Chef Robert Irvine and His Team Understand the Power of Social Media.
The Food Network star, who hosts several shows, including “Restaurant Impossible,” earlier this year visited Pinehurst Country Lodge in Greeley, Pa., to give the restaurant a makeover and help its owners get out of $350,000 in debt. As part of each RI mission, Irvine comes up with a marketing strategy to encourage locals to check out the restaurant he’s working on. When a local TV station declined to do a story on the Pinehurst Irvine had one of his camera men shoot and edit a commercial and posted it to YouTube.
Irvine hosts three Food Network shows—“Restaurant Impossible,” “Dinner Impossible” and mostly recently “Restaurant Express”—and owns two restaurants. He also has a line of protein bars, is co-authoring a book on fitness in nutrition and does live events around the nation.
According to Matt Bodie, Irvine’s director of social marketing, the celeb chef started early on social media to help promote his restaurants but professionalized his social presence in December 2012 when his personal website was launched. Irvine’s marketing team started including contests, original content, Twitter trivia and live-tweeting. (The cable channel manages the websites and social presences for its shows.)
“We operate with a fairly small team with people wearing a lot of different hats, so rather than thinking in terms of utilizing a wide array of social outlets for one brand, we have to think about the best way to build a workflow to manage a couple of social outlets for a few brands—two restaurants, a product/merchandise line, Robert personally, and a line of protein bars,” Bodie told Ebyline. He added that social media is used predominantly to interact with fans and to keep the conversation going online.
Currently, “Team Irvine” puts most of its efforts into Facebook and Twitter, but it is planning to launch on Instagram and Pinterest and expand its YouTube content this year.
The most successful Irvine social media campaign to date, according to Bodie, was a cooking contest held on Facebook. Irvine listed three ingredients, fans created a dish using them and then posted photos and descriptions to the Facebook wall. Why was it successful?
Chef Robert Irvine’s Facebook
“There were a ton of submissions and a lot of great interaction with, and between, fans that extended over a couple of weeks,” Bodie said.
The least successful social media campaign was a Facebook trivia contest held during “Restaurant Express.” Because Facebook’s comment feed isn’t chronological it created a lot of confusion.
“We do a similar contest on Twitter for ‘Restaurant: Impossible,’ and it’s always very easy to execute through Twitter’s functionality. The Facebook contest was difficult because of Facebook’s ranking of comments out of chronological order causing massive confusion resulting in a lot of people claiming to win who actually didn’t. It was just a tremendous mess,” Bodie said.
According to Bodie, 90 percent of all marketing for the Irvine brand is done digitally, and he finds digital advertising to be significantly more effective and trackable than print.
When it comes to content marketing, the Irvine marketing team creates content around a variety of topics related to the Irvine brand, including recipes, fitness, restaurant knowledge and celebrity.
“I think content marketing will be even more important than ever in the coming year,” said Bodie. “Original, engaging, and creative ideas are always more attractive than the over-posted, regurgitated content that seems to pervade on most social sites. I feel that ‘content farm’ sites are going to begin losing rank and a return to more earnest journalism will begin to be sought out by readers.”
