Hootsuite.com has made it easy to manage your social networks and keep your sanity doing it. The site offers more than just a website link shortener for users to utilize.

The Twitter focused site lets you add and update your social networks including Facebook, WordPress, LinkedIn, Myspace and Ping.fm.

This site has recently streamlined its interface to make it easier to use. You can now customize your streams, tabs and columns on the dashboard.

Attention indie  bands and artists, Headliner.fm wants to help you connect with other musicians and ultimately reach new fans and better promote your music. The website is a “promotion exchange” for bands and artists to help build awareness for each other.

Bands who sign-up on Headliner are able to join forces with and promote other bands on each other’s Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace profiles. Members are rewarded a number of “band bucks” (proportionate to how many followers they have on their social media sites) which can be used to buy requests from other bands to give your band promotion on their social media profiles.

Reports are a brewin’ about  a new “social network” called Google Me after a tweet was posted by Digg’s Kevin Rose. That’s right, Facebook, you allegedly have a competitor being released into the social media realm soon.

It brings me to ask questions about the upcoming social network…

Will it be artist friendly? Is there going to be a music player for bands and artists? Are they going to take aspects of Myspace to help the cause?

The Secret Handshake (Luis Dubuc) is gearing up to release his sixth studio album, Night & Day August 17th, 2010 on Triple Crown Records and is currently on tour playing new songs from the upcoming release.  The first single “Domino” is available today for free download via Facebook here: http://bit.ly/aBsjB1.

It is an album title that truly signposts a major sea change. Night & Day holds fast to its title’s pronouncement of seemingly polar opposites. The gripping melodies are still firmly in place, but that’s where the similarities between Dubuc’s back catalog and his latest creation end.

For the past several years, Dubuc and his fusion of sugary pop hooks, laid atop a host of samples and caked with computer-enhanced effects, created the signature electronic-pop sound that landed him the sort of success that many artists in indie circuits could only wish for.

In an ideal world, the music is all that would matter. You would play and the legions of fans would come. This is not, unfortunately, an ideal world, which means that you need to market yourself if you want to be successful. Fortunately, we are living in a time when marketing your music and yourself has never been easier. The Internet has brought the whole world closer together, and this has made it easier and cheaper to both contact your fans and potential fans as well as made it easy to give them a wide variety of stuff to sell. But marketing can seem overwhelming, so here are six ways to market yourself and your music:

Have an Online Presence

TrekWest5 is a podcast that strives to bring thoughtful conversations to television, books, movies, music, and pretty much anything else they want to talk about.

Q) Tell us a little bit about your site. What inspired you to start it?

A)
Peter: We love television, but the idea of just turning off your brain for mindless entertainment never felt right to us – it seemd to close to the Looter mentality.  We feel that you can have intelligent and entertaining discussion based on the subjects that television shows handle.  Our aim is to facilitate such conversation in ourselves and our listeners.

Have you wanted a customized design for your indie band’s Facebook page? A handful of designers sat in a room hours before Facebook’s F8 Developer Conference and created an application to have your data transition into a blog-type profile currently called Facebook.me. The application is based on Facebook’s new Open Graph API.

How do I connect to Facebook.me?

You can connect your profile to the application with your permission. Information such as status updates, photos and more from your profile are updated to Facebook.me through the app.

Online music promotion is an essential part of any artist’s successful marketing campaign in the “new music” business model.

The music business has been forced to change its business model as a result of the internet. This in the long term is good for musician’s bands and artists as they have more control of promoting themselves online using the various platforms of web 2.0 and are not as beholden to record companies as they were.

So how do we market music online?

At TheBuzz, we’re dedicated to bringing you all the greatest how-tos and success stories from the indie underground, and this time, we’ve got something really special to share.

When it comes to building hype and a fanbase, indie artists have thought of everything. The independent artists’ movement has even grown to the point where musicians are rejecting major label deals in favor of independent careers. Of course, there might not be a lot of money in indie music, but what we do have is shitloads of artistic integrity.

Enter We’re No Fakers

We’re No Fakers is an indie band with a plan so revolutionary, so radical, that not only has it never before been attempted, it’s bound to transform the nature of the words “artistic integrity” forever. I caught up with the Fakers lead Singer, Julia Fullia, in her parents’ basement earlier this week to get the scoop.

When I enter the house, Julia is on the couch, waiting both for her nails to dry and for the airplane glue in her fauxhawk to set. Already, I can sense that I am in the presence of a consummate professional.

GH: Thanks for taking the time to do this interview, Julia. I know you were a bit reluctant to participate.

JF: Yeah. Interviews aren’t really my thing.

GH: And that’s something of a core principle for We’re No Fakers, isn’t it?

JF: Sorta? I guess? We haven’t really talked about it.

When people ask me what Google Buzz is, I simply say it’s a hybrid of Facebook and Twitter. You apply live updates to your profile for your followers, similar to Twitter, and then add links or photos. You also have the ability to make your updates public or private.

Why should indie bands or artists use Google Buzz?

It is another excellent way to gain exposure for your band or project. You can apply custom links and have your profile showcased during Google searches of your project’s name.

Having a link back to your Web site is a solid reason to create a Google profile. Google also gives you the ability to add multiple links to your other social media sites, store, blog, etc. For instance, I currently have five links on my profile to the sites I want my followers to visit.

Mixcloud.com launched their new “Category” pages, which feature some of the finest stations, shows and DJs (Cloudcasters) on Mixcloud across 10 music and 6 talk Categories. The new update also includes an interesting integration with Twitter and Facebook.

The Category pages are a selection of editorial picks, designed to help listeners browse through the wealth of content on Mixcloud and discover high quality shows more easily. The Categories range from indie to house to comedy. In addition to the editorial picks, the Category pages include a section for “community picks”, empowering the community on Mixcloud to choose the Cloudcasters they would like featured – an interesting model for crowdsourced editorial. New user picks will be revealed every week on Mixcloud Monday!

Name: RootMusic

Quick Pitch: RootMusic is all about making musicians’ professional lives better, be it through building software or building community.

Genius Idea: RootMusic’s debut product is called BandPage, and it makes MySpace-like band page features possible inside a Facebook fan page.

At present, Facebook fan pages are laid out in such a way that you can’t share your music with your fans while letting them continue to browse for information. You can deploy a music player tab, but as soon as your fans click on the Photos tab to see pictures of your band, the music stops.

Myspace continues to streamline their Web site to try and keep up with features on other social networks. The latest update is the “Share” function that now allows you to apply a link and video to your status updates.

Instead of having to choose a “Mood” to update your status, Myspace has updated their design to match the rest of the profile’s home page; while adding the options to apply a photo, link, video and mood to your status.

This is just the latest in updates and moves by Myspace to stay afloat in social media. The site recently updated the “Stream” of your status posts and bulletins in an attempt to organize their many features.