whistler Blackcomb XXS
“In Fall 2010, Whistler Blackcomb asked us to produce a webisode for them,
along the lines of what we’d been producing for Salomon Freeski TV.
They gave us an addition challenge of trying to show more of the resort
than the powder action of the backcountry and the airtime of the park and pipe.
Ideally, they hoped we’d be able to showcase the lift system, vastness of the terrain,
and overall feel of the resort.
We came back to them with the concept for XXS.
We were able to answer all of Whistler Blackcomb’s challenges
and the video went on to become the resorts first truly viral hit
and has earned more than 500,000 views”.
They use digital post production technique for miniature faking,
simulating miniature cinematography on full scale filmed sequences.
Smallgantics is a digital image process that accurately simulates miniature depth of field (DOF)
on full-scale filmed subjects via a "hand-made" digital application.
Artificial depth planes, up to 8 layers, are generated by the artist, which distort with each frame of a sequence,
giving the artist complete control of a simulated miniature DOF scenario.
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33. Aspen/Snowmass (2 Jan 2007)
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35. Park City (2 Aug 2006)
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36. Mammoth (24 Nov 2010)
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38. Switzerland (17 Oct 2006)
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40. Sölden (23 Jun 2012)
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42. Ischgl (30 Oct 2008)
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44. St. Anton (5 Aug 2009)
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46. Laax (18 Jan 2010)
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48. Verbier (7 Jan 2011)
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50. Chamonix (19 Mar 2006)
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52. Zermatt (6 Mar 2009)
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54. Saas-Fee (31 Oct 2008)
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55. Hi Mum!
A video postcard from a solo skier in Whistler.
Some resorts are lucky, their customers do the social media work for them.
Essentials of Tourism Destination Management