Ann Handley, author for Mashable.com, writes about what we can learn from these creative and resourceful businesses who understand the power of connecting and engaging with their customers!

Check out some of these incredibly innovative businesses. And they’re all related to street food (something we all love)! Take a break as we can all learn from them.

Hmm time to eat!

Best Nicole

“Twitter* is still a scary, untamed frontier for many businesses,” Fortune wrote last week. I hear a similar refrain from the marketers who are part of the MarketingProfs community: They know that they should be engaging online, but they don’t have the foggiest notion of how to do it.

Lots of businesses on Twitter are doing it right. But, lately, I’ve been finding inspiration less from those companies that have become the poster children for leveraging social media (this means you Comcast, and Zappos, and Dell) and more from the lesser-knowns: not just the little guys, but the littlest of the little guys. I’m talking about street food vendors.

Time was that lunch from street vendors meant limited options. But no more: Street food vendors have expanded both in number and cuisine. In New York City, this growth has recently led to a kind of food fight over turf. But elsewhere, it’s just meant that you can get vegan ice cream sandwiches or East Coast lobster rolls (in San Fran!) as easily as you can score a slice of pizza pie.

Twitter may not be the sole driving source (no pun intended) behind the growth of street food vendors—undoubtedly the economy has done its part to encourage the otherwise unemployed to find an inexpensive way to make a living. But, nonetheless, a growing number of street vendors have been leveraging Twitter in innovative and interesting ways, serving up lessons for any business.

1. Find your target market. (Sometimes, less is more.)

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The best use of Twitter for your business, of course, is to start gathering followers in your target market. Aside from a few exceptions, you won’t find street food vendors on Twitter with tens of thousands of followers, as their target markets are geographically constrained. Rather, street food vendors focus on getting the right followers.

Lunchtime lesson: 1,000 followers who will actually do business with you are ultimately more valuable to your business than 100,000 less-engaged people.

2. Create demand.

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New York City’s The Treats Truck writes updates so vivid that you can almost smell the cookies and brownies baking. It also does a great job of creating a sense of urgency in a purchase:

Others stay top-of-mind with hungry (or potentially hungry) customers, like the way Food Shark publishes its daily menu of Mediterranean-by-way-of-West-Texas food via Twitter:

Or check out the “food porn” photos shared by Vancouver’s Japanese hot dog stand Japa Dog:

Lunchtime lesson: Communicate the breadth and depth of your products or services on Twitter in a fresh, compelling way, and in a manner that speaks directly to your customers’ needs.

3. Humanize a brand.

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NYC’s Chef Shack (run by two NY chefs) does a great job of monitoring any conversation online. When caterer Molly Hermann praised the truck’s Indian spiced donuts, the Chefs responded:

Profound? Not really. But such simple efforts can go a long way to make customers feel appreciated, and to humanize your business.

Or consider the way Rickshaw Truck, which sells steamed and fried dumplings in Manhattan, fosters a personality behind the brand:

Here’s the way Big Gay Ice Cream Truck shows that the dessert circuit isn’t always a bowl of cherries:

Lunchtime lesson: Be real. Reveal a little bit about the people and personalities who run your business so that your customers can connect with you on a human level.

4. Share news and updates. (Even when it’s bad news.)

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Twitter offers a platform for regular and instant communication. The mobile bake shop known as the Cupcake Truck, in New Haven, CT, publicizes its locations and hours, which change regularly, of course. But even less-portable companies might consider regularly communicating business updates or other news (and how it affects your customers):

Or think about sharing some love by calling out awards and/or customer reviews:

Look at how Seattle’s Skillet Street Food used Twitter to rally customer support when it got into hot water with city officials over permitting issues:

And Durham, NC’s OnlyBurger (”the only burger you’ll ever want”) uses Twitter to keep its customers in the know when things literally break down:

Lunchtime lesson: It might be obvious to share the good stuff with your customers, but consider sharing the less-good, too. Doing so allows your customers to rally around your otherwise sound business. What’s more, your audience will likely respect you more for being honest and forthcoming. (Or, at the very least, you can tell your side of the story.)

5. Gather customer feedback.

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I particularly like the way many food vendors treat their clientele as resources, not just customers. Here, Washington DC’s Streetflow Mobile, which sells frozen yogurt, solicits street intelligence, literally, when it asks its customers about the best place to find city parking:

Lunchtime lesson: Use Twitter to solicit and listen to customer suggestions and opinions. Treat your customers as resources for the kind of feedback that informs product development or other business improvements.

6. Run fun promotions.

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NYC’s Waffletruck regularly runs Twitter-specific special promotions to its followers:

Lunchtime lesson: Take a page from Dell’s playbook on this idea: Use Twitter as a vehicle to run certain social media-based promotions and specials. Your followers will begin to readily anticipate them.

7. Create a sense of community.

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Organizing face-to-face tweetups for Twitter followers is one way of extending your community into the offline world, especially as it will connect your customers to each other (not just you). The nature of that event should reflect your market, of course. Magic Curry Man in San Francisco fostered that sense of customer community by organizing a singles meet up:

Or consider connecting your business to a larger cause, like San Francisco’s UrbanNectar does with its Twitter presence:

Lunchtime lesson: Creating a sense of a customer community around your business furthers your clientele’s engagement with you and your products or services. And connecting your customers with each other strengthens both their relationships with each other as well as with you.

8. Integrate your efforts.

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Twitter is only one tool in the social media shed—or, in this case, one dish at the social-media buffet table. Like any marketing effort by any business, it works best intertwined with other tools in a marketing mix, like a website, or Flickr*, a blog*, YouTube*, or whatever.

Lunchtime lesson: Done well, Twitter is plenty fulfilling for connecting customers with your business on an immediate and intimate level. But it’s even more nourishing when it’s served up as part of a bigger spread.