For a summer guest, a selfie on a canopy tour or an action pic on a high-speed coaster becomes a sharable moment. In the life of the dedicated skier and rider, few things resonate more than a great on-mountain posed or action photo displayed on their wall.

Who knew the thing that would change most about that still-resonating comment would be the word “wall?” And who knew that those photos, once a simple souvenir to make retail customers happy, would become a crucial part of resort marketing, bringing way more value to the host mountain than it might ever to the happy poser?

But here we are. Resorts are learning, via trial and error, tracking and testing, using a combination of classic and new school, just how much on-mountain photography can benefit them. From Vail Resort’s wildly successful EpicMix to the simple act of resort marketing folks “liking” and “sharing” via Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, there’s a whole new world of marketing, and literally endless ways to benefit from photos taken on the hill.

In fact, rating the “success” of an on-hill photography program has completely changed. Where once the measuring stick was how many photos you could sell on the hill, now success is how many people those photos can reach and, ultimately, how many people those photos can bring in the door.


CHANGING WITH THE TIMES

Says Ryan O’Grady, president of Fotaflo, a company that provides photography services to mountains as well as other tourist destinations: it’s about content, availability and yes, timing.

“Fifty years ago, the lifespan of an image was incredible,” he says. “It would be framed and put on a wall and live there forever.” Now, he said, all that has changed. “The lifespan of an image is short. It’s hours, even minutes. What we do is get the image into peoples’ possession as quickly as possible to share. If you don’t get it to them immediately, you’ve often lost the share.”

While the beautiful backdrop posed photo will most likely always exist (after all, we still do have structural walls to decorate), the growth of those virtual walls is where it’s at.

Automated systems facilitate the processs. SnapSportz, founded by pro photographer Ben Kottke four years ago, uses RFID sensors worn by guests to trigger automated cameras to shoot rapid-sequence images in terrain parks, ziplines, tubing runs—any location where guests take a defined route. Images can be uploaded for sale or social media sharing.

SnapSportz has no permanent setups in winter resorts, though it was founded for use on snow. It has found greater acceptance in zipline applications. Still, Brighton, Utah, had the system installed in its terrain park for a few months, with great results, demonstrating the potential for regular use. SnapSportz deployed the system at The Truth Terrain Park to drive riders to www.truthagainsttobacco.com to access their branded action images. “It’s not easy to get this demographic to go to an anti-tobacco website,” Kottke notes. Users could upload branded images to their Facebook and Twitter accounts from the site; 9,490 branded images were shared.

“These images are high-quality,” says Kottke. “They replicate what I would do as a pro photographer. Automation can allow you to take some great shots, even some that a person can’t get,” due to location or risk, for example.

However the photos are taken, their end use has radically changed. “For years, people wanted to take home a memory,” says Chuck Roy, COO of Sharpshooters, one of the most recognized and respected names in on-mountain photography. “And for years, we did that with a single photo. Now, we want to give people a complete story. We think that the story needs to be told with a multitude of photos … at the top of the mountain. With the kids. In action. With the scenery behind you. Close up. The entire story of your trip.”

For that, Sharpshooters has debuted Storipass, an on-line program that allows guests to combine their own photos (taken from handhelds, cameras, phones, whatever) with photos taken and edited by Sharpshooter pros, as well as stock video and still images of the destination resort, and create their own kind of “virtual scrapbook” of the adventure. Storipass can be shared via social media, and keeps track of all likes and comments you may get on all your images. And of course, the images can be saved in high-res for more traditional uses (like that old-school framed wall photo), or shared individually any way the person wants.

It all comes together pretty easily. A guest gets a Storipass card upon arrival. Then, pro photographers located at ideal spots throughout the resort simply scan the card, take a photo, and store it on the individual’s Storipass link. Guest photos can be loaded there as well.

And here’s the best part, Roy says: “All that can be forwarded and shared on social media to just about anyone.” And it is shared. Storipass debuted at the San Diego Zoo this past year. In the first months, the total number of impressions … all branded with the Zoo’s logo … on Facebook? More than 1.4 million.


EPIC EXPERIENCES

Such has been the, well, epic success of Vail’s EpicMix program. Debuted in 2010, EpicMix was perhaps the pioneer of linking on-mountain photography with social media. And it launched with a huge bang. Now, four years later, it’s hard to avoid EpicMix online if you have social media friends who ski, and Vail is looking at millions upon millions of shares per season.

According to Stacey Pool, Vail Resorts’ director, online experience, more than half a million people have activated as users of EpicMix as of last season, and during that time, the company saw 1.2 million total shares. Half of those, she says, come directly from photos. “I’ll be honest: in 2010 we did not imagine this kind of success,” she says. “It’s really exciting to see it continue to grow.” That success, she says, really has been much about brand.

“We are broadening our reach every day with this,” she says. “We never imagined how far that reach could be.”

As it grows and their marketing thrives from it, Pool said there are two things they have to focus on. First, that this is in addition to traditional marketing and will not replace it. And second, that they need to evolve as their retail customers do, or better yet, before they do. “We need to understand our customers better, as they get more technically savvy,” she says.

This has meant looking for ways to entice folks, and recognizing ways folks might engage that they did not expect. For instance, the introduction of the EpicMix Academy allows adults “true bragging rights.” If you want to, say, prove you have mastered bumps on Screech Owl without stopping, you can have it witnessed by a pro and then confirmed via EpicMix.

Another thing that surprised Vail: the sudden willingness of local skiers and riders to embrace on-snow photography and virtual sharing. In the past, locals avoided posing for photos and sharing them. Now they embrace it, since all they need to is shoot, upload and share.

“We see kind of a competition happening,” Pool says. “They want to do the wackiest and craziest poses, pyramids and the like.”


GETTING INTO THE ACT

All of that sounds amazing, but what’s a smaller resort to do? While programs like EpicMix and Storipass are making headlines, simpler options make a difference as well. From hiring on-mountain pros like Fotaflo (and Sharpshooters, who can budget for different resorts), to focusing more on social media, smaller resorts are finding success as well.

At Wisp Mountain, Md., the resort decided to use an outside vendor to give guests something they see in most vacation experiences as commonplace, but took them by positive surprise on the mountain: action shots on a coaster.

Their mountain coaster, that is. With a set camera to take shots similar to those people are used to seeing at places like Disney, the resort takes shots and makes them available for sale at the bottom.

“It was even more popular than we anticipated,” says Michael Valach, former guest services director at Wisp, and now VP mountain operations at Camelback, Pa. “The guests were used to it at amusement parks, but it really seemed to surprise them and please them at the mountain.” To carry that over to the winter, Wisp did the same for snow tubing—and found the same success.

Since digital downloads were available for immediate purchase (and 40 percent of buyers did choose them), the popular photos, with a Wisp logo, were shared on social media often as well.

As an added benefit, the resort contracted to be allowed access to the bank of photos so they could use them in marketing collateral, saving them time and money and giving them some great visuals to promote their resort.

At Attitash and Wildcat Mountains in New Hampshire, on-snow pro photographers are not in the budget right now. But someone else is, and while it only costs him a bit more time, he is finding amazing results.

Says resort spokesman Thomas Prindle, it’s as simple as staying active on social media. “Every single day we sit down and see what is out there and then like, share and forward,” he says. “You would not believe how happy it makes people when we ‘like’ their social media share. It leads them to sharing more and commenting more and being more active with us.”

Prindle had an experience of his own that drove home the point recently. “I was at Park City and I shared and hashtagged a photo. Before I knew it, Park City had liked it and shared it, too. Now here I am, the person usually on the other side of that, and I was all like, ‘Park City liked me! Park City liked me!’ The response I had—and my online friends had—was incredible.”

Prindle suggests resorts that are not taking advantage of this low-cost marketing tool right at their fingertips start doing so now. “There is a credibility the customer has over us talking about the conditions or the experience,” he says. “And you know, way more often than not, they share good photos. There’s no fun in sharing bad photos, so it all tends to be pretty great.”

At Wachusett Mountain in Massachusetts, spokesman Tom Meyers says they are investigating ways to provide pro-shot photos to guests, particularly those in their hearty and busy race program. Right now they are looking into a company that would film skiers as they went by, via an app the skier downloads on their handheld. But even that, he says, has its limits. “After all,” he notes, “Racers don’t want to carry their cell phones in their race suits.”

Even so, Meyers—who has his mountain staff shooting professional grade video and uploading it to a television commercial almost daily—wonders if in time, social media and handhelds will do the job for resorts, with a little on-line tweaking and pushing.

“The concept of the on-hill photographer has never gone over well here,” he says. “We’ve tried it several times but we are a day area, and it just does not work at a day area.” But what does work, he says, is the world of the promoted “selfie.”

“The fastest-growing social media area for us has been Instagram,” he says. “It’s been off the charts.” Wachusett has used contests and hashtags (such as the area’s #safehelmet campaign) to get folks to engage, and engage they have, using their own handheld-taken photos to take part and yes, promote the resort.

“The nature of social media is that you don’t have to put out many incentives,” says Meyers. “It’s just what people do.”

And that, says O’Grady, is exactly what resorts need to embrace. The idea of using social media and photos to market, he says, is what is known as “outward in” marketing. Folks share photos, tag them, show the branding while sharing, chat about them, discuss them and like them. And that, in a private environment, creates valuable marketing: word of mouth delivered from friend to friend in an intimate and trusting way.

In other words, be it via a huge program like EpicMix, a long-standing company like Sharpshooters, a custom photo program designed for your hill like Fotaflo, or a dude shooting a selfie with his iPhone 5, it’s all about the share. And share they do.

“It doesn’t get much better than that,” O’Grady says.