Where to begin: Life as my muse

When we found out who our next Guest Chef in Residence was going to be (“Canada’s Gordon Ramsay”: Chef David Adjey from Restaurant Makeover),  we knew we wanted to do something different in terms of social media, in addition to the traditional media we were inviting. Unlike with the launch with Chef Rob Feenie, this time the chef’s name wasn’t kept a secret and we weren’t planning a big traditional media blitz as we’d done for the launch.
At first, the thought of streaming a classroom session to the web (like a reality TV show) was tossed around, but reality was that no one on our team really had the time to coordinate it. And for all that work, we had no idea how many people would be inclined to tune in during a regular work day.

The idea to do an evening “Date with Chef David Adjey” came as a result of a couple important factors:

1. Many of the local food bloggers meet occasionally because local food blogger Sharon Yeo (Only here for the food) started organizing “foodie meetups.” (I’ve personally attended a few.)
2. Many of the local bloggers have day jobs, so an evening event had a better chance.

Once we decided that what we were going to do, we thought we’d also incorporate a few other elements to make this event a little more social.

1. Use OpenTable.com to make the reservation with the bloggers.
2. Invite others to participate by asking questions via Twitter (with the possibility of winning a prize if a question was asked).
3. Film the entire date (using our professional video service) to post a video (uncut, but not unedited) on our YouTube channel, which allows us up to an hour on our “EDU channel.”

At the last minute, I also decided to grab my handheld video camera to create a teaser video for the date when I went down to meet David Adjey for the first time.

Here are the results of the “Date with David”:

1. OpenTable: While I love this service, I had hoped that the reminder emails for the reservation would go to all my attendees. The service only sent the reminder to me though. There really should be a “checkbox” option for it to allow reminders to your attendees as well. I had also hoped that the “how was your visit” email after the event would do that same, because who else is going to write such a detailed review of your food and service but a food blogger? Unfortunately it didn’t.
2. Twitter: This part actually worked fairly well with a dozen people sending questions (some sent many questions). We also had many people re-tweeting the date and making general comments about it and Chef Adjey’s visit to NAIT. (in addition to the NAIT Radio and Television and Culinary Arts students tweeting and Facebooking)
3. YouTube: This part was by far the most fun but also the most stressful. There were two reasons for that including the fact that the date went almost ½ an hour longer than expected (our YouTube channel has an hour limit) and our subject for the date said things that could not be posted. (Just a little more TV personality than serious chef in the omitted comments and stories.) Here’s what we ended up with (37 minutes in length).

Here’s the blog roll of attendees:
Brooke, Bruce, Cathy, Chris, Isabelle, Mack, Maki, Marianne, Nikki, Sharon, Twyla and Valerie

The lesson learned in all of this is be careful what you promise. I’m pleased with the video that resulted but it wasn’t what we said it would be, because it couldn’t be.
Follow through is a quality I value in people, so although I find it disappointing that I couldn’t completely follow through on my own statement, I’m happy with the experiment overall . Plus now I have a whole bunch of blog posts out there with my name in them with some keywords that came out in some stories that I could have never imagined would ever be out there.

Here’s what David thought of the date:

I would do it again, of course learning from this. In addition to promoting the value of the chef’s expertise and our culinary program, the wildcard that I didn’t properly account for in this instance (in my being able to deliver the final product) was the TV personality.
Special thanks to everyone involved including Chef David Adjey, the bloggers and of course all of the NAIT staff who supported the idea and took part.