Going mobile with Icelantic skis

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It’s been a couple months since I posted about one of my new favorite companies (even though their skiers), Icelantic. The person responsible for their social strategy is currently in the class I’m teaching and he’s done an amazing job organizing their social effort. I wanted to take some time and explore additional things Icelantic could do to help deepen their brand. Most of this comes from our class on social mobile and extending the product into the experience they provide.

  • Icelantic branded runs – Now, as a separate business you can’t brand Go Devil at Keystone. But as a user, who co-owns that brand, you can do anything you want. Using Foursqare (specifically the API), a user could submit a run that the Icelantic community should know about. That run would then be reviewed by the Icelantic  team (internal and First Tracks members) to insure it was up to snuff and if approved it would be displayed on an Icelantic map on their site or iPhone app. This would definitely help skiers when they travel to a different mountain. If they were apart of that community, they would know which runs they should try first. It’s always tough to know where to go when you first start on a new mountain. Icelantic could then organize tweetups on those runs and get people together with a mutual love for the company/skis.
  • Icelantic TV on the lift. If you checked into a lift on Foursqaure, you would be provided an invitation to view Icelantic fans performing their favorite tricks on runs that are connected with the lift, shown with hotspot on map. “He did a <insert name of trick> there and I got one better than that and I’m going to do it RIGHT THERE”. All you need is someone to video you and submit it when they’re done. You can do this with your iPhone and geo-tag it as it’s uploaded. (Not sure if you’ve been up lately but there are tons of people sliding around with video cameras/iPhones. IcelanticTV would be a small on-demand user generated mobile TV experience.
  • QR codes and “Project Mayhem Lite” – For those of you that have seen Fight Club you’ll have some sense of this. Two big differences, 1) You don’t have to blow up corporate art and 2) Bob doesn’t have to get shot. What should happen is QR codes should be placed around any ski town USA/international and when users scan these bad boys, their smartphone takes them to a mobile optimized microsite that demo’s next seasons models. A small branded experience. If it’s still early in the season the microsite would tell them the nearest place, based on their location, they could check the current models out.

These are things that could be done now. Foursquare released their API this past November and Icenltanic needs to extend their product into the experience they afford their fans. This cross pollination between the real and virtual worlds will help continue to build their business and their fan base.

Almost makes me want to ski.

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