Mashable‘s third annual Social Media Day is on Saturday, June 30, 2012!

Social Media is quickly changing our world by bringing people closer together. So, in true Mashable style, we celebrate it!

In previous years, we have had incredible Social Media Day Meetups created by event organizers around the globe. To keep that tradition alive, we invite you to once again bring your fellow social media enthusiasts together in person by hosting a Social Media Day Meetup in your area.

Like any event, Social Media Day Meetups require planning. If this is your first time organizing one, here’s a couple of tips to get you started. If you have organized one in the past, here’s a refresher course!

Step by Step

Because we use the Meetup Everywhere platform, there is already a Social Media Day event set up for the over 1,500+ Mashable Meetup Everywhere communities.

Here’s how to find and edit your local Meetup:

• 1. Visit Mashable’s Social Media Day 2012 Meetup Everywhere page.
• 2. Find the Meetup community nearest you and click on the city name to find the Social Media Day event page.
• 4. To be the sole organizer, give a date, time, venue and short description of the Meetup.
• 5. To be a co-organizer, leave other fields blank to allow another Meetup community member to fill them in, which will make him or her your co-organizer.
• 7. Check the meetup page frequently to answer questions and start conversations on the comment boards.

Find a Meetup Community Near You

Browse through this list to find a Meetup near you! If you can’t find your city, it may be up to you to create the event!

Get The Word Out

Make sure your community knows about your Mashable Social Media Day Meetup!

Here’s a few ideas to get you started promoting:

• 1. Create a Twitter account and Facebook page for your event
• 2. Find something that makes your event special, and let your local media know about it.
• 3. Alert local organizations that have similar interests about the event.
• 4. Encourage attendees to share the details, both online and by word of mouth!

Gather Organizer Tools

Our Social Media Day website is a one-stop-shop for everything you may need to plan your Social Media Day event.

On it, you will find Social Media Day logos, tweets, photos and videos from events around the globe, and helpful videos such as this one:

Connect with Fellow Organizers

The Mashable Meetup Organizers Facebook group is an incredible community of 250+ organizers who plan Mashable Meetups of their own.

They’re a friendly, active bunch who are always willing to extend a helping hand to people treading the waters for the first time.

Inspiration

To get an idea of what a great Mashable Meetup is like, check out the photos below.

Good luck planning your Social Media Day 2012 Meetup. We can’t wait to see what you’re able to put together!

Photos:

Cincinnati

An awesome Social Media Day cake was made for #SMDay Cincinnati, the winners of our Most Social City contest. Photo by Christiaan Todd Photography.

Click here to view this gallery.

For more Social Media coverage:

• Follow Mashable Social Media on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Social Media channel
• Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

Mashable!

Facebook is testing a new feature called Close Friends, which lets you know every action the people you add to the list take on the social network. Facebook told Mashable it began the push to some users Thursday.

When you sign into Facebook, you’ll be prompted to “Star Your Close Friends” to guarantee you don’t miss their important moments. In other words, you can now stay close to people you indicate as high-priority friends without ever interacting, visiting their profile or catching an update in your news feed.

Facebook’s explanation of the new features emphasizes organizing your friends into Smart Lists, based on where you work, live, went to school or family, to ensure you share with just the right people.

You can also view a news feed of your Close Friends update — much like a feed of a certain Google+ circle — by selecting the list from below the Friends tab on the left-hand side.

I decided to try out the new feature Friday morning, by adding about 20 friends to my Close Friends list. I added stars — Facebook conveniently suggests a pretty good idea of who you consider your close friends based on your interactions — and was ensured my friends wouldn’t know they’d been added to my list. Within an hour, I’d received a handful of notifications — only none of them had anything to do with me. My friends had joined events, shared stories and posted to their Timelines and I didn’t miss a beat.

I was eager to test out the feature because it seemed like an easier way to create lists — something I’ve been meaning to do on Facebook since Google+ rolled out its Circles feature. But the Close Friends feature became annoying as soon as my phone was flooded with status updates that looked like this one (taken from the phone of someone who put me on their Close Friends list):

If you receive mobile notifications from Facebook, it will send you an update every time someone you add to the list takes an action. If you’ve never restricted your push notifications on mobile before, this feature might be the one to drive you to cut some of them.

Do you organize your Facebook friends into lists? If so, do you only share certain posts with certain people?

BONUS: 10 Facebook Tips for Power Users

1. View Photos Full-Screen

You can browse Facebook photos in full-screen mode, making for a better gallery viewing experience.

In an album, click on the first image, then hover over the photo. A floating menu will appear along the bottom of the image.

Click on “Options” and you’ll see the ability to “Enter Fullscreen.” Now you can browse with a clean, black background.

To return to normal mode, simply hit the Escape key or the “X” on the top-right of your display.

Click here to view this gallery.

More About: Facebook, Google

Mashable!

Yahoo has decided to discontinue production of Yahoo Livestand, a newsreading app for the iPad launched just six months ago. The news was announced in a post to Yahoo’s corporate blog on Friday, leading up to three-day holiday weekend in the U.S.

The app, which was positioned as a competitor to Flipboard, Zite and AOL Editions (among others), served up content from various Yahoo verticals and content partners, including Forbes and the NFL. It was also capable of delivering a more “personalized” set of news based on your Facebook activity and your reading habits.

In the post, Yahoo said it planned to discontinue or consolidate a number of its products over the rest of year. It’s part of an effort, initiated by Scott Thompson (Yahoo’s CEO until, oh, 12 days ago), to reallocate resources to key products. It appears that interim CEO Ross Levinsohn is upholding the plan laid out by Thompson.

The app enjoyed a modest degree of popularity: It averaged a four-star rating in the App Store from more than 1,900 reviews. By contrast, Flipboard has received 4.5 stars from 154,682 reviews, AOL Editions 4 stars from 6,169 ratings and Zite 4.5 stars among 5,606 ratings. The total number of downloads was not disclosed.

Yahoo Livestand

Click here to view this gallery.

More About: Yahoo, Yahoo Livestand

Mashable!

Carly Rae Jepsen’s catchy “Call Me Maybe” continues to win over the hearts of countless Internet music lovers, topping Billboard‘s Digital Songs chart this week and the iTunes Store singles chart last week.

Music website Popdust, though, wants to keep the tune’s momentum flowing with its clever mashup of 75 lip-dubs, vocal covers, instrumentals and dance numbers.

We spy loads of famous faces in the clip such as Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, James Franco, Joan Rivers, Jessie J and Kathie Lee Gifford. Lip-sync king Keenan Cahill makes an appearance as do cover-song heavyweights Sam Tsui, Cimorelli, Ahmir and Tanner Patrick, who recently turned an iPad into a drum machine to put his spin on Perry’s “Part of Me.”

Of course, the mashup also stars Harvard University‘s baseball players and Southern Methodist Univeristy’s female rowing team (see their viral dance renditions below).

“If you thought the song was intoxicating before, just wait till you see it performed on accordian, lip synched by three shirtless dudes in a river, and danced to by an overzealous girl alone in a closed Burger King,” reads the video’s YouTube description. “You will see these people and hear this song when you close your eyes at night, and again as you wake up in the morning.”

The song’s original video has 76 million views while her second video (featuring cameos from Bieber, Gomez and Ashley Tisdale) has nearly 40 million.

BONUS: Watch 11 Sports Teams Rock Out to ‘Call Me Maybe’

1. Harvard University Baseball

Click here to view this gallery.

More About: Entertainment, humor, Music, music videos, trending, viral videos, YouTube

Mashable!

One of the battles in the war for the White House is being fought on Twitter. It’s common knowledge that Obama’s beating Romney hand-over-fist in followers: the president has more than 15 million followers, compared to Romney’s half-million. However, the number of social followers alone doesn’t mean much — instead, the key to waging a successful political campaign on Twitter is engagement.

Along those lines, how does President Obama’s Twitter presence stack up with that of Republican rival Mitt Romney? PeekAnalytics, a social audience measurement service, did some digging to find out.

President Obama has more than 5,000 times the “pull,” or influence, than the average Twitter account, compared to Mitt Romney at 466 times the average. That means Obama has 12 times the influence of Romney. That seems like a clear win in the Obama column — until you consider that Obama has 30 times the followers that Romney does, meaning Romney is doing a better job of influencing his smaller audience.

Breaking down both presidential contenders’ followers into demographic categories, PeekAnalytics says Obama’s followers are more international (48% of Obama’s followers live abroad compared to 10% for Romney), they’re younger (58% are between the ages of 18-25, whereas 43% of Romney’s followers are in that bracket), and female (47% for Obama, 29% for Romney) than Romney’s social audience. Meanwhile, Romney’s followers tend to have higher incomes (30% of Romney’s followers make more than $ 100,000 a year, that category makes up 22% for Obama).

Can the candidates’ Twitter following tell us anything about their chances come Election Day? According to PeekAnalytics, a higher percentage of Romney’s followers come from crucial battleground states, save Ohio.

For more, check out PeekAnalytics’ infographic below.

Do you think presidential campaigns are using Twitter effectively? Sound off in the comments below.

Disclaimer: Mashable and PeekAnalytics have a commercial relationship, but Mashable did not pay for this report.

Thumbnail image courtesy of iStockphoto, PashaIgnatov

More About: 2012 presidential campaign, barack obama, Mitt Romney, Politics, Social Media, Twitter, US

Mashable!

Welcome to this morning’s edition of “First To Know,” a series in which we keep you in the know on what’s happening in the digital world. Today, we’re looking at three particularly interesting stories.

Facebook Launches Camera App

Facebook has released Facebook Camera for iOS, a camera application with a close resemblance to Instagram, which Facebook recently acquired for $ 1 billion.

The app’s claim to fame are photo filters, which should — in theory, at least — make your photos look more attractive, but we’re not too sure Facebook Camera can compete with Instagram, whose filters are arguably much better. In any case, it’s a win-win situation for Facebook which owns both apps, and it can choose whether to push them both at the same time, merge one into the other or completely abandon one and put all its photo-nicefying eggs in one basket.

SpaceX Dragon Docking Attempt

SpaceX’s Dragon capsule is attempting to dock with the International Space Station today. If successful, SpaceX would become the first private company to achieve such a feat. Watch the live video stream of the docking here.

Google Announces In-App Subscription in Google Play

Google is adding an in-app subscription option for Android apps offered through the Google Play store. Starting today, developers can use in-app billing to sell monthly or annual subscriptions from inside of their apps. The subscriptions are auto-renewing, and developers just need to set the price and billing interval, with Google Play managing the purchase transactions for them.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, mattjeacock

More About: android, Facebook Camera, features, first to know series, Google, mashable, SpaceX Dragon

For more Tech coverage:

• Follow Mashable Tech on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Tech channel
• Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

Mashable!

Coaching tip: Combine the best basketball video game ever with footage of today’s most electrifying dunker to create Internet gold.

That’s what the online sports media network SB Nation did in the video above, laying NBA Jam visuals and sound effects over a few of high flyer Blake Griffin’s best dunks of the season.

Watch through the end of the short clip for a special surprise. The video was uploaded to YouTube earlier Thursday, so has not yet gone viral, but the guess here is it’s already heating up.

Griffin’s dunks actually have a bit of social media history to them. In February, he threw down a truly epic jam over the Oklahoma City Thunder’s Kendrick Perkins.

Perkins later called out NBA MVP LeBron James in the media for tweeting his amazement at the dunk in a pretty funny moment of sports and social media intersecting.

What’s your best NBA Jam memory? Let us know in the comments.

More About: sports, viral videos, YouTube

For more Entertainment coverage:

• Follow Mashable Entertainment on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Entertainment channel
• Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

Mashable!

With a slick weekly iPad edition and robust cross-channel packages including its meg-hit annual swimsuit issue, Sports Illustrated has adapted to the digital age better than many legacy print publications. But social media also plays a key role in kindling nostalgia and engaging younger readers, through the Sports Illustrated vault of photos dating back to the magazine’s inception in the 1950s.

The @si_vault Twitter account has become a modest sensation among the sports media Twitterati for its multiple daily posts of timely and off the wall images celebrating athletic icons, historic moments and items of sporting whimsy. Since launching last autumn, its counterpart on Tumblr has amassed more than 30,000 followers.

Andy Gray, who manages the vault of photos, says the Twitter and Tumblr presence have helped Sports Illustrated compete with more web-oriented publications in the crowded world of sports journalism.

“For sports fans who want to go to ESPN, Yahoo or other sites, this is one thing those sites can’t and don’t offer — huge collections of photos that have appeared in our magazine over several decades, as well as ones that never made it to print,” he told Mashable. “The first day I looked through our photo database, I was blown away and just thought it could be something.”

Gray joined Sports Illustrated in 2005 and launched @si_vault in 2009 to share old magazine article as well as photos. He soon shifted to just photos after noticing that those were what resonated with social media users, then started the SI Photo Blog Tumblr more recently to help get social sports fans to share the images more.

Gray’s photo posts — culled from the magazine’s massive digital image repository — range from old World Wrestling Federation action shots, to poignant moments between longtime rivals, to curious images of athletes off the field or court. He says they’ve become equally popular with longtime Sports Illustrated subscribers as well as readers who may have never picked up a print issue.

“I might post a photo of Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris smoking cigarettes in the Yankees locker room or Joe Namath wearing a fur coat, and all these college kids will be like, ‘Oh, that’s swagtastic,’ or something where I don’t even really know what they mean,” he says.

That’s an encouraging sign for a legendary sports magazine seeking to stay influential as media continues its migration away from print.

“People want to say this generation isn’t interested in history but I haven’t found that,” Gray says.

Is the Sports Illustrated photo vault something you would check out — or have you already? What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

More About: Media, Sports illustrated, tumblr, Twitter

For more Entertainment coverage:

• Follow Mashable Entertainment on Twitter
• Become a Fan on Facebook
• Subscribe to the Entertainment channel
• Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

Mashable!

Cable channel TBS is teaming up with Facebook to add more branded comedy entertainment options for advertisers.

The high-rated comedy network is utilizing Facebook to extend distribution with another recent partnership — Jason Bateman and Will Arnett’s digital ad and production company, DumbDumb. TBS will work with DumbDumb to give six brands up to six short-form customized comedy videos.

According to Facebook, the TBS and DumbDumb partnership will help brands distribute and promote content across multiple platforms, while engaging with Facebook’s 901 million active users.

“Facebook and television work perfectly together, as Facebook has become the location where viewers discuss, experience, and share what they watch and what they love, creating true word of mouth at scale,” says Carolyn Everson, VP, Global Marketing Solutions at Facebook.

Sources close to Facebook said that the content is going to live on a variety of channels, but the brand sponsors will ultimately decide where that content lives — whether that be on their own sites, on TBS.com, or the brand or TBS’s Facebook page.

Commercials will also air on TBS to drive viewers to the brand’s web and social platforms.

Turner Broadcasting announced a partnership with Funny Or Die earlier this month, forming a strategic alliance between the comedy website, TBS and Adult Swim.

Funny Or Die is well-known for helping advertisers provide branded entertainment, and other companies like Buzzfeed are using emotional intelligence to help marketers engage in social media. Increasingly, branded content partnerships are proving to be a smart way to build virility and shareable content with a targeted audience.

It’s a smart — and forward-thinking — approach for TBS to offer these branded spots to their advertisers. At the television upfronts last week, lots of networks talked about giving advertisers more value across multiple screens, but few offered concrete examples of how they planned to do it. If TBS succeeds, this could become more common across the television landscape.

“We are not just talking the talk about innovation; we are actively developing ways for our advertisers to creatively immerse their brands through a multi-screen approach that delivers great video to an engaged and interested audience on Facebook,” says Donna Speciale, president of Turner Entertainment and Young Adults Ad Sales.

What do you think about comedy ad production companies like DumbDumb or Funny Or Die? Would you like to see more marketers approach this method of advertising? Let us know in the comments.

More About: branded entertainment, Dumbdumb, Facebook, funny or die, TBS

Mashable!

83% of Facebook users say they rarely or never click on Facebook ads or sponsored content
eMarketer Articles and Blog Posts