Social Media Day 2010

It’s a great idea to have an international Social Media Day, nominated as June 30, and it’s great that Mashable got the idea going. The rationale is good:

Social media has changed our lives. It has not only changed the way we communicate, but the way we connect with one another, consume our news, conduct our work, organize our lives, and much more. So why not celebrate?

I just wish I had picked up on it earlier: the post launching the idea is dated June 8th, but I and a few others, it seems, have only just become aware of it.

That will teach me to keep a closer eye on the feed from Mashable!

There is an impressive lineup of events around the world. No doubt someone will do an analysis of the list and we can speculate about what the results tell us about social media  – or at least about social media enthusiasts – around the world.

Some of my immediate impressions:

Largest group so far is New York City with 415 indicating attendance, followed in order by Antwerp, Belgium, then Barcelona, Spain, then Atlanta GA and then Boston MA.

There is a complication in looking at the raw figures, for instance where there is more than one event in a particular city (e.g. San Francisco).

In my own neck of the woods, Sydney does well at 11th currently, with 143 indicating attendance.

Some of the events scheduled have only one attendee indicated to date, so Meetup’s figure of 563 events needs some nuancing before we can draw any useful inferences.

On a very rough count, it looks like 9 events scheduled for Australia.

Others in my region: New Zealand 4, India 21, Japan 7, Pakistan 3, Indonesia 3, Philippines 2, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand, Bangladesh each with 1.I

I find it interesting that the map shows no sign of activity for this world event in mainland China, Russia and a number of other countries in those parts. Don’t know how to interpret that.

Here on Australia’s Gold Coast there is an event at Southport at 2 pm.

A bit further south at Currumbin, our Social Media Club Gold Coast has organised an event at 10.30 am on June 30 at Vikings Cafe/Restaurant at the Currumbin Surf Lifesaving Club: signup details here.