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Snowago: A Stomp or a Yard Sale?

snowago skiing online community social media slope ski

So I get this email this morning:

“I noticed that you are an avid slope-goer and that you love to blog about your slope experiences. I just wanted to introduce you to a new social network that just launched called Snowago. Snowago is a community for boarders, skiers, and telemarkers that love hitting their favorite resorts year round and sharing their experiences with fellow enthusiasts.”

Slope-goer? If you’re going to huck your New Media meat onto the Social Networking Bandwagon with a pastel-colored, skiing-flavored Facebook wannabe, you better come up with something better than that. Dude.

The email goes on to tell me what amazing things I can do on Snowago, like check snow conditions. Sick! I can also “chat it up with fellow skiers, boarders, and telemarkers,” and participate in “sweet activities that let you show off your skills both on and off the slopes.”

Notwithstanding the Napolean Dynamite-esque ring of that sentence, I wonder if this means Snowago will be a forum for amateur snowbunny porn, because then they might have something. But I’m pretty sure that’s just wishful thinking, because what Snowago seems most excited about is their Snowlogger™.

“Snowago gives you your own Snow Log to track the days you’ve been on the mountain, which runs you conquered, the difficulty level, how much terrain you covered, and how awesome you are in general!”

Sounds like it should be called “SnowEgo.”

The ultimate “Snow Log” already exists, it’s consistently entertaining, and it comes to us daily from RandoSteve, even though I worry that there aren’t any Tetons left for TetonAT to tell us about. (Seriously, Steve, you schralped the range last year. Where in the hell are you going to ski this winter?) The point is, anything else is a mockery in comparison. Especially now that RandoKitty is on Dynafits.

I’ll think I’ll just keep my own Snow Log (”3 Glory Laps today! Almost passed out under the Repeater.”) to myself.

The best part is the email’s closing line:

“Happy sloping!”

WTF.

“Markoagogo,” if you and your investors are going throw a few hundred thousand at something like this, you should probably hire somebody who’s going to look at your “Happy Sloping!” line and smack himself in the forehead in disbelief. (Go to “Contact The Snaz” to learn more about my consultancy fees.)

Certainly it is my first instinct, and inalienable right, to make fun of anything online I didn’t think of myself, especially a “snowriding community” that comes to us from a New York marketing company that describes itself as “a leading provider of word of mouth (WOM) and social media marketing and technology solutions that allow companies to democratize their brands by engaging and empowering blah blah blah . . .”

But I have to ask, do we really need any more online “snowriding communities?” We’ve already got the TGR forums, and better yet, right downstairs from TGR, the one that serves pizza and beer, where I can ski right to the door as long as I don’t fall into the giant hole a few feet away.

Then again, I could be totally wrong. Snowago might totally take off, and in no time millions of avid slope-goers will be chatting it up, participating in sweet activities, and feverishly filling their Snow Logs with the runs they’ve conquered. Could happen. But Snowago, it seems like you’ve got a long, slippery slope ahead of you before you get there.

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