The Ocean Agency

As a small to medium sized interactive marketing agency in Chicago,we have an advantage over larger firms: Our internal communication.

Interns can talk directly with the principals, a link building specialist can work directly with a coder. As someone who focuses on social media, I can work directly with our design team to make sure that social applications are built into the initial design.

We are always looking to improve our internal as well as external communication, and here some new(ish) social media tools that will help:

1) Evernote

Evernote is a great way to keep track of inspiration, everywhere you go. At work, we are constantly interrupted and lose our train of thought easily, never forget that website you meant to blog about or that snipet of code ever again.

2) Group Posterous/Tumblr

People respond to humor and creativity. Setting up group Posterous and Tumblr accounts are great ways to encourage creative interaction among employees, and  show some personality. Showing  personality is one of the first steps to building online engagement with potential customers.

3) Teambox

Like Google Wave, Teambox has set out to improve the way we collaborate. Unlike Google Wave it isn’t creepy. Teambox is great for assigning tasks, organizing information, and for group collaboration without any of the clutter. Also, all of your information is stored securely in the “cloud” so you don’t have to worry about jump drives etc.

What online tools do you use to improve your internal communcation?

We give interactive marketing advice to companies in Chicago and all over the country. Of course, the Ocean Agency is more than happy to help with interactive marketing strategy, social media guidelines, and with social business design. This is an example of where we get our inspiration from:

Today, Cisco has released findings from its latest study about how business use social media to colloberate and interact with customers.

What is so special about this study?

1) The process:

The study utilized qualitative and not just quantitative methods. By using in depth interviews by graduate students and professors from universities all over the world, the data is espcially robust and reliable.

2) The findings:

Companies need to integrate their new media efforts with internal IT professionals, and that internal social media use needs to be more effectively organized and regulated.

IT professionals? Regulation of social media efforts? What does this mean for your business?

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This post is part of the Guest Blog Grand Tour over at Life Without Pants – an epic journey of over 75 guest posts. Want to learn more about Matt Cheuvront & see how far the rabbit hole goes? Subscribe to the Life Without Pants RSS feed & follow him on Twitter to keep in touch!

Remember a couple years ago when the term “Social Media” was foreign to all of us. Now, everyone and their mother (literally – my mom friended me on Facebook last week) is on the bandwagon trying to get the hang of this Social Media thing.

It’s become much more than a tool to stay connected with your old high school buddies, or to update your friends on what you ate for dinner last night. Social Media has become a regular part of our daily lives, and for businesses, an integral part of their marketing and PR strategies.

So with everyone on board – how does a business stand out from the rest? At the end of the day – Social Media is about forging, nurturing, and promoting relationships. The one on one connection Social Media allows between businesses and their consumers are allowing small businesses to not only compete with larger corporations, but thrive and succeed where the competition falls short.

Here in Chicago – there are a lot of businesses who “get” Social Media –
Threadless
Foiled Cupcakes,
GroupOn and
Grubhub to name a few.

Our generation is wise to the corporate act – and very rarely do we buy into a straight up sales pitch. This is why, when it comes to online advertising, we’re seeing more affiliate geo-targeted campaigns rather than pure Google ads. Businesses that get it focus on building a relationship first, helping us realize that there is a need or want there, and then acting on it.

Mari Luangrath, founder of Chicago-based Foiled Cupcakes, connected with me as a friend. She followed me several months ago and since then, we’ve become good friends both on and offline. Not once did she sell me on her product – not once did she throw a sales pitch my way. She focused solely on building a genuine relationship and friendship with me. Now I’m days away from signing a contract to have Foiled Cupcakes cater my wedding.

So what can business learn from this? What’s the take away? Here are some basic takeaways to implement into your Social Media marketing strategy:

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If you’re a business owner, social media is tantalizing. For free, you can set up a profile on a variety of different networks and have your products reach a larger customer base than ever before. All you have to do is make something viral, talk to the right influencers, and watch your sales time go through the roof!

While social media experts and consultants may tell you to “crush it” , become a “trust agent” or harness the power of the “groundswell” they generally underestimate  the time, investment, and strategy that goes into effective social media marketing, PR, and branding.

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This post is inspired by an experiment by @VanessaMiemis, author of the emergent by design blog. She asked her followers to write a post, entitled What I’ve Learned About Twitter, and then create a discussion around it. This is my contribution.

I’ll break this post down into three sections: What I’ve learned about individual Twitter use, What I’ve learned about using Twitter for small business, and what I’ve learned about using Twitter for larger corporations and well known brands.

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We obviously talk a lot about SEO content at The Ocean Agency – making sure we’ve got keyword-inclusive <h2> tags, bolding the right keywords, linking the right way. It’s all part of the effort to increase page rank and drive site traffic. Lately, I’ve seen a shift in SEO strategy from doing the right technical things to creating plain good content, and that’s really what it should be. Junta42 wrote a cool blog called 100 Social Media & Content Marketing Predictions for 2010 with folks like Seth Godin and Jason Falls chiming in. The biggest takeaway that I saw: quality content trumps frequent crappy content. Enter editorial calendars.

SEO Editorial Calendars = Quality Content

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Today, we had the wonderful honor of receiving a letter from the all powerful Google in the mail (yes a letter!). Between July 1 and September 30, Google users found our business listing 19559 times, making us a Google “favorite place”. Ok, so it’s a little exciting that Google has singled the Ocean Agency out as a high search volume business, but what’s the real point of the Google new favorite place system? How will it impact online business marketing?

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With the explosion of Twitter and social media, came tweet ups and meet ups as people want  to solidify their online connections in real life.

If you’re reading this blog, there’s a good chance you have been to a meet-up or tweet up. Let me tell you something, I love meeting new people and I love social events, but generally, tweet up are pretty bland. You go and you talk about how awesome Twitter is, and sit on your phone tweeting the whole time, and never make any real connections.

The Social Media Club Chicago holiday party/event last night, showed me just how valuable and fun a social media event can be. Here’s what they did right:

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You will be hearing more and more about “transmedia” in the coming months, as major brands are testing the waters creating advertising and marketing storylines that exist across multiple platforms and networks.

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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.

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