STRATEGY
Collabs
If you collab with everyone, it loses its impact.
The point of collaborating on social is broadening your audience. There should be some audience overlap between the respective accounts because otherwise there’s no relevance, but finding that sweet spot is crucial.
Sunday River reserves collaborations for established outdoor brands and personalities like GoPro, IKON, or Donny Pelletier. We’ve also been lucky to capitalize on collabs with Kevin Cooney and Matt Lyons because of personal connections to the resort. Finally, we look at proper “influencers” like Feed Feed to speak to a larger, more affluent market.
Maine’s Finest Athlete
Honestly, there’s too many options here and picking only one feels like a crime. If you don’t know Donny, do yourself a favor and go check him out.
Donny’s alter ego (aka the real mastermind Troy Murphy) came up through the ranks of the Gould freestyle program and ultimately reached the Olympic stage. After his success in the limelight, he stumbled into the Donny Pelletier character while skiing out west. It gained traction like a fresh pair of snow tires.
Donny comes back a few times a year to Sunday River and is treated like royalty. The bit has gotten so big that Donny (not Troy) was asked to be part of Warren Miller’s 50th anniversary film. Donny works with some of the best of the best in the biz, and we’re lucky enough to work with him.
Matt Lyons
Sometimes it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.
The ski industry is a relationship game, and we fortunately had a direct tie to Matt Lyons. Matt was visiting on a family vacation but wasn’t able to ski that day, and as the fates would have it, it overlapped with a visit from Donny so we jumped on it.
The two juggernauts met for the first time at 10AM and by 10:30AM we were lapping the gondola making a video. Matt has a huge platform, so being able to leverage this was a big win for us.
GoPro Snow
Finding new bits to do with Donny can be really tricky without them seeing super orchestrated. Part of his charm is making everything feel impulsive and unplanned. That’s where my GoPro pitch took form.
GoPro came on as a corporate sponsor for the 2024/25 season and I knew we had a chance to make a splash with them. Attaching 6 GoPros to various locations on Donny became a huge winner for us and the content was so versatile that we got 3 separate posts out of it, all with strong engagement.
Kevin Cooney
Candidly, I had never heard of Kevin Cooney when we began talking about him. Then I heard he was the guy whose wife had a wicked thick Boston accent and then I knew exactly who he was.
Kevin was one of those “shoot your shot” type of connections. We hit him with a DM from Sunday River and it started up a conversation. We came to learn that his family used to take vacations at Sunday River so we leaned into that and got the whole Cooney fam up to Maine.
We treated this as a relationship we didn’t want to push. We let them form the content they wanted to on their terms. It wasn’t about a huge, viral moment. This one was about fostering a relationship with two really influential creations in one of our largest geographic customer hubs.
