Gaining Exposure

Once our site was launched and we tested it properly, we began reaching out to every single food truck on our list as well as many news sites such as Bostinno, CAMD News, News@Northeastern, Boston Globe, Boston Food Truck Bloggers, Steven Leibowitz, and a few other cities. We sent a slightly different message to each truck saying something along the lines of the following. Our main purpose was to ask for feedback for the future as well as the possibility of a social media tweet promoting our site to others.

"Hey Zinnekens!

As part of a Northeastern University course my team and I have created a food-truck-finding website using the data from the government food truck website that features your trucks location schedule and embedded social media feeds.

The purpose of our site is to promote Boston's growing food truck culture and make it easier for people to explore new food trucks and find out where they are without having to search through multiple twitter feeds.

Please check out our site here! We'd love to get your feedback as a food truck vendor: www.BostonFeed.Me

In return, if you are able to promote our site on social media and share it with other trucks we would greatly appreciate it. In the future we plan on having a system set up where we can feature certain trucks for a period of time. If that's something you'd potentially be interested in please let us know.

Thanks!"

We received responses from more than 15 food trucks mostly saying thank you and that they we're impressed with our site. Some had minor tweaks to our schedule or encouraged us to continue optimizing our site on mobile. Among the news sites we we're interviewed by News@Northeastern.

Notable Responses:

"I would love to set up a time if you are still around and aren’t too busy with finals work! Let me know what days work best for you." CAMD News

"Sorry for the delayed response here. Thanks for reaching out and promoting the food truck community in Boston! You guys have a great website! Are you getting much traffic?

The website is pretty user friendly though on the mobile version I was having a hard time seeing and using the map. It's great how you have a link to our site. How will you know to update the menu you've posted on your site when we update ours? We don't do that a lot but just a question.

We'd be happy to promote this site on our social media today and again in the future. Please let us know when you'll be able to feature blazing salads so we can be sure to check back." -Blazing Salads

"Thanks so much for reaching out. This looks like a really cool project. Any chance you and the rest of the group might be able to meet later this week to discuss how this all came about?" -News@Northeastern

"We can definitely meet up when I'm back and chat about some opportunities for reciprocal cross-promotion." -Larissa of The Lunch Report

"This website is incredible - I love it! I really see this becoming the go-to resource for locating food trucks.

I'd be more than happy to promote your site on social as well as with a guest post. I could write up a few Q&A style interview questions for you to answer via email, or if you have a topic in mind you want to pitch for a guest post, that's an option as well." -Megan of Boston Food Truck Bloggers

"The site looks great. Fell free to tweet at us whenever you want and we will help out. Speak soon" -Chik Chak

"Very nice site! Rhythm 'n Wraps is at Harvard Wednesday to Friday...not on Tuesday. Thanks for including us." -Rhythm 'n Wraps

"Your website is really cool and very well made, congrats! Do you have social media accounts? I cannot see any." -Bon Me

"Very cool website. How is it updated? As you may know truck schedules can change every three months or so. The only thing I can think of which you may have considered is getting the different truck icons on the map as opposed to all the same icon." -Fresh Food Generation

"Wow. I love everything about this site! I love the look and the functionality. Other sites that provide a similar service are boring to look at and difficult to navigate. Our page did format a bit weird when viewing on my phone though. I will definitely promote this site and I hope you continue to develop it." -The Bacon Truck