Since launching TasteCasting, I have met so many incredible people who enjoy great food and are willing to help others. This is one of those stories.

Meet Bill Cason. Bill is currently the Founding TasteCasting team captain in Tampa Florida. You can follow him on Twitter at TasteBudsTampa. Bill was building out his team of tasters and as he was preparing to launch he met  Elaine Giammetta and Lou Luzzo, co-founders of Gourmet Girl Magazine. Elaine and Lou co-founded this site and it is dedicated to spreading the word about Good Food, Good Wine, and Good Living.

Elaine Giammetta and Lou Luzzo were kind enough to feature TasteCasting in their magazine.

The site is packed full of restaurant profiles, recipes, a chef’s corner where you can actually ask the chef’s questions. Chef Brian Roland is featured in the Chef’s Corner this month teaching you “How To Properly Season Your Food” . Under Recipes you can find a wonderful recipe for Lobster Treat from Executive Chef and Event Designer Paul Bott.

Not only are the team from Gourmet Girl providing you with terrific information about food, wine, recipes, and dining – they are also out to help others. In Late July Gourmet Girl attended and featured Save The Tortillas. This is an effort to help Tampa native, Taco Tammy Young save her company, La Bonita Ole from being taken over by SunTrust Bank and Tammy and her management team being forced out.

Click here to take a look at Gourmet Girl Magazine, Read a few profiles, print off a recipe, and contact the Gourmet Girl staff with any questions.

Until Next Time,

Social Media and Food Hobbiests Join Forces To Help

What started out as a way to bring together social media savvy people in the evening to network and socialize and help restaurants, cafes, and other food and drink establishments in central Ohio has now grown to more than 12 cities and more than 100 members in the United States. I’ve also be in touch with several bloggers interested in forming teams in Canada and Mexico. 

It Has Been A Total Team Effort

This fast and furious growth in Columbus and now spreading around the country and into North America could not have been possible without the huge support of the founding team members in Columbus and now the cities that are joining. From the day that I sat down with Alvin Borromeo (@wyliemac) and Jason Blanton (@Blantonious) explaining how I would like to create a team and taste in the evenings after work the team has been there to help. Right out the gates, Alvin, Jason and I came up with the name over a bowl of noodles at Noodles.

The team grew quickly and we held a few planning meetings and right away team member Peg Yruegas (@ur_ay_gas) volunteered to be the secretary and take notes during meetings. LeAnn Purdy (@LeAnn_Purdy) offered to and made name badges, still others Julie Castell (@jujubird) pulled together team rosters. Michelle Savaldi (@cbusimpressions) wrote and distributed our press release.  Kelly Gingery (@KellyGingery) is assisting with our shirt orders making sure we streamline the process for everyone and reduce the costs for members. Stats were collected to find out how many followers on which social media platforms we all used so we could share the number of possible impressions that are possible with restaurants.

Many others are pitching in too. Other members are spreading the word to friends around the country and others still are contacting restaurants to schedule tastings. During our last team meeting team members provided training on the social media tools they use and provided help and assistance. Now the Columbus team is going to start providing hands-on training thanks to two other member’s Gloria Cannon (@GloriaCannon) and Brian Lockrey (@1datarecovery) generous offer of using their facility for team training. It is a very exciting time and I owe a great deal of thanks to the founding Columbus, Ohio team for their support. Before I started this, I was meeting with about 3 to 4 people on a regular basis that I would call friends in Social Media. Thanks to TasteCasting I’m meeting the best and brightest and forming new friendships daily. My hope is that this kind of teamwork and willingness to help each other spread across the country and who knows, maybe even the world. It is starting to happen.

Meet the First TasteCasting City Team Captains  

Social Networking Spreading Word About Columbus Restaurants
Friday, March 20, 2009

A group of central Ohio social networkers is going into restaurants, sampling the food and spreading the word to others. Dan Harris is behind TasteCasters. He hopes to have groups across the U.S. by this time next year, 10TV’s Andy Hirsch reported. “(We) go out and meet each other, and eat and drink,” Harris said. “We’re combining together …

Sleepless In Columbus

On February 14th 2009 I tried to sleep but I couldn’t. I had too much on my mind. The economy, friends who owned their own businesses that were struggling, layoffs and I was also thinking about what had happened just the day before. On February 11th, 2009 @cherylharrison, and @amandacallicoat along with sponsors pulled off a great tweetup at The Chocolate Cafe called the Sweet Tweet Meet.  

Music Magic Meal

There were 112 people that showed up for this event. Music. Magic and a Meal. That day we had the worst rain, hail and wind storm you could imagine, but people showed up anyway. The Chocolate Cafe had a great evening financially and had mentioned the phone was ringing off the hook all week and new people were visiting the cafe. I kept thinking to myself that this turnout, and the resulting success for the restaurant was happening because our small group of socially connected and social media savvy people were informing, educating and promoting this establishment and this event. 

8 Pages Later

I believe it was 4:00am when I finally crawled out of bed, and around noon I had written 8 page document titled Twitter Tasters. This idea was born. I had it in my mind that I could recruit tasters by offering them free eats in return for taste tweets. I wasn’t sure if it would fly, so I started twittering the general idea. “Anyone interested in becoming a Twitter Taster?” Within minutes I had more than 10 people responding. A few minutes later, I had restaurants, coffee shops, and even ice cream shops DMing me wanting to hold an event. 

CbusTasters Was Born

Other twitter followers were asking to join. Within a few hours I had 20 people who wanted to become CbusTasters. I made the decision to start a new hobby. I would use social networking and social media to help restaurants, cafes, coffee shops, ice cream shops and, really, any establishment that has a menu of items to taste,  get the word out.  I ran the idea past @blantonious and @wyliemac, two very close social media friends, and that is where we discussed the name. We couldn’t really use Twitter Tasters, because we couldn’t use Twitter in a twitter idea. We also thought it was too limiting. Tasters could use any social media platform to get the word out. So we put pen to paper, came up with a few ideas. When we thought about what the team would be doing, which was tasting, the first word TASTE made sense. As we thought a bit more, we realized we would be broadcasting the message to our networks. Wa-lah. TasteCasting was born. 

35 Days Later

Fast forward 35 Days. It is now March 20th. We’ve held two tastings, have more than 25 members on the tasting team, launched the site, have team shirts, have been interviewed by Channel 10TV to air tonight, launched this site and we have new requests from restaurants coming in daily to: Meet, they will TREAT, We will EAT, and then Tweet and Repeat.

What An Amazing Team

The CbusTasting team is a great! They really are the ones creating new opportunities for our local restaurants and helping to make my sleepless night all worth it.  I plan to profile each and every one of the team in this blog in future posts so you can get to know them, follow them and cheer them on.

A Great Hobby

This is a great hobby. We all get to help restaurant owners get the word out, promote their menu and specials and we get to meet, eat and tweet.  The only thing I will need to do more often is spend extra time in the gym.

Until next time…