Don’t you love it when you have an idea that just comes to life? Well, that is exactly what happened on 9/9/09 when the first ever BurritUp took place at Chipotle, Boloco, Anna’s, and Boca Grande on Beacon Street in Brookline, Mass.
It all started during a discussion with Michael Schneider about the burrito, which we both agree is the perfect food. We thought it be great to get a bunch of people together who also felt the same way about burritos as we did.
The BurritUp was born.
You see, one of my favorite things to do is bring people together around common interests and passions. In this case, the focus was centered around the burrito – plain and simple.
The plan was to keep this little TweetUp low-key, but the day I posted the event on Eventbrite, it was written about within The Brookline Tab Blog by Neal Simpson (who also attended the BurritUp with a photographer for a story he wrote about the event here). Through the power of word of mouth, or Twitter in this case, buzz continued to build about our little “BurritUp” and before we knew it, there were 60 people signed up to share some burritos with us.
John Pepper, CEO and founder of Boloco, who always looks for opportunities to connect with customers offline as well as online, loved the idea and decided to come along. He also gave all the BurritUp attendees gift cards to come back for a free burrito. Before the BurritUp began we had a chance to ask him a few questions about how he uses social media to market Boloco and future plans for the business. Please check out the video interview below.
Ultimately 45 burrito lovers came out to the first ever BurritUp. Which goes to show you that all you need is a great idea, passion, and some amazing people with big appetites and you have all the ingredients for a successful event! This will certainly not be the last BurritUp and there were a lot of grumblings about other food-related TweetUps that we are sure to see soon!
Want to get a taste of what the BurritUp was all about? Take a peek at this video slideshow of the BurritUp I created below using Animoto’s new video feature (very, very cool). I also included a photo slideshow Steve Garfield pulled together using Animoto (Thanks Steve!)
Other BurritUp photos can be found on Flickr. Videos from the BurritUp can be found on BurritUp TV.
Be sure to follow @BurritUp on Twitter for news about future BurritUps and just talk about burritos.
