One of our newest clients, Blind Tiger Santa Barbara, is celebrating the month of November and men’s health with a Made In Movember ‘STACHE BASH next Saturday, November 22nd.

They are also hosting a contest for the BEST ‘STACHE on social media—if you post a photo to either INSTAGRAM or TWITTER with hashtags #stachebash AND #blindtigersb, and FOLLOW @blindtigersb, you could win a bundle of super awesome prizes!

‘STACHE BASH supports the Movember Foundation, who seeks to raise awareness about men’s health and wellness.

The winner of the contest will recieve:
—2 Free Tickets to the Made in Movember ‘STACHE BASH on November 22nd
—2 Free Drink Cards
—Gift Certificates to Richie’s Barber Shop
—Dinner for two at Blush SB

Ello is a revolutionary social networking site unlike all the rest. Ello, is different from Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking giants in that it is completely add free. Ello’s manifesto reads, “We believe a social network can be a tool for empowerment. Not a tool to deceive, coerce, and manipulate — but a place to connect, create, and celebrate life. You are not a product. Ello. This is what makes Ello unique from its forefathers.  To generate revenue, Ello allows for users to customize their pages with special feature tools which may be purchased for a small price according to Ello these features are not necessary, but do provide some financial support to the company, as well as allowing for users to continue to create and uniquely customize their social networking experience.

Ello is set up as like a mash between Facebook, Pintrest and Twitter, in which users may generate statuses, post pictures and gifs, find friends and comment on posts. Started by a small group of programmers and artists, Ello has sprung up quickly with rapid popularity. There are as many as 35,000 requests to join the social networking site per hour according to The Guardian , and Ello’s head team is working rapidly to keep up with their growing popularity. The site however is not new; Ello was launched in March and was intended to be a small, invite- only community between friends. Interest was recently sparked by the LGBT communities’ migration to other social networking sites after Facebook launched their real name policy, prohibiting users from using names other than their legal names. As interest increased, Ello became more public, but one must still obtain an invite to join the site. Some have even begun selling Ello invites on eBay ranging from 5-150 dollars according to Mashable ,but it is still unclear whether or not Ello will be a fad, or is here to stay. 

You know how when you’re at a party and there’s always that struggle when multiple people want to play music but just one sound system is available? Or when you’re at a wedding and want your music-savvy friends to make a playlist in real time? Or when you’re on that long summer road trip and don’t have any new playlists that everyone likes? Aghh.

Enter the solution: Pow Wow is a new iPhone app that allows friends to collaborate on playlists in real time. You invite your friends, and create Pow Wows (playlists) so anyone invited can add songs. Pow Wow is powered by Spotify, and as long as one person has a Premium account then everyone in the Pow Wow will be able to contribute.

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VINE Update
Vine recently updated their iOS app with some major revamping, which will particularly please those who primarily use Vine to make stop motion videos.

The New Camera Interface boasts many new features and tools:

• Optional grid to frame your shot (the grid square icon at the bottom)
• Ghost feature: tap on the ghost icon in the lower right corner of the camera to activate this feature, and it keeps your last frame transparent so you can align your next shot for a flawless stop-motion capture.
• Focus button: this allows the camera to focus on one object in the shot, and is a much-needed update as many users have previously struggled to focus in their Vines.
• Privacy: Vine now allows you to set your account to Private, similar to Instagram’s privacy feature.
• “Re-vine”: Essentially the Vine version of a Retweet on Twitter, Vine now allows you to Re-vine someone else’s video.
• Categories: Vine added 15 new categories for users to browse through popular videos: comedy, art and experimental, cats, dogs, family, beauty and fashion, food, health and fitness, nature, music, news and politics, special effects, sports, urban and weird.

INSTAGRAM Update
As of today, Instagram now allows embedding of Photos and Videos on desktop. Once embedded, it will show your Instagram handle above the image or video, and notes at the bottom. Once someone clicks on your photo or video, it takes them to your Instagram Web Profile.

So, who do you think is winning this war on social media video apps?

The Santa Barbara Earth Day Festival is near! Kicking off on April 20 and concluding on April 21, the two-day festival has been known for their vast display of various companies and organizations. Previous Exhibitors include California Solar Electric, KJEE 92.9FM, LoaTree, Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, and us, Oniracom!

The SB Earth Festival, organized by the Community Environmental Council (CEC) and partnered with Plus One Events, New Noise Music Foundation, and LoaTree are excited to bring two days filled with exhibits, music, and green technology to the Santa Barbara Community.

We are also excited to be exhibiting at the Social Media Lounge along with our friends at LoaTree. CEC encourages companies an organizations to become exhibitors at the festival. The registration form can be found on the Earth Day Festival website, and takes only about 10-15 minutes to complete. Here’s what you need to have ready when registering:

We knew something big was going to happen when Facebook announced three months ago that they have purchased Instagram. A lot of users however, did not expect this drastic policy shift.

Beginning January 16, Facebook “claims the perpetual right to license all public Instagram photos to companies or any other organization, including for advertising purposes, which would effectively transform the Web site into the world’s largest stock photo agency” (CNET). This means that Facebook won’t have to pay you anything to use your images. If for say, you took a splendid image of a restaurant, and that restaurant decides that they’d like to use that image for advertising purposes, they pay Facebook and not you.

CNET also makes another great point, stating that this policy could “trigger state privacy laws” if the photos that Facebook sells contain images of young children without obtaining parental consent.

Social media has been without a doubt a very prominent factor in this year’s presidential election. Lab42 recently performed a study surveying 500+ American social media users who were ages 18 and over. They came up with a pretty interesting infographic that broke down who registered Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and others are voting for. The infographic by Lab42 looks at some other interesting statistics such as what percentage of social media users tune in to satirical news shows such as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Registered Democrats and Independents were each about 17% above what registered Republicans reported. Take a scroll through the full infographic below to see the rest of Lab42’s unique statistics of American social media users.

A few weeks ago, we launched our client CapoSonic’s awesome webpage, and now we have officially launched CapoSonic’s Kickstarter! Kickstarter is a funding platform for various types of projects. A funding goal is created with a deadline. If the project succeeds its goal, all “backers” who offered to contribute money are charged, if the project does not reach its goal, no one is charged. It’s up to YOU to give CapoSonic its kick start!

Late last month, the unveiling of Google+ prompted the world over reconsider the future of social media and online networking, and many began to wonder if The Goog’s latest product would boast enough innovative features to dethrone Facebook, king of the social networking realm. Speculation has run rampant as the search giant’s latest foray into new media gains momentum, much of which attempts to size up Google+ against Facebook. Many in the tech world are projecting whether or not + will be successful both in stealing existing social network users and attracting new ones. But here at Oniracom, my compadres and I have been interested in how Google+ will integrate into the larger scheme of social media marketing and brand growth strategies. While wishful thinking would allow Google+, Facebook and others to harmoniously coincide with each other in the virtual world, it is becoming ever-more clear (as is obvious with Facebook’s Skype contract retaliation) that there really may only be room for one. It’s impossible to know which network, if any, will prevail, but Google+ is making a strong attempt by promising features and upgrades not available on Facebook or other social networking sites.

Thank you to Ignite Social Media for this great INFOGRAPHIC about our average consumption of social media.

The switch from the old profile to the new profile that Facebook pulled on its users in late December/early January anticipated some other alterations to occur. Alas, the new Pages on Facebook is here! The new Pages redesign resembles and operates like a user’s regular profile. However, there are multiple differences in regards to the Page’s and their admins.

The new Pages consists of all the features of the new profile more or less. For example, the menu bar is on the left-hand column with links to the wall, photo albums, videos, tour dates, etc., which also eliminates the information box that was a component of the old profile and old pages of Facebook. The edit tab option has therefore also switched to the very top of the page. Admins can now click up top to edit their pages, which directs them to editing the info, apps, profile picture, marketing, etc.

The Background:

In Apple’s Keynote this morning, they launched a much needed upgrade to iTunes that includes social integration.

Much like current sites Rdio and Last.fm, iTunes is finally getting a social overhaul that will transform iTunes into a music discovery social network called Ping.  You can now “follow” your friends to see what they are listening to and share recommendations - all without leaving iTunes. 

Initial reports indicate that Ping only displays data for albums purchased, NOT listening data.  I have yet to confirm this first hand, but if true, this is a big disappointment from Apple’s latest social endeavor.  If Ping only displays what albums your friends purchase off the iTunes store, they are missing out on a huge amount of data and interaction with listening data.  Without listening data in Ping, last.fm will still thrive.

What does Ping mean for artists?

Much like Facebook’s News Feed, when you go into iTunes Ping, you will see an activity stream that includes recent activity from the friends that you follow.  In addition, artists will now be able to post updates that are delivered to this news feed for people that follow them.  This is huge.

In the keynote, they showed an example of Jack Johnson posting some recent pictures from his upcoming music video, and Lady Gaga sharing a video blog.  What does this mean?  You now have another outlet to push content through. Time will tell if Ping will be a major player in the social game, but for now, you’re better safe than sorry by being on it.  iTunes has a lot of customers.

I am currently getting access to accounts for our clients, but am unable to disclose how to get access for your artist in order to post.  I will disclose when I am allowed!

iTunes 10 vs. Cloud-Based Music Services (Rdio, Spotify, MOG, etc):

I was really hoping iTunes was going to go “to the cloud” on this upgrade.  These social integrations are great, but I won’t be using them much because I’m sticking with Rdio’s subscription service.  I much rather pay $10/month and get unlimited streaming to an enormous catalog of music on my computer and mobile than start buying albums for $10 a piece on iTunes again.

Until iTunes goes to the cloud and starts offering a subscription streaming service (or until Google beats them to the punch), my loyalty still lies with Rdio.

This board isn’t really informative at all, but it sure is funny if you’re familiar with the social media landscape!

(We love how Myspace is jail….)

A Facebook Fan page is one of the many ways for fans to stay connected with you.  More and more artists are recognizing the importance of a fan page.  They are going beyond the standard lackluster fan page look and feel to create pages that fans actually enjoy using and interacting with.

I have recently been browsing through the The Facebook Showcase blog to see what other artists, brands and businesses are doing to pimp out their fan pages.  There are tons of great ideas and examples of excellent page designs there.

One of the more notable fan pages (and also one that Oniracom designed!) can be found in the Celebrity and/or Enterainment categories - Lenny Kravitz!  The Facebook Showcase describes the page as having “a nice tab promoting his new tour dates”.  You can check out Lenny’s fan page here and “like it”!

Today’s online networking environment requires simplicity and solutions in response to demand. First people demanded a more open Facebook, and now they’re demanding ease and integration. Everyone tweets, posts, updates, links, likes, comments, and tags these days, and although Facebook is admittedly the best, there will always be room for improvement. This stage in the social networking game will be won with easy and open integration.

Facebook and Pandora are on the leading edge of the key players in this relatively new game.

Found this interesting message when I went onto one of the pages I admin on Facebook this morning:

It seems that Facebook is doing away with dealing with ‘Fans’, substituting for the lighter-weight term ‘Like’.  As far as I can tell (thus far), “liking” a page on Facebook is the exact same thing as “Becoming a Fan” was.

Facebook has yet to change their “Become a Fan” button to the new “Like” button on some profiles and also the Fan Badges that you embed on your webpages.

One of the biggest advantages to being a contestant on American Idol?  Building a strong online fan base to take with you once the show is over.  15 minutes of fame turns into a potential career if you can grow (and keep) your fan base.

However, American Idol has stomped on this growth by not allowing American Idol contestants to maintain their individual social media pages, as it is taking traffic away from the American Idol page. 

The following excerpt is from The Wall Street Journal:

Want to tweet personal “feel better” messages to Crystal Bowersox? Too bad — your time has passed.

As of roughly 6 p.m. ET on March 3, all Twitter, Facebook and MySpace followers of individual “American Idol” contestants were sent the same message: “Thanks so much for following me/joining my Fan Page! All my updates from now on will be on our Official American Idol 9 Contestant Page, please become a fan there to read all my updates throughout the season!”

That means that for 20 contestants, they all share one Twitter, one Facebook, and one Myspace.  It’s pretty unlikely that they would give passwords out to each of the contestants, so any tweets coming “from the singers” are probably highly moderated, if not completely fabricated. 

So much for honest, spontaneous updates.  If I cared about American Idol, I would be pretty upset.  Right now I’m just upset that all of their social media pages are hideous.  Where’s the design?

Facebook chat is a powerful feature within Facebook that has become increasingly popular.  Now there’s even more reason to celebrate.  Allow me to introduce you to Facebook Chat - Everywhere. 

Starting yesterday you can now send and receive chat messages from your favorite desktop instant messaging client.  You’ll never miss a message when you leave Facebook and you’ll be in total control of how and where you chat with your Facebook friends.  Hooray?  Check it.

2/9/10 UPDATE: Dr. Dog was about to hit 20,000 fans on Facebook (solely credited to the hard work and promotion from their original fans), and then they decided they were going to give the exclusive release of the song to Stereogum.

Yes, they will reach their end goal of getting 20,000 fans, but they didn’t reward their Facebook fans whatsoever.  Bad practice in my opinion.

The indie-rock/soul band Dr. Dog has made a deal with their fans: Get us to 20,000 fans on Facebook, and we’ll let you hear the first track off the new album.

When they originally posted this, they were around 7,000 fans on Facebook, so they were asking of a pretty big feat.  Each fan needed to convince two of their friends to become a fan of Dr. Dog.

Two weeks after posting their proposition, they had doubled their Facebook fans, and are quickly continuing to grow. 

Their fans went above and beyond in order to spread the word:

One thing you need to know: this won’t work for every band. 

Dr. Dog is one of those bands that is known for having a small, but incredibly devoted fan base (another example: Delta Spirit).  It’s much better to have 10 super fans over 100 regular fans.  Their fans probably like other indie-underground bands, and they are probably the friend in the group that is always listening to a new band.  Now they have a payoff for spreading the word: they get to hear the new single first.  The fans are the most important thing you have.  Give them incentive, and let them do the work for you.

During the summer of 2009, Lenny Kravitz embarked on a huge European Tour in support of his “Let Love Rule 20(09)” re-release.  We leveraged some serious social media tactics through the use of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube, Kyte, iLike and more.  One of the most notable social media campaigns that we created used a very powerful Facebook tool: photo-tagging.

We took advantage of this Facebook feature and grew Lenny’s presence exponentially on Facebook.  The case study below details our strategy and the step-by-step process we used to create this unique campaign.  This case study among many others can also be found on our website - www.oniracom.com

Recently, I was creating tour date events in facebook for one of our artists that has a huge fan base.  I was blazing through the creation of these events when I received a warning message that I’ve never see before:

It looks as though facebook, is now watching over the content we post and the frequency of the postings.  I thought this functionality was pretty cool at first - I liked how facebook was looking out for the well-being of the fans and what they supposedly wanted.  That lasted for about a minute.  I then became a bit annoyed that facebook had this power over me and wouldn’t let me continue with the work that needed to be done.  It was all a little too “big brother-esque” for me. 

I can understand and appreciate what facebook is trying to do for the fans in this situation.  However, those tour dates needed to get up in order for the page to have the latest and greatest content.  Isn’t that what a facebook fan page is for?  Further, I wasn’t publishing any of the events on the artist’s wall so no one was even seeing them. 

Perhaps it’s a bug or perhaps it isn’t.  What do you guys think of this facebook warning message?  Good idea or bad idea?

I usually try to refrain from using any sort of sporting analogy.  Unfortunately, “Game Changer” seemed to be the most fitting title for Google’s new social media attempt- Google Wave.  Google already has a well established name, a great reputation and a ton of money- it only seems natural that they would try their hands at social networking.  It looks like they might have a “winner” too.