Genghis Grill TV, the social-media hub launched by the 59-unit Mongolian-barbecue chain last October, is more than a place to see Genghis Grill’s videos online. It’s an effort to pull together an expanding array of social media fans, followers and friends in one place.
A growing number of chains are using a social-media hub strategy, as seen in Pizza Hut’s Under the Roof website or the all-in-one corporate blogs from Krystal and Dairy Queen. The goal is to get brand fans from various social networks communicating with each other, which in turn will help to build brand awareness, loyalty and sales, according to marketing officials.
Digital channels such as the Khan’s Club e-mail program, social networks and promotional microsites — all captured within the Genghis Grill TV social hub — are the chain’s primary advertising media, said Ron Parikh, chief marketing officer of the Dallas-based casual-dining chain. The guiding principle is to use those tools to communicate rather than just push coupons.
“We’ve never done an offer to get people to sign up and then forget about us,” Parikh said. “Word-of-mouth is best as far as marketing goes.”
Casting a wide net
Genghis Grill has cultivated a following on Facebook and Twitter, with nearly 20,000 followers on each network, as well as on YouTube and Foursquare. It uses all those platforms and its corporate website to develop its ongoing promotions, such as the month-plus-old Health Kwest program touting the chain’s healthful options and the Genghis Live concert series. But the Genghis Grill TV site compiles all that content and the resulting comments. A big benefit is that visitors to the hub can read comments and leave their own whether they follow the brand on Facebook, Twitter or no network at all.
“We didn’t want to go to one place to do this — either Facebook or Twitter,” Parikh said. “We wanted them to come to us where it’s open and they can comment and it’s not restricted only to users of Twitter or Facebook. We’re still leveraging those to promote our initiatives, but we want to make sure it all comes through Genghis Grill TV.”
Similarly, visitors to the Krystalist blog, where 364-unit quick-service concept Krystal compiles its social-media feeds and promotes its contests and new products, can comment on blog posts without needing a Facebook or Twitter profile. The blog for Chattanooga, Tenn.-based Krystal also has a newsroom tab for corporate press releases.
Dallas-based Pizza Hut runs a corporate news ticker below constantly refreshing plug-ins for its social-media pages at its Under the Roof hub. A division of Yum! Brands Inc., Pizza Hut has nearly 10,000 restaurants worldwide.
It’s important to keep the content running across the social hub fresh and relevant to customers, Genghis Grill’s Parikh said. For example, Genghis Live, a promoted series of concerts from independent musicians in Texas and Atlanta, fits with the chain’s core customers: young professionals who self-identify as music fans.
“For a lot of concepts, it’s all about what discount they’re offering that day,” Parikh said. “But don’t forget the human factor. If you don’t have people, you’re not going to fill your seats. Take care of those people first.”
Fans in tune with the Genghis Grill TV content interact more with the brand than visitors to the corporate website, he said.
“People who don’t know about us will go to our brand website and stay on for about 15 seconds, maybe a maximum of 30 seconds,” Parikh said.
Making connections
Restaurants are starting to value their customers’ interactions with each other as much as their interactions with the brands, which is why a social hub’s ability to unite disparate audiences will be crucial going forward, said Jamie Guse, interactive marketing manager for Dairy Queen, an Edina, Minn.-based chain with 5,845 units worldwide.
“I’m looking for a way where someone can go to a one-stop shop and explore what we’re doing from all of [the networks],” Guse said.
Dairy Queen is testing the social.dairyqueen.com site that eventually will be an enhanced Twitter page incorporating photos and videos accessible to anybody. Currently, links on Dairy Queen’s Twitter page redirect visitors to its corporate blog, which incorporates the brand’s social-media presence and its Blizzard Fan Club.
The integration hopefully will prompt different Dairy Queen fans to interact with one another, Guse added, since many customers follow the brand on one network but not the others. Also, some of Dairy Queen’s profiles get more traffic for certain promotions or products.
“We’ve found that our Twitter followers respond to different things in different ways than our fans on Facebook,” he said. “We get huge buzz on Miracle Treat Day [Dairy Queen’s national fundraiser for Children’s Miracle Network] via Twitter. But usually it’s not a flurry with other content. No matter what we post on Facebook, it gets constant conversation going. With an integrated point, you could see everything we’re doing.”
Guse said the biggest challenge is investigating the right place for Dairy Queen’s digital-marketing time and resources, and the integration efforts are meant to get a more complementary punch out of social-media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube while the brand invests in its biggest proprietary asset, the Blizzard Fan Club. At press time, the club had more than 2.9 million members, compared with Dairy Queen’s 2.6 million Facebook fans and only 13,000 Twitter followers.
“For us, the question is how do we get our Facebook and Twitter people into our Blizzard Fan Club to take advantage of those loyalty points,” Guse said. “That’s how they get the communication from us before the general public. Then it’s about getting the fan club members into Facebook, so we do a lot of integrations between the two.”
Contact Mark Brandau at [email protected] .