Twitter and Food Trucks
I’m not sure if any of my references to the complaint that Twitter ends up being a food blogging service have made it through my drafts section (That’s right, there is some quality control on here and there are roughly three posts sitting in my drafts folder for every one that sees the light of day. Think of what you could be reading and shudder.) but today instead of talking about being overweight I succumbed to the urge to keep everyone informed of what was going down my gullet (Or, more accurately what was going to go down my gullet) when I invited people to join me in tearing into some flesh at my friends’ marriage of metal and meat, the Grill ‘Em All burger truck. I’ve already posted about the truck here and while I wouldn’t miss an opportunity to plug them and say that my Waste Em All burger and H-100’s were delicious this isn’t a food review.
Hanging around after the lunch rush was dying down I caught a glimpse of how powerful Twitter can be and was really struck for maybe the second time at the relevance of the emerging real time web everyone’s been talking about. (The first being meeting people because we tweeted about being in the same place.) I don’t know how big food trucks are in other cities but right now in L.A. they’ve become quite en vogue and their owner’s have been pretty good at leveraging technology in some ways to reverse the food truck/customer relationship. Instead of trying to predict where hungry people will be and finding them, food trucks are making it easy for their customers to seek them out and there is a community of food truck hunters that have emerged. It would be silly to totally do away with concern for location and I’m sure all of these vendors are using a sort of hybrid strategy, maybe the best example being a food truck food court in Santa Monica — Or Grill Em All setting up shop outside of The Cha Cha in Silverlake (For the simple and awesome reason that that’s where they go hang out at night anyway.) This in and of itself isn’t any real news, businesses have been using the internet to bridge the gap between themselves and their customers for a long time now. But the speed of feedback, and the rate at which it’s received and responded too is something new.
While I was standing there the head chef, Ryan, had is phone out and was reading all the mentions for @Grillemalltruck. The nature of this kind of business and Twitter users’ enthusiasm for food makes this pretty stunning. People who were literally feet away were taking a bite or two of their burgers and taking out their phone’s to chime in, mentioning everything from the burgers to the music to the bullhorn Matt kids around on. The ramifications of this type of response may not be as big as we’d like to believe; lightning fast data always sounds nice but more often than not outstrips the pace of other aspects in an operation. For example, the speed at which data like the most popular burgers comes in isn’t really relevant because that data isn’t relevant until it comes time to order more supplies; but, since the boys could have their phones hanging up in the truck, anything about quality or preference can be immediately addressed. Plus, I’m sure it’s nice to read that people are liking your food while you’re making it too.
It seems like this usefulness should be obvious (and old hat) but I’m not sure that it is. I’ve been to a few events now that followed and/or displayed their own hashtag feed but I’ve yet to see them used effectively. Let’s take the simplest type of event which would just be a speaker. The display is always behind them and if it weren’t you wouldn’t want them reading it during their presentation anyways. Useful activity generally dies during the presentation because, on the whole, people are paying attention. In my experiences, what you end up getting are a bunch of people on their phones announcing “I’m at ‘cool web thingy’ with __,” or, “I’m leaving for ‘cool web thingy’ now,” followed by little recaps or appreciative tweets afterward. Perhaps this is different at conferences when there are multiple presentations occurring simultaneously or during staggered time slots and could be used effectively in different rooms to give a picture of what’s going on where. I couldn’t say because I really have no business attending such things.
Seeing Twitter and thinking about all the big things you can do with it in the abstract is exciting but I’m really happier every time I see someone using it for something on the small scale. I think we’ll find the biggest and most significant changes it makes by adding up all the little things people do with it. I think we can look at these food trucks and see just how great Twitter is by how natural and unforced the shift feels.
For your enjoyment: @FoodTruckLA’s food truck list.
