The Ocean Agency

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.

But it did occur to me that moving is a lot like social
media marketing, and not just in the sense that both
involve—recently—me doing them. But in the sense that they are the
exact same thing in different spaces (neither being spaces in which we
naturally reside but both being in spaces we have conquered through
our own invention).

We don’t normally live in the air (assuming the moving is
done by plane and not by car or boat (though we don’t normally live
while moving a mile a minute or on water, anyway)), and we don’t live
in cyberspace (a place we actually invented). Yet the best way for
others to discover us, the best way for us to spread awareness of our
being (or company) is through these channels that, at one time, did
not come close to existing.

Technology: it’s pretty neat.

The United States (just to keep it small) is like the
Internet: everywhere you go, not only do you hold some piece of it
with you (memory or cookies), but you can leave some part of yourself.
I’ve lived in very few places (New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Washington,
D.C. and now Chicago), but in each one of those places, I’ve left
behind people who know me, who can help me, who (at least I’ve
convinced myself) like me (to some degree, I won’t get superfluous on
my self-adulation).

In the same way, everywhere you leave a part of yourself
on the Internet will have some impact on someone somewhere. Vague as
that sentence is, it couldn’t be truer—whether by link or comment or
blog post or Tweet or Facebook status, whatever you do, someone sees
it. Someone notices it. And then the race starts for who will be
noticed the most and who will be noticed first.

And, like moving (especially to a place dissimilar from
“home”), it’s a race to keep up with the elements around you. Social
media is, as is obvious, changing faster than the airplane that
brought me here. And, just as I now have to figure out why there’s
going to be tons of little dandruff flakes falling out of the sky—is
the world ending? The Apocalypse!—social media marketers have to
understand the constantly changing landscape.

And since it’s being invented as it goes, it makes everything just a
little bit more exciting. Because, in essence, we—our world—invented it. We are creating our own new space.

I may now live in Chicago, but we all live in our social media. It
keeps us connected. And that’s sort of the whole point.