An upmarket ski adventure company is being urged to confront the downturn head-on with aggressive marketing on social networking websites. But will all the effort spent blogging and tweeting actually win any business?

RUTH O'MALLEY was just five years old when her parents brought the family on its first skiing holiday to the French Alps. In her teenage years she saved money from a part-time job to pay for trips with her older brothers to wherever affordable snow could be found.

Although tempted by a third-level course in outdoor pursuits, her parents' argument that a business studies with languages degree would keep more career doors open held sway. But even before the ink on her last exam paper was dry, Ruth had a backpack over her shoulder.

On her return to Ireland she was enthusiastic about the idea of starting her own business based on her by now considerable knowledge of skiing. She had strong views about where many large ski companies fell short but also recognised that she had no direct experience of dealing with accommodation or travel providers.

Her father put her in touch with Simone Jennings, the daughter of a work colleague. Simone had gone straight into the travel business from school and was now an experienced manager in an Irish package holiday company. The two young women took to each other straight away and were soon planning the launch of Black Slope to capitalise on two niche opportunities.

The first was boutique holidays for "cash-rich, time-poor" executives and wealthy individuals. The second was providing good value off-piste skiing and boarding for younger enthusiasts.

Established with family financial support, the partners quickly found they were tapping into a rich seam of opportunity. By their third season they had a staff of seven. The financial return on the economy trips was significantly less than that generated by the upmarket end of the business. However, Ruth in particular has remained committed to this sector. As she constantly reminds Simone, these enthusiasts are the potential high-net-worth customers of the future.

In common with most other businesses heavily dependent on discretionary spending, things have started to go downhill for the company over the past nine months. With considerable reluctance the owners let two staff go and recognise that they have to find ways of winning additional business.

Four years ago, when discussing future marketing plans with staff, it was suggested that the business was not making proper use of the internet. As a result Ruth committed to developing a monthly e-zine (a small magazine or newsletter distributed electronically) that would appear on the web and include articles about skiing, the ski destinations Black Slope favoured and anything else Ruth thought might be relevant.

She sweated blood over the first two issues and apart from a few congratulatory e-mails there seemed to be no tangible return. The e-zine dropped back to coming out every second month and has since become even more sporadic.

One member of staff has long been an enthusiastic member of Facebook and has constantly chivvied her employers to use social networking as a business tool. Initially she urged them to look at LinkedIn - a business-oriented social networking site launched in 2003 which is mainly used for professional networking.

A rapidly growing site, it allows members to create business contacts, search for jobs, and find potential clients. More recently it has also become accessible via mobile phone. With more than 40 million users in 170 industries, LinkedIn also has a useful free service, similar to, but more business-focused than Google Answers and Yahoo Answers!, which allows users to ask questions for the community to answer.

Neither Simone nor Ruth were really familiar with social networking and they found it hard to see how joining a network like this would benefit them. While they thought it might possibly be of value in the future when social networking had become a more widely accepted business practice, for the moment they saw it potentially eating up time without delivering results.

At a recent business strategy meeting Black Slope's Facebook fan was more vociferous than ever about the importance of social networking, this time extolling the virtues of Twitter. Her proposal is that Ruth, as the skiing expert, should have a blog in which she shares her passion and enthusiasm. In it she could share her opinions about trends in the sport, poke fun at some aspects, but help to generate a sense that the people at Black Slope are "in the know" which in turn would give the business more personality.

The staff member also made the argument that Twitter is the next wave Black Slope needs to catch.

Twitter is a form of microblogging and the entire message (known as a tweet), can be no more than 140 characters. At its most basic, it allows people to follow each other and complements other social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Pulse.

Its potential is already being realised by early commercial adopters. Posters often put up several tweets each day and influential people in a variety of spheres, including Barack Obama, use it as a way of communicating regularly with their followers.

Dell Computers claims to have already generated sales of over $1 million through its Twitter account and large corporates such as South West Airlines and Ford use it to listen to their customers.

Tweets can be accessed through mobile phone as well as PC and a wide range of applications are available to allow users to search for key words, measure influence and tweak it to suit individual needs.

Only founded in 2006, it is currently growing at a rate of aproximately 10 million new users worldwide each month and is expected to reach 100 million or more by the end of 2009. That makes it a true internet phenomenon in an industry usually unimpressed by anything less than astonishing growth.

Simone recognises that one half of Black Slope's clients are exactly the type of IT-literate young people who embrace and value social networking. She is uncertain, however, about how relevant it is to the other (older) half who generate more income. She is also unsure about where to start with this new approach to marketing and fears making a mess of it, which she thinks might be worse than doing nothing.

Ruth is even less enthusiastic. She suspects their young staff member is right and that they should be far more active in terms of blogging, for example.

She also knows they could be using Twitter as a two-way communication with clients and potential clients. But from talking to friends she is concerned that Twitter may be creating a lot of sound without a lot of content behind it.

She is worried that it might be passing fad and she has heard that the dramatic growth keeps putting strains on the network and that there can be delays in messages being posted to followers. Her biggest concern by far, however, is who is going to take on the responsibility of making it all happen, keeping it all up to date and hitting the right tone with messages.

Ruth is terrified that it will all end up in her lap and she is also worried about the damage it could do to the company's reputation if they don't get it right. Ruth thinks the problem might be solved by hiring someone to be their digital media expert - but is this the right time for Black Slope to be breaking new ground and taking on more staff?