Keeping and updating your events on calendars can be a pain, the one you have on your website is a given, but there's a good reason to use other ones as well, (most can take the place of your regular website calendar and offer additional benefits.)
The list of three I give here are not meant to be all inclusive or as endorsements. I do want to bring them to your attention to let you know there are more ways to get things done, (hopefully more efficiently.)
The first one I want to talk about is Syndicateus.org. It was developed by Warren Armstrong who's the secretary for the Ten Pound Fiddle Music Organization. The Ten Pound Fiddle puts on "Coffee House" concerts in the Lansing area of Michigan. It's a free service without advertising, and is ran as a public service. The stripped down, no frills approach while seeming to be a liability is really it's greatest asset. Syndicateus was designed to be picked up and used by the media, but it can be used in many different ways.
At the first level it can be used to support or replace your calendar. You can setup your Syndicateus calendar or "feed" and link to it in your emails and websites. There's a provision to use a header to hide the Syndicateus logo so the calendar looks like it's a part of your site.. "OK, I can do that with my current calendar." you may be thinking, but that's not the point. Here's where things get more exciting.
I'll use my own case as an example, I put out a newsletter of acoustic events in Michigan. I also have a MySpace webpage. I can subscribe to your calendar/feed and anyone else's that fit with what I'm doing and the combined data is put into a super calendar or combined feed. For my newsletter all I have to do is cut and paste the part I want to use (the next two weeks) and my work is halved for my newsletter. For those people that aren't on my newsletter's mailing list, or for people wanting to see the latest information or further into the future, they can see the combined calendar from a link I've posted on my MySpace page.
Getting back to the media, they can use it to fill in local event information and community calendars in their TV, Radio and Newspapers. Not a bad way to extend the coverage from your efforts!
The next network I want to bring to your attention is Eventful.com. Eventful seems to be just the opposite of what Syndicateus is. It's big and flashy and provides all kinds of bells and whistles. I first found out about it when a musician contacted me to be a "Friend" in MySpace. He'd spent a great deal of time sitting up MySpace websites all across the country with an Eventful "Demand It" box on each one of them. The Idea was that he'd use those sites to see where his biggest audiences were, and to establish contacts in advance of sitting up his tour. It was a good idea, and who knows how things would have gone if he hadn't taken the top off his tour bus while going under an overpass that was too low a couple of days into his tour.
What I like about Eventful is that it's big (as in International), all the bigger more prestigious venues here locally use it. It just plain looks good when you've finished posting something.
The last network I want to showcase is Reverbnation.com. It has the most bells and whistles of the three. It isn't as public as Eventful, or as pliable as Syndicateus, but for those of you that can post events on multiple websites in different networks, it's King. By using the site you set up with them, you can manage everything from one calendar and the short pieces of code or "Widgets" they provide you. Update the main calendar and every one of the sites where you have a widget will be updated as well. Reverbnation can stand alone as an "Electronic Press Kit" and gives Sonic Bids a run for their (your) money. Reverbnation is free to you, (there is advertising ) whereas Sonic costs and keeps on costing as you add features.
Which one's best for you? That's for you to decide, I would and do use all three.
Best wishes,
Flamekeeper
(Jim Ison)