Looking to travel this spring? Hunting through different travel sites for convenient hotels and cheap flights can give you a headache. Event planners are on the move, whether it’s for conventions, galas, or fun. This is why we tried Wanderfly, a travel recommendation engine that goes beyond flights and hotels.  Users tailor the settings to fit their budgets and interests, and the site uses your social networks and other travel search engines to give suggestions.

ABCey is planning an event in Washington, D.C. this spring for a company attending the International Trademark Association’s Annual Meeting, so we decided to let Wanderfly help with our travel itinerary.

We set the specifications for San Francisco to Washington DC, $600 per person, early May, and for 4 days. The coolest part of this site is that you can add your interests.  For this trip we decided that our interests were: landmarks (can’t miss those in DC), food (event planners have to eat), and outdoors (May is lovely).  When we hit the “Get Going” button, we were transported to the front steps of the White House…well, not really, but it gave us everything that we needed to get there.

The first thing we did is check out the flight and hotel options.  Wanderfly uses content from travel sites such as Orbitz, Hotels.com, Facebook, Foursquare, Yelp, and Mashable.  We found flight options and hotels with reviews and tips right on the page. The activities suggestions are really what makes the service unique.  For us, it recommended highly reviewed restuarants, hiking trails, and all of the important monuments. If you log into Facebook through the site, it accesses your network’s knowledge and allows you to post a question asking for advice.  

Interested yet? Even if you don’t know where you want to go on vacation, Wanderfly will make recomendations for you based on your interests and budget.  We suggest that you try them out! It is free and easy to plan vacations, even if they’re imaginary. Have you ever used Wanderfly? What travel services do you generally use? Let us know in the comments or find us on Twitter!

Do you ever spend hours in a store or shopping online, trying to find the perfect gift for someone, but just can’t quite figure out what to get them? Well, now your days have become much easier, and just in time for the holidays!  Givvy is an “open community that let’s you participate in shaping the next gift-giving trend”. Whether it’s for a birthday, holiday present, housewarming party or a little something for yourself, our community of curators makes it easy to discover trendy new gifts that will inspire you and delight your friends and family.  You can also keep track of your most important occasions and social events with a personalized calendar and gift reminder service.

Givvy is uniquely designed for use inside Facebook—so you can discover gifts and share occasions while staying connected to the friends you love most. Givvy is an open community that let’s you participate in shaping the next gift-giving trend. Simply share your favorite gift ideas with friends and earn points as your influence gains in popularity. The members with the most influence earn exclusive rewards and join our community of Curators.

Your Holiday season of gift giving has now become much easier.  Make sure to check out Givvy’s Facebook page for great ideas for the perfect gift.

ABCey Events would like to thank Larry Rubin, one of Givvy’s founder’s for making our gift-giving days much easier!

Google has finally made it possible for Google+ to have brand pages so businesses can merge and communicate with Google’s social network. Rather than having a Google+ profile, it will be much easier for companies to promote themselves via their own page. This will make it easier for followers to interact with the company and hopefully will increase the brand’s followers.  Users can choose to follow brands, such as specific, news, games, or restaurants, and be able to interact with that specific brand.  Ben Parr states that “when users add a brand to their circles, it increases that brand’s follower count”.  Hopefully this will be beneficial to businesses! This is very similar to Facebook and we are curious to see how and if it will affect Facebook’s brand pages.

Zeny Huang, Emerging Media Strategist at JWT New York, thinks that Google+ will be better and more successful than Facebook for four reasons:

1. Better Search Opportunities: There must be better search benefits for Google+ users because of Google.com domain.
2. More Customization: Google+ users will be able to use the excess white space on the sides of the profile for custom skinning of the brand page as well as space for advertisements.
3. Better Analytics: Google Analytics will help guide brands in organizing and specifying content on their page to direct towards their followers.  Also Google Analytics will allow advertisers have space for media placement that and will create more interaction between their followers and media spending.
4. Google Can Learn from Facebook: Google can learn from Facebook’s advantages and weaknesses and make Google+ better.

Customers will use social media to give compliments or complaints about a company, regardless of whether that company uses social media itself.  Therefore, it is important for a business to use social media to give their customers an environment to share their thoughts. Dave Toliver, Director of Corporate Marketing at Angel, gives seven ways to create a memorable customer experience with social media.

• Give Your Customers a Place to Talk:  If you don’t have a place for your customers to talk openly, they will do it behind your backs and you may never know what customers don’t like. Therefore, having a place for customers to freely give compliments or complaints, allows you to know what you are doing well or need to resolve.
• Integrate Social Media Into Your Customer Service:  Giving a place for customers to voice their complaints allows for you to find a way to fix them, but be prepared to have resolutions for the complaints.  Likewise, if a customer compliments you, make sure to give them thanks or even coupons and rewards.
• Activate Your Existing Customer Base:  Many businesses have more customers than they do Facebook or Twitter followers.  Reach out to the current customers to start building your social media fan base. Then use the social media to reach new customers and perhaps promotions to sell your product.
• Be Proactive:  Interact with customers. Engaging in conversations will make you noticeable and customers happy.
• Reward Influencers:  If you reward customers, they will most likely be advocates for your business.
• Create Compelling Content:  Give your customers something they can admire on your page.  Remember, they are following you, so you want to make them feel special and exclusive.
• Stand Out From the Crowd:  The majority of social media is done by text. Be different and make yourself stand out. Use pictures, voice applications, or even music, to engage with the customers and make yourself memorable.

Friends! This Thursday, October 27th we have a really special event for you. Rise2Shine & Marilyn’s Mission is collaborating to bring their 1st Annual MONSTER MASH @ MARS Fundraiser to help alleviate the suffering of young underprivileged children, locally and in Haiti. Our local favorite Superstar DJ’s Clarkie and Dirtyhertz will be gracing the decks & providing us with some great tunes for the eve! The event will be held at Mars Bar, SF located at 798 Brannan St and will run from 9:00pm-1:00am. Costumes are optional and there will be some other fun stuff in store including a Raffle & great prizes! For more information and to RSVP, you can visit the Facebook Event Page.

Marilyn’s Mission has been supplying household necessities to children and families in need for 13 years. They work in conjunction with Holy Family Day Home, a day care center for homeless and low income children, and many other charitable organizations. Many people want to be charitable around the holidays, but the people who need it most, are in continuous need. Marilyn’s mission strives to supply all year round.

Rise2Shine (R2S) is a 501(c)(3) Non-Profit organization established to help alleviate the suffering of young children living in impoverished developing countries worldwide, with a current focus on Haiti. R2S concentrates on helping the forgotten children, those children from six months to five years of age. These children live in abject poverty and are too young to attend public school, resulting in minimal access to essential food and educational services.They are super excited to finally announce the grand opening of their flagship location in Fond-Parisien, Haiti on 11-11-11 (only 2wks after this fundraiser).

With your help, we can all make this possible. To ensure a better future for our children, please RSVP today and come out and show your support! Suggested donation $15! You can also make donations on the Rise2Shine website here.

We’re hoping that we get to the point where Sean Parker, the Napster co-founder and Facebook founding president calls us as last minute to pull together an event that warrants over 300 facebook “likes.”  He was celebrating the arrival of his latest venture, Spotify, the European-based music-streaming service that launched in the United States earlier this year and quickly picked up more than 10 million subscribers. Stanlee Gatti was the lucky planner that was hired to produce this incredible last minute event. He says that his crew had to pull the whole thing together in less than two days. “I got the phone call at 12:08 a.m. on Monday night.”

The graffiti theme continued inside the warehouse where soaring Rye Bar cocktail stands and bars teemed with every top-shelf tipple imaginable. All the better to pair with the bounteous McCall Associates buffet stands groaning beneath sushi and lobster bars, spit-roasted suckling pigs, pounds of fresh-sliced proscuitto and Parker’s personal favorite, Mac & Cheese copiously sprinkled with just-shaved truffles, six pounds of the pungent tuber which McCall Executive Chefs Lucas Schoemaker and Josip Martinovic had flown in from France. Amid the exhuberant extravagence, a few whispers about a potential bubble burst wafted upward to the warehouse ceiling bumping into towering chandeliers. “This isn’t old school because the first tech boom was never this good,” observed one partygoer, with a joking aside. “This is about kings and artisans of the court. So it’s more like medieval school.”

Spotify allows users to easily play music and share it with their friends in real time via their Facebook profiles. The collective hope is that increased access and exposure to new music will result in a boost in sales for record companies and maybe an incentive to subscribe to the full-fledged versions of the services on offer.

“What we discovered is the product consumers were willing to pay for was convenience,” Parker said. “Solving the piracy problem can’t happen unless you build a service that will compete with it. The party drew many Silicon Valley and music industry luminaries, including the managers of Top-10 pop acts such as Eminem and Bruno Mars. Zuckerberg made a brief cameo in the pit during Snoop Dogg’s raucous, expletive-laced set while socialites, including author Danielle Steel and former Mayor Willie Brown, mingled with guests on the long white couches that lined the room. (Lady Gaga was rumored to be making an appearance, but that didn’t happen.)

For the entire SF gate article, read here.

Is Google+, also known as G+, Google Plus or Plus, really a competition for Facebook? As you already know, the major difference between the two is in the privacy settings. Facebook does allow you to create lists, but they’re incredibly time consuming and you can’t post directly to just those in a certain list (you can only view). Google+ allows you to manage the content as you post it through creating Circles of your networks. Also, there is that magic +1 button that apparently might influence the SEO presence of our posts. Today, for most of us Facebook has become a natural part of our every day communication process. G+ is great, but do we really need another social network to post to if we already have one, or two, maybe 5 that already serve this purpose? It really would be great to just have one platform for all of our online activities. Among tweeting, posting, blogging, sharing one can easily get confused. Personally, I am loving the Huddle video chat feature and have already conducted a few hour long business calls. Just make sure you take a shower first!

Does G+ have a chance of beating out Facebook? Should Facebook be even concerned? In any event, here at ABCey Events, we always look forward to changes and plan accordingly!

Here at ABCey Events we know that it can be difficult to keep up with the latest technology and stay connected in the social media world with all the new innovations being created. The new buzz about Google+ may have some of you hesitant to jump on the bandwagon right away. You’ve just become comfortable navigating through Facebook and you can’t imagine starting over. Well, there is hope for those of you who want to make the change but don’t want to start completely over. We found an easy step by step process to migrate all of your friends, pictures, videos and other data to Google+.

1. Migrate your friends: A social network is nothing without a group of friends with whom to talk, so the first thing you’ll want to do is move your friends. The easiest way to transfer your Facebook friends is to import them through a Yahoo email address. To do this, head to mail.yahoo.com and click the Create New Account button (if you already have a Yahoo or Flickr account, you can skip this step). Once you’ve created an account, sign in and head to the Contacts tab. Click on “Import Contacts” and choose the Facebook option. You should now see all your Facebook friends in your Yahoo address book. Lastly, head to Google+ and go to the Circles tab. Click “Find and Invite” and click the Yahoo button. It’ll add all your Yahoo Contacts.

2. Migrate your Photos: You have built up a lot of photos from your own computer and your friend’s and it would be a shame to loose them. Migrating your photos is ridiculously easy with the Move Your Photos Google Chrome extension. Install it, click on its icon in the extension bar, and log in to your Facebook account. Select the photos you want to transfer and click the upload button at the very bottom of the page. Don’t log out while it works, just let it do its thing.

3.Mirgate your Videos: The only way to move your videos, unfortunately, is to download the entirety of your Facebook data and re-upload them. To do this, head to Account > Account Settings, and scroll down to “Download Your Information”. Hit the “learn more” link and hit he Download button. It will take awhile to gather your info, but you’ll receive an email when it’s done, and you can download a ZIP file full of your photos, videos, and profile information.

Now that all your data’s been migrated, you can enjoy using Google+ as your main social network. There isn’t a foolproof, one-step way to migrate your data, but this should help make the process quite a bit easier. If you’re not ready to make the switch yet it’s understandable. ABCey Events is learning new things every day about Google+ and we will keep you up to date with any new tips we find.  To find out more helpful tricks, view the full article.

Have you made the switch to Google+ yet? Do you think it will take over facebook?

Get ready for a weekend full of music, food, art, and wine! The Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival is coming back to Golden Gate Park on August 12th -14th. Mark your calendars and tell your friends to attend this great summer event. Before we get into the line-up, here’s some fun info for you on Golden Gate park and why it’s called Outside Lands. We are really excited and can’t believe the talent they’ve got this year. It keeps getting better and better!

HISTORY:

The history of Golden Gate Park goes back to the 1860s. In San Francisco’s Gold Rush days, the area that is now Golden Gate Park was marked on maps as part of the “great sand waste,” and untrammeled “Outside Lands,” located well beyond the reach of the city’s masses. In fact, the entire Sunset District as you know it was barren, uninhabitable land owned by the U.S. government. Nonetheless, the City and County of San Francisco, which was growing rapidly, desired the land and petitioned for it in the 1850s. After years of court battles, the U.S. Government declared the area part of San Francisco in 1866.

MUSIC LINE-UP:

Muse * Phish (2 sets) * Arcade Fire* The Black Keys * Deadmau5 * MGMT* Girl Talk *The Decemberists * John Fogerty* Erykah Badu * The Original Meters * Beirut * The Roots * Arctic Monkeys * Big Audio Dynamite* STS9 * Warren Haynes Band * Big Boi* Major Lazer * Little Dragon * Julieta Venegas* Sia * OK Go * The Greyboy Allstars* Josh Ritter & The Royal City Band * Old 97’s* Mavis Staples * !!! * Latyrx feat. Lyrics Born & Lateef * Best Coast * Collie Buddz * Phantogram * Charles Bradley* Foster The People *Lotus * STRFKR * Junip* Pajama Party * The Infamous Stringdusters * The Vaccines * Toro Y Moi * Vetiver * The Limousines* Macklemore & Ryan Lewis * The Stone Foxes* The Joy Formidable * Wye Oak * Ana Tijoux * Orgone *Lord Huron * Tamaryn *Grouplove * The Fresh & Onlys *Ximena Sariñana * Ty Segall * Sunbirds *Nicki Bluhm & The Gramblers * Diego’s Umbrella * Ghost Robot

You can get more info on food and wine vendors on the Outside Lands website and can also purchase your tickets here.  Judging by the list of over 60 restaurants and wineries, it’s hard to say if more people will come for the snacks or the tunes. Joining last year’s crew of restaurants will be newcomers such as  Salumeria by Flour + Water (think porchetta sandwiches), 4505 Meats, and classic Grilled Cheese Sandwiches from American Grilled Cheese Kitchen.  Ritual will caffeinate the crowd, and 30 wineries will gather under a tasting tent. ABCey hopes to see you there!

It’s TV THURSDAY! Today’s video clip shows us a man’s life lived on facebook. Watch Alex Droner’s birth when he starts an account. See him make new friends, find the woman of his dreams, and build his family. Get to know Alex as you see him through the good times and the bad times. Facebook now has over 750 million active users and has become one of the primary forms of communication. Here at ABCey Events, we use it daily to connect with not only our friends, but our potential clientele Most people use it multiple times a day. In a way, it is taking over our lives. What is your reaction to the video?