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The Chicago Trib did an article yesterday featuring a couple of random small businesses—a cruiseliner, a test preparation site, a real estate company and more—that have used social media to successfully drive their business.

Some highlights/lessons from the article:

Go where your customers are. The Scion Group, which owns and manages college housing, took its blogs to Facebook so they could reach their potential customers where they already play. Find out where your potential clients reside online by asking existing customers what types of social media they use (connecting off and online presences) and seeing where competitors and similar businesses in your field have successful online presences.

Don’t do it halfway! Posting events on social networks, blogging, having a Facebook profile won’t get you a lot of traction unless you have an integrated strategy for what you want to achieve, and actively work toward it every day. For example, PrepMe.com has a targeted, integrated social media presence to reach online clients: words of the day on Twitter, a Facebook crossword game, and Facebook group pages associated with high schools that use its services.

Be transparent. What does that mean? Being open, honest and responsive to online criticism. If someone complains about any aspect of your businesses, being online gives you the opportunity to acknowledge your shortcoming and make it right. Take advantage of that.

If you’re in the food business and haven’t heard about Kogi BBQ, L.A.’s roving Korean taco truck that commands hours-long lines and worldwide fans, you’re probably interested in their secret now. It only involves simple math: A bit of spot-on branding plus the perfect social media strategy equals 14,000 Twitter followers and a much-traversed blog; and coverage in the Los Angeles Times, LAist, Serious Eats, Yelp, and more, about a year after the truck’s debut.

How the heck did they do it? Social media guru Mike Prasad, now with Girlgamer.com, walked us through the process.

Step 1: Start with Basic Branding

Prasad and Kogi cofounder Mark Manguera came up with the basics over a three-hour lunch. “We wanted to create an iconic food phenomenon,” Prasad says. They started with a name; something distinctive and short, but not too cultural to where it wouldn’t cross over to the main market. Like Pinkberry. “Gogi,” Korean for meat, was tossed around; Prasad heard “Kogi,” which he felt was more accessible. “The K stands for Korean,” he says.

Lesson 2: Choose the Correct Social Media Platforms

Prasad felt Kogi’s Korean tacos were an embodiment of L.A. street culture, the fusion and food found all along its windy, populated asphalt.

“We really wanted to leverage the brand and create a culture around the brand, and we couldn’t do that if we stayed in the same place all the time,” Prasad said. Twitter was the obvious social media tool to keep potential street eaters up to speed on where the truck would be. Sure, Kogi employees would blog scheduled stops for the week, but they also moved around a lot, both to where the crowd would take them and after cops might make them move.

“Twitter was like a game—find the Kogi truck,” Prasad says. “And it does help create [customer] ownership of the company.”

Lesson 3: Bridge the Gap

But Prasad didn’t believe in a “if you build it, they will come” approach. So he and the rest of Kogi’s gang hit the streets to “hustle.”

“You have to broadcast your message,” he says. “So we looked for ways to engage our audience. We came up with nightclubs. The first week was really full. Steve [Yoo, promoter] is one of the guys; he’d go in the club and hustle in the club: ‘hey, you gotta come check this out.’ He’d bribe the security guys at the door with tacos.

“I invited influential people to try the tacos—LAist, key people. They liked it and talked about it.”

Mommybloggers and Yelp reviews came next, spurred by Prasad’s plugging the truck to hungry bloggers just let out of late conferences.

Lesson 4: Shutup and Let it Go

Well, just kinda. When you base your marketing on interactive social media platforms, Prasad says, you have to be open to customer ownership and participation. The key is to hone it to the point where it benefits you and the customer.

“The brand has to be focused on its core value, but you have to be flexible enough to let it go and flow where the consumer base takes it,” he says. “If you try to control it too much, it backlashes. And if you don’t do it enough your company isn’t gonna sustain itself.”

Kogi seriously considers the taco and other menu selections customers request, or visiting a site—often, UCLA—where customers have asked and gathered a crowd. Several bands have already made their own Kogi theme songs, which the Taco Truck 2.0 happily showcases on its blog.

Social media marketing campaigns take elbow grease to bridge the gap between on and offline audiences. Don’t have time? Let us do it.

So many businesses post a happy hour, dinner, or other event on Facebook and expect a magic throng to materialize at their door. But without certain planning, precautions, and promotion on other channels (including in-person and word-of-mouth), your event is bound to bust. Never fear: heed these rules to optimize your Facebook invites.

1. Target the right guest list

If you’re gonna invite all of your fans to a, say, happy hour event, know that the ones who live states away probably aren’t going to attend. Better to target more local friends. Take it a step further—ask and leave comments on your (local) opinion leader friends’ pages—preferably, people who live or work near your businesses—to recruit some more people to the event.

2. Use the right social network

Speaking of location, maybe Facebook isn’t the place to post your happy hour event. Maybe it’s better on a place like a Ning social network for your area. Find a group that engenders a category your business falls into, and start an event there. Or start your own group: “Downtown happy hour fanatics.”

3. Give due time

Not too long of a lead, and not too little. A week and a half is good to do the necessary legwork.

4. Jazz it up

Make a short, funny video about your event. Plant it on your Facebook page and plug and link to it on your ancillary social media outlets (Twitter, Ning, opinion leader blogs on which you comment). Visual media is arresting and instantly explanatory.

There isn’t a whole lot out there on Twittering for businesses who are selling to consumers, whether they’re boutiques, restaurants or Fortune 500 companies. The way B2C outlet owners should utilize Twitter varies with their services, but there are some general guidelines most can follow to generate business from the explosive social network, which grew almost 1700 percent from February 2008 to February 2009.

1. Know your audience.

Twittering from the hip is like thrashing in a swimming pool when you really want to swim—especially if you want to move beyond networking to driving sales. Start with who you know—the consumers, that is.

Use the search tool to look for people in your area who are tweeting about phrases or services that speak to your offerings, and follow them in hopes that they’ll follow you. Having a targeted audience makes it more likely that your enticing tweets will send them scurrying to your store.

2. Turn your offline customers into online ones.

When you’re collecting e-mail addresses for your Web or blog updates, collect Twitter handles, too (and Facebook URLs, while you’re at it). Or have an in-store Twitter handle party for a weekend where you collect all the identities you can. This can help turn biweekly customers into people that visit you every few days.

3. Don’t just spew into the Twittersphere. Sell.

Random thoughts often make their way onto Twitter, and that’s fine. But the majority of your tweets should drive followers directly to your store. If you are a restaurant with 500 followers in your area, and you start tweeting your lunch specials at 9:30 — 10:30 a.m., you can bet on getting direct business from that.

4. Search for—and plug into—trends.

Twitter is, above all else, an information goldmine—If you know how to filter it. Simply hitting the search button shows you several “trending topics” people are talking about. Want to make a kitchy, timely event that’ll draw customers and possibly magazine editors? Theme it according to the trends—“AIG Bonus Return Bust”; “SXSW in Indianapolis Music Festival,” etc. (Not sure if the latter would be legal, but you get the idea.)

5. Combine and conquer.

Have a couple of competitors in the same area that are on Twitter? Get together with them to offer your collective guests Twitter-specific coupons. Send the tweets out several times a day with the handles of all participants (@your store name @participant store No. 1 @participant store No. 2, etc.) and a TinyUrl to the printable coupon. All the links will show up prominently, and you’ll probably get your competitors’ clients to discover your own Twitter presence.

6. Use plugins.

There are literally hundreds of plugins that help you filter and extend Twitter’s results and capabilities. The Web Pitch has a great list of the “Top 100 Twitter Tools.” Try TwtQpon to create savvy looking coupons on Twitter; track click-through rates with Twittertise. There are also tons of plugins on this list and beyond that help organize and prioritize your tweets.

7. Follow the right people.

Your followers should be your potential customers. You should be following them, of course. But keep tabs on your competitions’ traction, too. And if you know the Twitter handles of some local editors and station producers, you might engage them and land some free press.

8. Be consistent.

This is the hardest part. Once you start tweeting, you have to do it regularly. If you start sending out promotions and specials, make it at the same time of day every weekday, or on the one day of the week you want the special to run. Driving business through Twitter takes time and dedication.

Of course, if you’re too busy, you can always let us do it.

We target specific businesses who are already on an upward trajectory. We just help them reach critical mass and go viral.

“But who in the world is growing these days?” you ask. Simple: craft breweries. Inexpensive gourmet eateries. (I love it! I’m a food writer!)

Don’t believe me? Articles abound on the craft beer growth phenomenon. This AP report references Mount Carmel Brewing Company in Cincinnati, who just starting selling 6-packs in January 2009. When it was time to restock their stores, they were shocked to find that their brews had all been bought up. They project 3,000 barrels in 2010, up from 1,000 last year.

Andy Crouch’s popular Beerscribe blog summarized a 5 percent increase in craft beer sales and a general downtrending for macrobrewers in 2008.

As for food—if it wasn’t wildly apparent from Top Chef’s ratings, America is taking comfort in gourmet during this time of economic hardship. But they’re making it as frugal as possible, cooking at home and indulging in small, inexpensive treats like Whoopie or Moon Pies and, yes, craft beer.

Who is poised for growth locally? My bet is places like Gourmet Frank’s, an upscale Chicago-style hot dog hawker set to open in Indianapolis’ Broad Ripple in about two weeks (the original location is in Palo Alto, CA, but I’ve intercepted a manager who said this one won’t be quite the same). And, of course, Brugge Brasserie, which gets so packed on weekends (even at 10 p.m.!) they’ve started sending downstairs diners to the newly built upstairs bar to dine.

The biggest problem for businesses like these right now are not necessarily attracting local customers (although social media will certainly speed that up for Frank’s) but raising awareness in ways other than regular marketing and advertising campaigns. Print media are losing market share and readers by the boatload as consumers flock to the Web to research and find goods and services.

If Brugge Brasserie wants to penetrate the national market—raise awareness and distribution—a space-spanning, SEO-amping, connection-making campaign involving a blog integrated with meaningful updates, Twitter, and Facebook is the way to do it. That goes for any of the small businesses on this page.