Hi everyone!

We would like to ask for a couple minutes of your time if you are in the wine industry and maintain a facebook fan page. Please help us in creating our latest product offering by answering this short poll:

CLICK THE BELOW LINK:

What would like to show on your Facebook Fan page to increase its reach and effectiveness?

Tweetology, the Twitter curation platform we helped develop for online advertising giant, Adgent007, will be appearing on the big, big screen!

Jumbotron big.

Essence Magazine has chosen Tweetology to become the offical Twitter curation platform for the three-day Essence Music Festival in New Orleans, LA.

Concert-goers will be able to see real time tweets during the show from fellow concert-goers and the artists appearing at the festival.

Some of the artists in the feed will include:

Janet Jackson
LL Cool J
Mary J Blige
Gladys Knight
Monica
Arrested Development

We’ll be posting pics from the show next week!

Things have been cooking for us ever since the start of 2010. Tweetedia, the Twitter Management System we developed for Adgent007 is spreading to some major publication hubs. Check it out on Ellen Degeneres, the Ultimate Fighting Challenge’s event pages, Healdsburg’s Wine Road and the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). More Hu-hu-huge sites are coming soon, so stay tuned.

The Tweetedia product itself has a ton of new features now including color pickers for the widget, the ability to reply/retweet and direct message a post and posting your own twitter update, all from the widget.

In the spirit of the Olympics, here’s a Winter Olympics-focused Tweetedia Widget to enjoy. Took less than 10 minutes to build and add the custom colors … so cool:

We’ve been busier than North Pole elves lately, launching a very cool new product called Tweetedia for our client Adgent 007.

We’ll be at digiday:APPS on December 10, 2009, at The Renaissance Hotel, Hollywood. At 12:15pm we, along with the Adgent 007 team, will be demonstrating how Tweetedia works and how it can benefit your web site.

For all of the information you need to catch up with us at digiday:APPS, click here. If you don’t want to wait until Thursday to learn more about Tweetedia, click here!

We hope to see you there!

Our office will be closed from Thursday, November 25 through the weekend, as we don our stretchy pants in observance of Thanksgiving. We will be back Monday morning, November 30.

If you need to speak with someone urgently, you can reach us by filling out this form, and someone will get back to you as soon as possible.

We hope everyone has an enjoyable and relaxing Thanksgiving weekend!

- The SonomaCreative team

We need your help! We’re one of the potential panelists for the 2010 South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas.

If we receive enough PanelPicker votes to appear on the panel, SonomaCreative founders, Mark Gordon and Matt Kirk, will be presenting tips and valuable information about how companies can use social media avenues to boost business and increase sales:

Making the Most Out of Where Everyone Is

Organizer: Mark Gordon, SonomaCreative

Description: Social media is the new vehicle for companies trying to engage target audiences, but what keeps certain campaigns/applications from standing out rather than being overwhelmed by Web 2.0 noise? This session will provide best practices and case studies to show what works and what doesn’t when developing campaigns/applications for Facebook and Twitter without creating yet another quiz or chain letter.

Questions Answered:

1. What social media sites should companies use to target new customers?
2. How should an attendee use Facebook differently from Twitter and others?
3. Which campaigns and applications are best for social media?
4. What sites are best to find target audiences? What’s the difference between the sites?
5. What measurements should a company use/expect to track results?
6. What are a few tips and tricks that can differentiate a campaign?
7. How can I make money on social networking sites? Is there an ROI?
8. What is the protocol / etiquette and how does this differ from more passive marketing campaigns?
9. What is the portability of these initiatives across other platforms and social networking sites?
10. How can I streamline the conversion and retention of users leveraging these real time media portals?

Level: Beginner

Category: Branding / Marketing / Publicity, Content Management, Design Thinking, Social Networking, Web Apps / Widgets

Type: Dual

Event: Interactive 2010

Please vote for us! Voting ends at the end of the day on Friday, September 4th.

This afternoon The Press Democrat published an article reviewing this year’s Barrel Tasting event, put on by one of our clients, the Russian River Wine Road. Also mentioned in the article is another one of our clients - Timothy Nordvedt from Bella Vineyards & Wine Caves.

Click here to read “Barrel tasting brouhaha: Aficionados vs. partyers”.

For years, people with web sites have had to make a choice between using a dull “web-safe” font for text headings to ensure search engine optimization and using images for headings to create the desired look and feel for their site.  As obsolete browsers are fading into obscurity and cool new internet technologies are being introduced almost daily, the need to compromise between appearance and searchability is no more.

sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) is a method that allows developers to insert any font into a without sacrificing accessibility, SEO, or markup validation.  We use sIFR on several of our client sites and our own (for an example look no further than the title of this post).  Here’s how it works:

The page is loaded into the browser as normal with all sIFR text being rendered as standard HTML text.  Then sIFR uses JavaScript to recreate the text in Flash to display the desired font.  To the browser and all search engines, the text appears to be normal text, while the end user sees the cool font redrawn in Flash.  If the end user does not have a Flash Player installed on their browser or JavaScript is disabled, the standard HTML text will display, so that all of your users can still view the page.

For sIFR documentation and FAQs, click here.

Here’s a scenario that’s all too common among anybody who updates the content of their web site: You receive a Microsoft Word document with text that needs to be put online. The logical thing to do would be to copy and paste the content from Microsoft Word into a WYSIWYG editor, common in most content management systems such as WordPress, Joomla, and so forth.

So what’s the problem? The behind-the-scenes formatting code put in place by Word. This code is inserted with good intentions in mind, but more often than not results in you wasting a good amount of time manually reformatting all of the text. In some cases this is done on a line-by-line basis.

That’s where WordOff.org comes to the rescue.

WordOff.org is a handy web site with one purpose: It allows users to paste text, copied from Microsoft Word, into the text box they provide. Once that is done, you simply click on the “clean up” button and within a second or two your content will have the Word formatting removed.

Now all you have to do is copy the clean content from the text box and paste it into your WYSIWYG editor.