The picture above is of a line up yesterday at the Japadog hotdog stand set up on the UBC campus for a fundraising event.

Japadogs are pretty delicious, but they aren’t a new sensation to Vancouver. They’ve had a stand at the corner of Burrard and Smithe for a long time now and over the years they’ve received lots of rave reviews from the local foodie media.

But that line up at UBC? What was with the sudden feeding frenzy? Are students that deprived of good food out on campus? And how did they all find out about this one day special Japadog stand? There’s probably a lot of reasons, the most obvious being that this was a fundraiser and no doubt it was well advertised in advance. In fact, the charity behind the event did a good job promoting it on Facebook. But there’s another reason that I want to highlight as a great example of how social media can be used to… well, sell Japanese-style hotdogs.

It just so happened, that on the same day as the Japadog University mob scene, I attended a lunch and learn presentation on Twitter by Vancouver blogger Rebecca Bolwitt (aka. Miss 604) and lo and behold, she also mentioned Japadog and their Twitter account. So while I’m sitting listening to Rebecca’s great presentation on Twitter, I’m seeing a stream of @japadog tweets coming up on my mobile Twitter feed.

Using Twitter, students were sharing information on this cool event happening on campus making it the place to be and no doubt this drew even more people to the fundraising event. They were also taking pictures on their mobile phones and uploading those to Twitter, giving  the event even more cache, as well as something interesting to pass around a second time to all their friends on Twitter.

Since the event, the general Japadog chatter on Twitter has kept a pretty steady pace and by the looks of the way things are going, Japadog’s Twitter account will continue to add followers (and customers) as they Tweet about the latest goings-on at their hot dog stand in what is a very authentic, interesting and unique voice.

If Japadogs aren’t already an institution in Vancouver, it looks like the Twitter community is determined to make it happen.

I think next week I’m going to head on down to the Japadog stand and try and get an interview with the Japadog head Tweeter for an episode of Vancouver Social Media TV, so stayed tuned!

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Tagged as: food, fundraiser, head, japadog social media, japadog twitter, JapaDog University, local foodie media, Social Media, Tweet, Tweeter, Vancouver, vancouver social media, vancouver twitter