It’s that time of the week – time to look at another great travel marketing campaign making the rounds on social networks.  This week’s highlight?  Snow at First Sight by Visit Colorado.

What I Love About This Campaign

Catchy, Unexpected Idea.  Ok, the whole “make a video to win” idea is getting a little too much traction at the moment.  But Visit Colorado took the solid concept and made it there own with this contest, which is open to people who have never seen snow before.  How cool is that?  It is appealing to lots of people because we all want to know “who are these people?  what is there story?  where are they from?”   Great, great idea.  Love it.

Stupidly Easy to Use Website.  Simple,straightforward, easy-on-the-eyes websites don’t get better than this.  I normally wouldn’t like a site that only has pop-ups and essentially just a couple of main pages, but in this case it works pretty well.  Minor tweak would be to make the bottom menu identical to the TOP one, but that’s more a personal preference.

Not Limited to US Participants.  If you read the Ts & Cs, this is a global competition.  This makes it easier to spread across social networks – particularly important since the idea is that you need to have not seen snow, so probably the most likely candidates are quite far away.

Integrated into Already Existing Social Networks. A lot of people seem to think it is good practice to setup a new Twitter account / Facebook Fan page / etc. for a particular campaign they feel will get a lot of traction.  BAD idea.  You’re giving yourself a lot of work and once the campaign is over, those folks will be stranded.  Get everything linked back into your core network profiles, which means that interested people will be there for your next great campaign.

What They Could Do Better

Ditch the Auto-Start Video.  While I do love the video, it doesn’t need to auto-start.  Leave that spammy setup to the sleazy Internet Marketers.  Incidentally they have the same auto-start madness on their colorado.com website.  Not cool.

Where’s Flickr?  And Youtube? My first thought was, oh I should check out their other Visit Colorado-produced videos to see what might resonate as a good entry for the contest (not that I’m entering, mind you!).  They have a channel, but no link on this page.  Same for Flickr – get those up there in the upper right hand corner so people have the choice to connect with you on their favourite social network.

All-You-Can-Eat Voting.    I have seen this turn to ruin so many times, so I am surprised they went with it.  Yes, this is only the first round of voting; to win, you have to go to Colorado as a finalist and go through an evaluation panel.  But I would think a one-vote policy would have been better.  This adds the complexity of requiring users to login or have some other form of authentication, but it’s better than dealing with a PR mess because somebody cheated or rigged the voting.

What I Hope They Do Going Forward

I really hope they take advantage of using the winner to write some great content, and I want to see a video when this person does their first snow angel!  Other tourism boards who have run similar promotions (and who shall remain nameless to protect the guilty) have really missed an opportunity.    You’ve invested the time in all this branding and promotion – use it for all it is worth.

To Learn More…

Want to add a contest like this your online marketing mix?  For do-it-yourself support, check out the How to Nail Travel Marketing in Unfamiliar Territory guide which will help understand the various social networks.  If a bit of hand-holding and one-on-one support is more your style, our coaching and consulting packages could be just the thing you you were looking for.

We’ll be launching a new guide next month aimed precisely at brainstorming great promotional ideas, so be sure you are on our mailing list to be notified when that comes out.