Social Media Content Creation Tools

At the core of any social media strategy, it’s the chewy center of content creation that is the object of customer engagement and interaction. There are a lot of ways to create content online, as well as manage content creation, distribution, media files, profiles, comments and channels. It can get overwhelming. Here are our top 10 favorite tools for social media content creation for resort or destination marketers.

Ten Essential Tools for Social Media Content Creation for Resorts and Destinations

Cameras

We tell our clients to take photos (and lots of them) and post them everywhere. This may sound like a simple proposition around the conference table, but then you have to decide what camera to get, who to give it to, and then how to get the images from the camera to the computer to the web. Our three camera pics come from our friend John Shafer, Snowcialite and the man behind PhotographyReview.com.

Waterproof Point and Shoot

“I shoot a lot of skiing, so I usually carry a waterproof, pocket digital camera and my digital SLR when I’m in the snow. I love waterproof pocket cameras because you don’t have to worry about getting them covered with snow, and if you carry them in a pouch on the shoulder strap of your backpack they’re always accessible. This year they almost all have 720p video as well as still shooting, making them even more versatile. My favorite waterproof camera at the moment is the Sony Cybershot TX5. It’s tiny, has good image quality, great video and it appears to be nearly indestructible. For more general information and a list of current outdoor-friendly waterproof cameras, check out my Outdoor & Waterproof Camera Guide.”

Superzoom

“If you want more power and features than a waterproof camera has to offer, I think superzooms are the way to go. Most of the big camera companies now make pocket superzooms with 10x zoom lenses and HD video. You’ll have to be careful about keeping a non-waterproof camera dry in the snow, but a 10x zoom lens offers a lot more shooting flexibility and reach on the ski slopes. Right now the pocket superzooms I like are the Panasonic Lumix ZS7, the Sony Cybershot HX5V and the brand new Canon PowerShot SD4500 IS.”

Digital SLR

“For best quality you’ll have to carry a digital SLR and a big lens. If you’re really serious about your photos it’s just what you need to do. But for most purposes – especially if everything you shoot is just getting posted on the Web, a compact, pocket-sized camera will more than do the job.”

Eye Fi

So now lets say you’ve got a camera full of images in the hands of a liftie on the back side of the mountain on a Saturday evening. How do you get those images up on the web as quickly and painlessly as possible?

The Eye-Fi replaces the SD card in your camera and saves all your images like a normal SD card. We recommend the Eye Fi Pro X2 SD Card. The big difference is when you get back to an on-mountain WIFI hotspot the Eye-Fi card will log in and upload all the new photos to a predetermined list of web photo sharing sites like Facebook, Flickr, Picasa and more. You can then log in, add titles, captions and tags and post them to your website or blog and you’ve taken a huge step out of the process.

HootSuite

Managing Twitter for a brand can get overwhelming. Hootsuite is a web and smartphone app that simplifies managing your incoming and outgoing Twitter content quite a bit. Here are the key features that make or break a twitter app for business use.

* Scheduling: Key up tweets to launch throughout the day at strategic times.
* Monitoring: monitor keywords, or profiles in real time
* Follower management: Through the app you can add, remove, search for and manage lists for your followers.
* Collaboration and assignments
* Multiple account management
* Stats and analytics

iPhone/Android

Your employees are your social media presence. Make the most of them and their ability to capture content on the mountain by distributing company owned smartphones to key personnel. A good social media strategy should include provisions for using this team of employees to create content, so go the distance and put the tools into their hands that make it as easy as possible to fulfill that part of their job. We recommend iPhones if you’re on AT&T or one of the great Android powered devices if you’re not.

Wordpress Application

Having the smartphone is just a start. The next step is to connect that devise to what should be your primary marketing venue, the blog. Most blogs out there are running the Wordpress software and the Wordpress App for Android, Blackberry and iPhone. This is a great content creation tool for creating blog posts from the chairlift (or mid mountain bar). You can also moderate and respond to comments on your blog from the app. Even if all you do is use that functionality, it can save you some time and let you be on top of the conversation.

Drop Box / Sugarsync

Sharing files with a marketing team is a nightmare when it comes to social media content. You end up trading emails with document revisions, images, videos, etc. Online file synchronization and sharing tools are becoming an indispensable part of social media content creation for teams because they let you manage files on your computer’s hard drive that are available offline, while effortlessly sharing them with your team.

Drop Box is a great tool for sharing a lot of separate folders with a lot of different people. If you’re managing a content team, this will save you a lot of grief.

Sugarsync is better suited for managing your own files across multiple machines. It can back up whole directories to a web archive as well as sync a “magic briefcase” across all your devices, including android and iPhone. The Sugarsync Android app will even let you sync all your cameraphone pics to your magic briefcase so they’re there when you’re ready use them in a blog post.

Photo Enhancement apps

As we noted recently, the quality of the photos you post to social media sites matters. We also noted that smartphones, while always the most convenient, don’t always produce the best images. Photo enhancement apps can be a solution to this problem. Many will apply an artistic effect to the images making them look like they were taken on an old camera, a Polaroid or a toy camera. Others let you adjust tone, exposure, contrast or sharpness. Or add effects like sepia, vignette, or even add titles. Here are some of our favorites.

• The Best Camera
• FX Camera
• Hipstomatic
• Picsay Pro
• Photoshop.com Mobile
• Pano

Upload by email

Sometimes you don’t have enough connectivity to use an app to connect with a content portal to upload media. Or maybe you have a smartphone or camera phone without the apps you need to connect to a particular site. There are ways to upload content by email, which you can create and set in the queue to upload when you’re back online.

* Upload by email to Wordpress
* Upload by email to flickr
* Upload by email to Facebook

Quality Matters in Social Media Content

Of course it makes sense if you think about it, but a lot of focus and buzz is on the opposite: those amazing photos taken with an iPhone or other crappy camera phone that shows some crazy image that gets a million hits and gets on the cover of news week. Then you hear social media gurus telling everyone that all you need is a simple video or photo tool and anyone can create great, meaningful and impactful content.

And, of course, that’s true. If a bear comes out of hibernation to ride a chairlift at your ski resort, run out with whatever image capture device you have because that’s too good to miss. But what about the other 99.9% of the time when what your capturing happens every day, or isn’t itself remarkable enough to make the news?

That’s when you start to see that the quality of online video and photography posted to twitter, facebook and flicker does matter. Want proof? We found some:

The online dating service OkCupid manages a lot of user data including images. To test the relationship of image quality with perception of the image, they presented 552,000 user images in pairs and asked members “who would you rather go on a date with?”

The full results can be seen here and show that a few simple photography techniques make for better photos. Sometimes those are just random luck, sometimes the product of skill and purpose. Here are some takeaways that are also good rules of thumb for social media content creation.

Interchangeable lens cameras make better photos

This is obvious, but don’t think that you can just go out and buy a Panasonic Micro 4\3s Camera and call it good. SLR cameras require more thought, and more thought often results in a better photo. For travel and destination marketers, it could pay off to acquire and learn to use a decent digital SLR Camera.

Magic Hour trumps Flash

There’s no better way to present a travel or resort experience than to show photos and video of smiling happy people having fun. And there’s no better way to make photos of smiling happy people look bad than to take photos with an on-camera flash or during the middle of the day with harsh light and stark shadows. If you must use a flash, get an off camera sync and hold the flash out with one hand from the camera. Better yet, get photos just before and after sunrise or sunset, the magic hours, or under clouds. This is when light is diffuse and comes at the subject from all angles eliminating harsh shadows and making everyone look their best.

Short Focus

Short Depth of field is more important for portraiture than anything else. Generally with sweeping landscape shots you want the longest depth of field you can get. This represents another case for getting and knowing how to use a good camera. Being able to prioritize small f-stops (short depth of field) or large ones (long depth of field) can help take the kind of photos that can really make a difference when presenting your destination online.

Why Quality matters

When it comes to capturing the meaningful moments in life with friends, it’s the shared experiences that make them valuable to us on Facebook or Twitter despite the flaws inherent in camera phones and point and shoot photography. Memory fills in the gaps left by lack of skill and technological shortcomings of simple cameras.

When you’re using imagery to sell a destination, or resort experience, you don’t have that connection with the audience. Brands need to present the whole picture without relying on shared memories, feelings, and personal connections. Spending the time to take better photos to use on social media marketing profiles makes a huge difference in communicating.

-Mike

Snowcial Conference Announcements

In conjunction with Heavenly Mountain Resort and Harrah’s Lake Tahoe, we are stoked to announce a few new developments on the Snowcial snow sports and social media conference coming up in January.

Snowcial Conference Entertainment

Last year we had the great MC Hammer as Snowcial conference Keynote and entertainment main event for the  conference. This year we put together a wish list of bands that kill it on the social web and Harrah’s Entertainment was able to secure our top pick: OK Go! So for the Saturday night entertainment, we’ll have a special VIP section at the South Shore Room @ Harrah’s for OK Go! Read more

Snowcial Conference Speakers

We already have a great lineup of conference speakers for Snowcia 2011 including leaders in entertainment, travel and interactive marketing. There is one slot left to fill however, and we’re opening that up to the community. We’ve gotten some pretty impressive submissions so far, and we hope you’ll submit your Snowcial conference presentation proposal here.

EpicMix

Vail Resorts recently released their custom location based snow sports social network that lets users interact around skiing and riding using real time tracking of their adventures across the mountain. We’ll get to chat with Rob Katz and the rest of the Vail Resorts interactive team throughout the Snowcial conference as we us it for an extended interactive digital and real world game. Read more

Snowcial Conference Giveaway

Be a part of a meeting of the best minds in snow sports marketing and get it for free. We’re giving away one all access pass to Tahoe Snowcial 2011. The worlds of digital storytelling, snowsports and technology will converge again on Heavenly Mountain Resort January 6 – 9, 2011 for Tahoe Snowcial. A winter festival of technology and snowsports, Snowcial unites and celebrates our global community of enthusiasts who live their passion in the snow and tell their stories online.

If you are a part of that community, you belong at snowcial. Enter the Snowcial Conference Giveaway here

Snowcial Conference Tickets

Be sure to purchase your ticket ASAP. You have until the end of the month to register at the early bird rate (about 13% off) after which rates go to full price. The All Access options include lodging, skiing, meals, VIP events and the conference on Friday. This gives you the chance to network with other Snocial VIPs and share insights and stories on the mountain. GET YOUR TICKET NOW

-Mike

Vail Resorts, EpicMix and the social networkification of skiing

This week, Vail Resorts announced their new location based social networking app that turns any person with an Epic Pass into a trackable entity thanks to RFID chips and scanners placed around the mountain thus creating the first ever social network fully integrated into the infrastructure of skiing.

For the last few years, ski resort marketers have been experimenting with ways to engage customers both in the real and digital environments with varying success. We’ve been using Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Gowalla to get users to engage with the location and engage with others about the location. But there was always something missing… something that EpicMix nailed.

EpicMix is a service that is a value add to the season pass you buy for any Vail Resort.
GarminConnect, nike+, Google Tracks, and other free or paid apps, let you use your phone or GPS to log your activities and view, analyze and store the data. They also let you share it socially and interact with it. But these services require you to purchase a specific gadget and remember to activate it every time you want to use it.

EpicMix, on the other hand, doesn’t require an additional piece of equipment, and is activated automatically when you come across checkpoints at chairlifts and points of interest on the mountain. You can’t forget to turn it on. You can’t forget to turn it off.

You can still forget your pass at home though.

The one thing I worry about is that the lack of a need to take action to use EpicMix could lead to a lack of engagement with it on the users part. The mobile apps will help keep people engaged, acting as a social networking filter that shows your friends Facebook and Twitter activity while they are on the mountain. We are still not 100% sure how that’s going to work.

The app also incorporates the real life game layer that apps like Foursquare and Gowalla slap on the world. Is that awesome? Some say yes, some say no. Will it become the Farmville of winter? I say yes. In that EpicMix will be configurable so that you can share updates or not, and if you do, and i don’t want to see them, I’ll be able to hide them on my side. At least on Facebook.

Which brings me to what i think is the smartest thing about EpicMix. It has something for everyone. Personally, i don’t care for the game component. But plenty of people, and kids, do. What I care about is the ability to track runs, elevation, days skied, etc. According to Mike Slone, Interactive Director @ Vail Resorts, Vail will start out tracking your lift rides, and expand to tracking other areas like runs, terrain parks, lodges, etc.

These two functionalities engage different customer profiles in different ways while letting each communicate what they are doing to their social networks. It remains to be seen how granular the controls will be, but I assume they’ve thought of content volume concerns.

Can’t wait for opening day @ Keystone Resort in Colorado on November 5th! If you want to spend some time with Rob Katz, Robert Urwlier and Mike Slone from Vail Resorts as well as Josh Williams from Gowalla, who advised the project, check out Tahoe Snowcial in January 2010.

-Mike

Where Human Process and Technology Intersect

It is always fascinating to observe how people flow through the process of booking travel, and more specifically how they interact with and use technology to aid them.

An amazing mass of people documenting their booking process can be found on Facebook… one friend posts a comment “wow… I would love to go here” with a link to a photo album from a travel blog. Later that week more comments come out with videos, photos and links to hotel and airline deals found during their hunt. Pretty soon an announcement that they are waiting in the airport and a few weeks later images, videos and comments are posted and shared about the vacation.

When you break down all of the different user types; savers, spenders, thrill hunters, etc.  they all follow a similar path. They visualize a trip, organize their options, take a vacation and then contribute the experience to friends and family.

The Travel Buying Process:

From a digital marketing perspective this process contains three key questions that should be considered:

1. What stage is the potential consumer in?
2. What social needs drive behavior within the stage?
3. How can technology play a role in facilitating or enhancing the stage?

By asking these questions and understanding what stage your target is in we have a better chance at creating relevant technology and marketing that empowers the traveler and gives them a more natural and intuitive experience.

Example:

Going back to the Facebook observation you can see that photography played a role in the visualize stage. The user found a piece of content that caused them to post “wow… I would love to go here.” Developing galleries that inspire and promote a specific experience, i.e. relaxing, unique, thrilling, and allowing these to be shared across Facebook would be one small example of this process in action.

One to One Travel uses this approach to both develop and validate new technologies and marketing tactics ensuring that our points of engagement with customers are in alignment with the natural purchase process.

- Rob