personality | Nicole Monahan

This past week The Daily Meal announced their picks for this year’s 101 Best Food Trucks in America. Personally, I’ve been a bit bias on a few industries that are still not always up to speed on the whole social media and technology thing, (Healthcare/Fitness, TV/Film, Hospitality and Travel, and Food/Restaurants industries.) So I thought it would be fun to check out a few of these food truck’s Twitter personalities.

Let’s take a look at 5 food truck’s from NYC that made the list and how they’re using Twitter.

1.) Big Gay Ice Cream Truck

They’re simply just amazing at social. They have the most followers on my small list of 5, and here’s why…

They have great Twitter conversations and responses:

They just do want they want and help out friends:

No social media rules. They speak their minds, with whatever comes to mind… It makes it personal, not just a brand:

Recently, I went to the East Village store a few weeks ago since they sadly don’t have the truck in NY anymore. Which isn’t really a terrible loss the tourist still rack up the line whether it was for a truck or shop. Point being is they now have drag queens that help make this terrible waiting thing both bearable and entertaining. They also do a fantastic job Tweeting about this experience while still making it relevant to what’s going on in the world. For example, this Tweet the day of the Tony Awards:

2. The Cinnamon Snail

Who doesn’t love to be updated on truck locations. They just seem to be a couple of streets off every day. That’s NY parking for you.

I don’t know who does their photography but it’s gorgeous. And yes, they also have a beautiful Instagram account.

Like: How they post weekly specials. Dislike: The mass social channel promotion. I don’t like to double-click.

3. Wafels & Dinges

They win just for coming out to Queens on weekends. Although I’m having a love/hate relationship right now with this question promotion (below). I get it. Engage with fans and offer freebies, I guess I’m just not loving the questions. Personally, I wouldn’t share a picture of my dad to a food truck. Plus I responded to one of these and no free dinges yet, what gives?

Constant updates=Love! This truck is everywhere and at all the best tourist locations.

4.Schnitzel & Things

Pre-order your food. If you’ve every experienced NYC lunch rush you understand how genius this is.

Womp, womp. Same basic formatting for tweets. We get it, it’s lunchtime. We thought we’d attempt a drunk Schnitzel & Things food truck run on 52nd btw 6th/7th at 2am. That’s actually not a bad food truck idea.

5. Red Hook Lobster Pound

I wanted to save the glory child, #1 food truck in America for last. Because they were that terrible.

I don’t understand most of these references. It’s not really explained and they keep mentioning Derecho like we all of a suddenly get it.

I’m a grammar snob. There was just too many of these mistakes: ITs, 2day, be4. It’s making me cringe. AND TOO MANY ALL CAPS AND OVERUSE OF THE WORD LOBSTAH.

So what have I learned?

If you have a great product I guess you don’t need to be good at social media. That’s where word of mouth marketing really helps. But, it doesn’t hurt to be relatable and fun with your fans. It only takes word of mouth marketing that much higher. Additionally, it doesn’t have to be all about where the truck is, it helps of course, but it should also be about your product and personality. Each food truck has its niche or else you’d never make it on that list or in NY, so emphasize what you’re made of. Trust me, we’ve got plenty of those doughnut and halal trucks.

Old Spice:

Old Spice kicks the games off by what it does best, incorporating their own quirky humor into the games. First step, setting up a spot light on Table Tennis player Tim Wang and really talking to their audience.

Thank you Old Spice. Here’s to American pride, table tennis, and photoshopping. Old spice continues to challenge and question the games especially when it comes to smelling good.

Mr. Clean:

Mr. Clean best encompasses brand voice, which I like to think is an old man’s voice or perhaps the voice on anyone on Facebook that shares way too many useless status updates. It’s like he is a real person! Mr. Clean really doesn’t try to do anything different for the Olympics except continually asking lots and lots of questions about it, as only an annoying Facebook friend would probably do.

Charmin:

Charmin’s Facebook page is usually up to some kind of bathroom humor, yet with the start of the Olympics I noticed a challenge that faced them. How do you package together the Olympics and bathroom jokes? Charmin had to accomplish this by thinking outside the box.

The result: Bathrooms with London flare. Engaging fans with their finds on some posh terminology and British bathroom culture.

Duracell:

Technology and Powering up the Olympics, this is Duracell’s angle for the London games. Duracell has created a Virtual Stadium where Olympians and their families are able to view videos, photos and messages from online fans on a screen using Kinect sensor technology. They are using Facebook to not only promote the campaign but to engage their audience in the real-time interactions with the Olympian’s family members, as shown in the above Facebook post. I only wish there were more than just one of these post, I love behind the scenes photography.

Takeaways:

I have learned quite a bit about this company after this research. Not only did I have no idea some of these brands were nestled under P&G but I have found that what their brand’s are doing within social is very different. I would have naturally expected every brand to have the same structure, same voice, same social media strategies, but no. To my surprise they have executed each product differently taking on an individual personalities. Looking beyond P&G’s core “Thank you Mom” campaign, this experiment helped me see each product differently, while understanding the importance of having a unique brand voice.