Twitter in action

With the new year comes new resolutions, new plans and new ideas – hold up, scrap that – here’s what this is without all the rambling…

A new mini-series of posts from Tactical Thinking about how Social Media is being used in the Snow Sports and general Adventure Tourism Industries.

It’s always nice to associate things with the beginnings of another calendar year, but I think I’m a few weeks late on that note.

So here it is; post number one in our new series and in it we’ll be discussing last years big social media development Twitter. Now if you don’t know what Twitter is, don’t fret…

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

… in other terms it’s a free micro-blogging platform that allows people and businesses to communicate short and simple messages quickly to their audience.

Rather than explain all the benefits and intricacies of Twitter itself, we thought it best to just show you how others are using it in the many different ways it can be applied.

It’s about keeping your audience up-to-date

Every company that offers some form of outdoor sport as a product is dependent on one major thing: the environment. And we all know how rapidly this untamed beast can change it’s mind.

Here’s how Mammoth Mountain, in California, keep it’s patrons tuned-in to what’s happening on the mountain. Notice the quick references to temperatures – they’re dangling the carrot nicely and making the updates (or Tweets as they’re known in Twitter circles) very easy to scan through.

Heavenly Ski Resort uses Twitter for similar purposes, except they use their Tweets primarily to bring in additional traffic to their web site and blog. They also push their photographic content well, directing people to images that really speak a thousand words.

Twitter is setup so blog content or RSS news feeds can be automatically pulled into your Twitter stream. Snowboardmag uses this technique well, as does Powd3r – a very informative snowboard news site.

Integrating Twitter into your own web site is also possible to automate. Here’s how The Adventure Travel Company uses their Twitter account as additional content on their blog – check the sidebar.

And here’s how the New Zealand Snowsports Instructors Alliance have just begun to use Twitter as a simple mechanism to post notices for their membership on the home pages of two of both their Ski and Snowboard divisions – a Tactic Group design implementation we’re fairly proud of.

There really are quite a few Snow Sports and Adventure Tourism businesses utlising this new social media channel. You’ve even got the likes of the Daily Mail’s Ski/Snowboard web site Metrosnow.co.uk using Twitter.

Look out for our second post in this social media mini-series, coming soon.

Tags: Twitter

This entry was posted by Posted by Keith on Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 at 12:36 am, and is filed under Social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.