Monday, July 25, 2011
Thursday, July 21, 2011
5 Innovative Food Truck Social Media Marketing Campaigns
Fueled by demand for inexpensive, quick and delicious meals, gourmet food trucks have swept cities across the world, offering up specialties, such as grilled cheese sandwiches, tacos, pickles, cupcakes and meatballs.
The past few years have seen an onslaught of social media-savvy food trucks, empowering on-the-go customers to follow their favorite truck’s whereabouts on Twitter or learn about nearby deals on Foursquare, among other advancements.
Food trucks are becoming increasingly smart with their social media marketing, running campaigns to support particular efforts, deals or events. Here are five examples of innovative social media campaigns created by food trucks of all types.
1. DoubleTree CAREavan: Celebrating a Milestone
DoubleTree by Hilton gives out approximately 60,000 chocolate chip cookies each day when guests check in, amounting to more than 21 million cookies annually. In celebration of the 25th anniversary of its signature chocolate chip cookie, DoubleTree by Hilton suited up a food truck for, in their own words, a “10-week, 10,000-mile, 50-city journey to deliver hundreds of thousands of smiles to weary workers, tired travelers and local charities across the country through the pleasant surprise of a sweet chocolate chip cookie treat.”
The campaign is driven by social media, including the following components:
Facebook: The DoubleTree Facebook page features an app with a real-time map of where the cookie CAREavan is, relevant tweets, a sweepstakes entry form for free stays at the hotel, YouTube videos and related promotions. The page has experienced an 89% increase in Facebook Likes since DoubleTree launched the campaign on May 26.
Foursquare: The CAREavan’s location is updated on Foursquare, where the truck is running a special to promote its free cookies, as well as its Topguest partnership.
Topguest: Topguest members receive 50 Hilton HHonors Bonus Points and 25 Virgin Elevate points with each Foursquare checkin.
Twitter: DoubleTree is running a contest on Twitter to give followers the chance to win a “sweet break,” in which the truck team chooses tweeters using the hashtag #SweetBreak and hand-delivers 250 chocolate chip cookies to each of the winners’ offices. Twitter followers can also stay informed about the CAREavan’s whereabouts and activities.
YouTube: DoubleTree is capturing “Cookie Confessionals” of fans talking about why they love chocolate chip cookies and posting them to its YouTube channel.
While DoubleTree isn’t a food-centric brand at its core, it is known for its warm chocolate chip cookies, and this campaign definitely plays on that nostalgia, bringing a bit of sweetness to each city it visits.
2. Mexicue: Crowdsourcing Recipes on Facebook
BBQ truck Mexicue is on a mission to crowdsource seasonal offerings on its menu. This summer it is running a Summer Market Special Contest, in which one lucky winner will be picked to have his or her seasonal recipe featured on the menu for one month.
Using a Facebook app, Mexicue announces an ingredient and accepts recipe submissions that include that ingredient. Then the Facebook community can vote for the recipe that will be featured aboard the Mexicue truck that month. Each month this summer, a new menu item is featured. The creators of the winning recipes win a $50 gift certificate to Mexicue and a Manhattan Messenger bag by Lexdray. The second and third place prizes are $25 and $10 Mexicue gift cards, respectively.
This contest is a fun way to engage a community and empower aspiring taco artisans to craft recipes for the chance to be featured on the menu.
3. Ninja Snowballs: Building Excitement During a Dead Time
There are only so many months in a summer when pedestrians want to stop for a snow cone. Baton Rouge snow cone truck Ninja Snowballs decided to combat slumping sales in September and October by running a flavor contest.
Bite and Booze blogger Jay Ducote partnered with Ninja Snowballs to run the contest, which asked foodies to invent a new flavor combination for the truck. Entries were accepted via Twitter and Facebook.
So, how did the campaign do? The truck was able to vend a few more weeks than it usually would have as a result of the buzz around the new flavors available for customers to try during the contest, says Ducote. Furthermore, the contest details page racked up 1,500 visits, and the top 16 submitted flavors drove a lot of buzz during the six rounds of judging, in which votes were counted by how many people ordered each snow cone.
The winning flavor, called “Lemon Fluff,” was submitted by marketing consultant Julie Perrault and featured a blend of fresh-squeezed lemonade and sweetened condensed milk.
4. Chi’Lantro BBQ: Offering a Deal
Chil’Lantro BBQ, a Korean and Mexican fusion BBQ food truck based in Austin, uses social media to keep its fans abreast of the truck’s latest news, locations, giveaways and specials of the day. Owner and founder Jae Kim actively uses Twitter, Facebook, Yelp and Foursquare to do just that.
Kim says his truck’s most successful social media marketing campaign took place during this year’s SXSW conference. Teaming up with mobile payment system Intuit GoPayment, the truck offered 25-cent tacos to customers who followed the truck on Twitter and paid with a credit card.
The campaign generated “tons of buzz” and was a “huge success and win-win for everybody,” says Kim.
5. Wafels & Dinges: Promoting a Relevant Holiday
In celebration of Belgian National Holiday (July 21), New York City-based Wafels & Dinges is introducing its Belgian Madness ice cream, which features its now-leaked secret ingredient, Hoegaarden white beer. From 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. ET, the Wafels & Dinges truck will be handing out free cones of the new flavor. To make the event even more fun, the Astor Place cart is crowning the “back-up King of Belgium” at 10 p.m. ET. The details for entering are explained on the company’s blog:
“Come dressed up as royalty (or at least in uniform worthy of a King) and give a 1-2 min speech about the role of Dinges in the expansion of the Belgian empire! If you convince our Belgian jury, you might win a free catering event for 50 people anywhere in NYC! The second prize is a gift certificate for 5 WMDs! And under the Belgian motto of ‘participating is more important than winning,’ all the contestants will receive a free jar of Spekuloos!”
The waffle truck is promoting its campaign on Twitter — where it has a following of over 15,500 — and Facebook, where it has 7,500 fans. Since this promotion ran on the day of this article’s publication, success metrics could not be determined.
Your Favorite Food Truck Campaigns
Which social media campaigns are food trucks in your neighborhood running? Let us know in the comments below.
Series Supported by Ben and Jerry’s Scoop Truck
The Social-Savvy Food Truck Series is supported by the Ben and Jerry’s Scoop Truck. In New York City or San Francisco and want a free scoop? Follow @BenJerrysTruck and @BenJerrysWest for details!
Images courtesy of Mexicue; Flickr, speedye, somethingstartedcrazy
Posted via email from Kellyfornia on the state of... well, things.
Monday, July 18, 2011
Social Media Day SF Recap: Should the Anti-Social Mashable be Leading the Charge?
However, that afternoon I received (hang on, time to channel Brando) ... "an offer I couldn't refuse." Free VIP ticks to the Blonde Readhead show at the Independent. Blonde Redhead, a beautiful music factory reminiscent of The Proclaimers reinvented as hipsters with a Toria Amos of sorts in the role of lead vocals - a band I've been following for some time now.
So, I chose a free night of food, best friend one-on-one time, drinks and music I adore - over trampolines, I know.
Sorry to my reading public. This is my formal apology for lagging in my responsibilities as this city's Social Media Examiner. I'm back, and the news is on again.
Today though, this is about more than news. I had a revelation at work while walking past the Mashable offices that share a wall with my company on the ninth floor of an office building in SOMA.
You see, I share an office space with the San Francisco syndicate of the venerable social media journalism monopoly. We work amid a cadre of Internet start-ups nested in various corners of the floor's available space, which is dwindling with each week. It's a coveted spot.
The ninth floor SOMA Central crowd is quite sociable, even for tech-heads. We throw a weekly floor-wide-invite happy hour, mainly to get to know our neighbors better and share a few brews at local spots. We've even been known to film a music video on the floor with all the businesses, together.
Team Mashable over the months of our shared residency though, has gained a noted reputation of anti-socialism when it comes to meeting up. Ironic, no?
Some on the floor venture the guess that they snub their nose at the smaller companies that they feel superior to the Lilliputian web ventures sharing their floor, or possibly consider themselves a serious business with a responsibility to the news and therefore, no time for monkey business.
Posted via email from Kellyfornia on the state of... well, things.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Two Tickets to the Newport Beach Film Festival Opening Night Gala for the Price of One ($160 Value)!
Go to this site for a 2-for-1 from my favorite film festival on the planet –@NBFF. Two tickets for the price of one to the NBFF's Opening Night Gala ($160 Value)! hosted by my other love, @Adility.
Posted via email from Kellyfornia on the state of... well, things.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Q&A with Kiip Co-Founder Amadeus Demarzi
San Francisco has become the ground floor in a rise of social media projects, inventions, startups, applications architecture and more. Yet even among the cadre of social media app-heads running around there, a few outshine the rest. Amadeus Demarzi co-founder of Kiip, eightbit.me and FollowStyle has become one of those names to stand out within the masses.
Demarzi has a fluid resume including work with Chipotle, Chevron, Google Ventures, and most recently the creation of Kiip – the new wave in mobile advertisement applications. Yesterday he took some time to talk a bit about how he got into the “game,” some of the projects he’s currently involved in and few side projects that are still flying under the radar.
Tell us a little about your professional background.
I would say I am just really driven to build and create things. For me it's always about creating amazing user experiences using technology. If I haven't delighted the client/user, then I've failed. I feel very lucky to work on such a variety of projects like Kiip and EightBit, which allow me to express different creative mindsets.
I went to college for 3D animation, switched halfway through to film, dropped out in '07 to work in web, and had been doing freelance web design throughout college.
The first company I worked for was Eurekster, a social search company that essentially took results from Yahoo via an API, and allowed people to vote on them. I was there for about a year.
After Eurekster I went to work for a design agency called Sequence. There I got the unique opportunity to architect the Chipotle iPhone app – the first application that allowed users to order and pay for food on their iPhone. I also got to work on various other projects for companies like Chevron, Sonos, Google Ventures, Zinio, etc.
During my final year at Sequence, I started working on various side projects with a friend of mine, Courtney Guertin who was an engineer at Digg. Together we built an iPhone app (Skeemo) and a couple small fun sites like answer.to. Eventually we decided to leave our current companies and work on a fashion site together – FollowStyle. We iterated very quickly and had something up and running within a few months, but unfortunately we found it was a very difficult industry to gain any traction in due to our lack of connections.
Around this time, another friend of ours from Digg, Brian Wong a young 19 year old who worked in Business Development [at Digg] managed to raise around 300k for an idea: rewarding game players with real items for accomplishing things in [the] games. Courtney and I dug the idea, and Brian was in need of a couple cofounders that could fill his technical void to build the product, so we joined full time, Courtney as Co-Founder and CTO, and myself as Co-Founder and Director of Design.
Around this time, Addison Kowalski, an ex designer at Digg, had been getting some Internet props for designing these little 8bit avatars for people's twitter profiles. Soon the demand for them got pretty high, and so Courtney, Addison and myself decided to remedy that by making a web based avatar creation tool.
Over the next 5-7 months, Courtney, Brian and myself hustled on Kiip full time. In the moments we could find to spare on nights and weekends, we squeezed in EightBit. We successfully opened up EightBit to the public around SXSW, but also added a bunch more functionality in the way of an iPhone web app and a mini social game based on Foursquare. It still amazes me how often I see people using the avatars on Twitter and various other services.
A couple weeks later, we had an amazing launch for Kiip, which overall went out very well in the press. We have been absolutely inundated by great brands and game developers reaching out to us and wanting to use our service/platform. We just recently got our own office for Kiip, and have expanded the team up to eight, from the original three. We can even be considered bi-coastal since our VP of sales is out in New York.
Tell us about Eightbit.me. Where did the idea come from? What are your plans for it? What makes it so different? What have been some trials, triumphs, etc?
Originally birthed as an avatar creator, it has since evolved into a foursquare based social game. We ultimately would like to make it a very deep social game, that utilizes many other social platforms to create a sort of Internet avatar, which represents you, online. The ideas, concepts and designs have grown very organically over the last 6-8 months. Every project presents a unique set of difficulties. This can range from exploiting limits of a particular technology platform you are on, to solving user experience barriers.
With EightBit, the major challenge was getting a low powered device (iPhone) to create a native like experience in HTML, CSS, and Javascript. When building an 'app' for an iPhone, you have 2 basic choices. You can build a native application, which uses iOS libraries and Objective-C to build an application. These technologies take full advantage of the iPhone's hardware, allowing you to create very rich visual or data experiences that perform smoothly and efficiently because of this more direct interaction with the iPhone's hardware. On the flip side, the only REAL way to distribute these applications is through the Apple App Store, which means you have to abide by certain rules, and your release cycle is often controlled more by Apple.
Another way to build an application is using web-based technologies in the iPhone's Safari browser. Most people may not know this, but Apple has created far and away the best mobile browser currently available, and they have gone even further to provide excellent APIs allowing for some level of hardware acceleration. The major downside of building a web app is the dependency on a network connection is hard to avoid, the lower computing power of Javascript, because it's such a high level language, with so many browser/operating system layers below it. This means that your code has to be VERY efficient, and sometimes entire processes have to be re-thought in order to accomplish a smooth useable experience.
Kiip - that is a big release for you - what are you thoughts about it, and what do you think sets it apart from others like it?
Kiip is built on an advertising model of cost per engagement, or CPE. We are the vary first rewards platform that allows brands to highly target, much like the world of banner ads, using rewards instead of banner impressions. We also feel that the game experience is not very conducive to banner ads, since they require visual real estate, which on mobile devices is rather low to begin with. Our platform is about targeting users/player/customers when they are excited and happy, by providing a non-intrusive opt-in reward.
We have already had our initial public launch, announcing what we are doing, since we've been in stealth mode for the last 7 months or so. Soon we will be announcing which games we are going to be integrated with, so people can begin actually winning rewards for playing.
Some interesting obstacles with Kiip was around the fact that we are productizing the concept of a reward. Technically we have designed the first ever reward unit, a standard unit that can be used to reward a user for an interaction they had with an application. This is a far more complex usability problem than banner ads. Here at Kiip, we hold user experience in the highest regard, and have been doing everything possible to make the reward collection and redemption process as frictionless as possible.
We took a bit of a cue from Apple, by creating our reward units using html/css/javascript, giving us tremendous control over the design, without requiring game developers to update their Kiip SDK libraries.
Let us in on your thoughts on social media's usefulness, cool factor, possibilities, etc.
Hmm, I have mixed feelings about social media. I feel that it's mostly misunderstood by the general public. Every couple years in the web world we get new buzz words like web 2.0, Ajax, html5, etc., that mostly miss the point and don't really do any justice to what they are describing. At the same time, these buzz words also allow these concepts to become more mainstream, which ultimately helps our tech/web industries.
Overall though, it's hard to make any money in social media. Most of the time, money is not made off the product itself, but rather, by throwing advertisements into it since everyone ultimately accepts these platforms as being free. Ultimately this only works if there is a certain huge mass of users; otherwise it's not sustainable.
It's hard to really say what the future will bring, especially with the market being REALLY frothy right now. The big 'hit' things right now seem to be social tools that utilize the capabilities of mobile devices; always on and connected, location based, short message, photos, video, etc.
I think the far more interesting thing to watch though, is this transition away from 'personal computers' over to mobile phones and tablets. Think about it, kids that are born today, will be growing up in the world of touch based interfaces, always connected, cloud based, and no mice and keyboards. This, I believe represents a HUGE significant change in the world of computing, and personally I am really excited that it's my playground.
Posted via email from Kellyfornia on the state of... well, things.
