I love food and I love social media. So I have been very taken by the Kogi success story.

For anyone not living in Los Angeles, California, not following social media or not interested in food, a little background is necessary.

Kogi started as a taco truck, a very familiar sight on LA streets and nothing to write home about.  The first interesting twist comes in the food: Kogi takes Mexican staples (tacos, quesadillas, etc.) and “koreanizes” them. Trust me, the result is exciting, different and delicious. The second, and to us social media marketers, more important twist is that Kogi built a cult following using a blog and Twitter.

The blog gets about 21,000 monthly unique visitors (per Quantcast, nothing to sneeze at for what is essentially a very local blog) and @kogibbq has almost 22,000 followers! Twitter was used as a tool to let (hungry) followers know where the taco truck would be on any given day or time and tweets reportedly draw crowds of 300 to 800.   And that’s for a restaurant-on-wheels that launched as recently as November 20, 2008.

The quality of the food, the novelty of the concept and a very specific and consistent social media communication strategy are to be credited for this unlikely success story.  However, for a data-driven marketer like me, who preaches the analytics gospel for social media marketing, and sometimes struggles with how to validate the impact of it, the wake-up call was to be found in an equally unlikely place: The Alibi Room.

Another bit of background for folks outside Los Angeles in general and, more specifically, outside of the Westside area.  The Alibi Room was your prototypical neighborhood dive bar, located on a thoroughly non-descript stretch of Washington Boulevard in Culver City.

If this sounds like a recipe for retail failure, it pretty much was.  The bar was bought and totally redesigned (successfully I think) into a much hipper destination while still keeping a great neighborhood vibe.  The perfect place for a local like me to go enjoy an interesting selection of wines by the glass and imported, hard-to-find beers with upgraded bar food.  On a typical week night, finding a seat and getting food quickly while being able to converse with your friends at reasonable volume was the norm.  WAS the norm.  The Alibi Room signed a deal with Kogi a few weeks ago to feature the truck’s food.  The news was reported using quintessential social media outlets: I heard about it through my trusted Thrillist and UrbanDaddy newsletters/blogs and Kogi’s Twitter was involved.

Now I usually like my measurement methods to be accurate and as quantitative as possible but in this case this seat of the pants measurement will suffice: both times in the past 3 weeks I have been to the Alibi Room, on weekdays, the place was standing room only, the decibel volume barely sufferable and the crowd all imported from other parts of LA (we’re good at telling these things in Tinsel Town).  I was shocked…but shouldn’t have been: social media, when the product/brand marketed is good, will drive word of mouth and will influence conversions, even if the product is “offline”.  No need to brandish spreadsheets to convince the owners of the Alibi Room or Kogi of this!