The Ocean Agency

Facebook Fan Pages are becoming more and more ubiquitous, with over 300,000 businesses using the feature. These fan pages go above and beyond, and resemble full functioning websites more than a Facebook profile.

It is pretty clear that social media works for big brands. Just to name a few, we all admire the utilization of SM by Southwest, Jet Blue, Comcast, and Dell among a myriad of others.

But what about smaller companies? What about small and medium sized businesses that don’t have the brand awareness of a large corporation? Does it work for them?

I spend a lot of time convincing businesses that social media marketing is real and here to stay. But I’m pretty sure you all wouldn’t appreciate a sales pitch in a blog post, so instead I’m going to give 21 examples of small to medium sized Chicago businesses that are using social media effectively. In no particular order:

The Internet has brought us so much good: instant communication across the globe, a new way to do business, a new way to converse and a plethora of new ways to procrastinate. I mean, before the advent of the Internet, was anyone able to spend hours looking at cats? Or hipsters? Or people at Wal-Mart? (Now I feel like anyone who reads this thinks I spend hours looking at cats, hipsters and people at Wal-Mart … and, umm … well, what do you do that’s so interesting?)

It has also given us the ability to have our questions answered by total strangers, anywhere, at any time. Any question. Taking a quick glance at Wiki Answers gives us a few ideas of how far we’ve progressed with the most magnificent tool of the this past century.

Here are some of the best unanswered questions.

The offhanded elegance of this question is what strikes me the most.

Foursquare is a location based social networking tool, with a competitive edge. Foursquare has generally been billed as the next “hot” social media platform, and partly based on this widespread hype early adopters have flocked to the service.

Foursquare takes aspects of many popular social networks and ads a very powerful force: Competition. Users compete by “checking in” at different locations to become the mayor of certain locations. So, if you go to your favorite bar or restuarant 5 times a week, and check in every time, you unlock badges and can essentially rule a spot.

A post from our new intern, Travis Andrews, who just recently moved from New Orleans, Louisiana and is now quickly learning the world of interactive marketing. These are his reflections on the first week of the job:

It’s been a special few days: I moved from New Orleans to
Chicago. I started interning here. I watched the first episode of Mad
Men.

I’m still trying to figure out what was most exciting.