Congrats to Cupkates

The Sister-person passed along an article from Forbes: -- America's Most Wired Lunch Trucks -- starring our favored supplier of cupcakes:

For lunch truck owners, social media isn't a trendy gimmick, it's a serious business tool.

From the get go, Kate McEachern used Twitter, Yelp and Facebook to advertise her Cupkates truck, which sells gourmet cupcakes. Cupkates currently has 5,000 followers on Twitter and Facebook. "Social media is a huge part of our marketing strategy, if not the principle tenant," McEachern says.

In addition to providing updates on the truck's daily stops, McEachern says social media tools give her instant customer feedback. "It's helped us get better and sharper. You have to listen to what people are saying," she says. "You have to take everything on Facebook and Twitter as an honest assessment."

For example, after customers tweeted that the lines at the cupcake truck were getting too long, McEachern started taking pre-orders.

Social media tools also allow McEachern to quickly poll customers on new cupcake flavors. Salted caramel won recently.

McEachern says it's gotten to the point where Cupkates "customers answer other customers' questions, like ambassadors for the company" on Twitter, Facebook and Yelp. "I'm not sure what we would do if Facebook and Twitter collapsed tomorrow," she says.