The face of the city’s food truck scene, Chris Hodgson, had a simple method for generating a social media following during the earliest days of Dim & Den Sum: He visited the Facebook page of Cleveland uber-chef Michael Symon and sent scores of friend requests from his personal Facebook account to Symon’s fans.
It was a guerilla marketing move, but one that got Hodgson’s name out there and raised the profile of his then-startup food truck.
“I wasn’t worried about blowback,” Hodgson says of piggy-backing on Symon’s fans. He knew the chef and realized his supporters were Dim & Den Sum’s target market.
Before starting the food truck in early 2010, Hodgson wasn’t much of a social media guy. “I had 100 Facebook friends, and they were my actual friends,” says Hodgson, who added a second truck, Hodge Podge (
@hodgepodgetruck), this year in conjunction with his appearance on the Food Network’s
The Great Food Truck Race. “Now, I know only about 1 percent of my friends on Facebook.”
Since Dim & Den Sum hit the streets, people following the truck’s Twitter feed (@DimAndDenSum) and liking its Facebook fan page have long-since eclipsed Hodgson’s personal Facebook account. The separate feed and fan page for Hodge Podge Truck isn’t far behind.
“We can’t just have a website,” Hodgson says. “We’re a mobile kind of business.”
He tweets his menu and locations. He posts photos of tomorrow’s dishes. He updates followers when he hits delays to his scheduled stops, and he even shares what dishes he’s making for family gatherings.
“You talk to people, you hand them their food,” Hodgson says. “My company is all about personal relationships.”
And where Chris Hodgson goes, people follow.
Like the time this fall when Jennifer Ilgauskas, founder of Rebound Physical Therapy and wife of former Cleveland Cavaliers center Zydrunas, wanted to get people to turn out for the grand opening of her new North Olmsted facility.
She asked Hodgson to bring his Dim & Den Sum truck to the opening to help boost traffic. Hodgson tweeted out where he would be that day, and the place was swarmed with nearly 600 devoted Dim & Den Sum customers.
Just a year and a half and two successful food truck launches later, Hodgson says he still hasn’t spent a penny on marketing. Now he’s getting ready to launch a new restaurant and expects to rely just as heavily on his strong social media following.
“[Without social media,] I don’t think it would have ever happened,” he says.