Happy Social Media Day!

VANCOUVER – If there is ever a day to cave in and try your hand in social media, it is today! June 30 is officially the Social Media Day, as proclaimed by Pete Cashmore, the founder of popular tech blog Mashable.

Billed as a day to acknowledge and celebrate the revolution of media becoming social, the second annual Social Media Day will be celebrated by nearly 1400 cities around the world, and Vancouver is one of them.

Vancouver’s Social Media Day Tweet-up organizer Mitch Baldwin says half of the people who will be joining the meet-up today know each other personally, and a lot of those relationships were forged on social media.

“People become friends on Twitter first and then met up,” says Baldwin. “Most of the people I consider friends in Vancouver are the people I met through social media.”

He says Vancouver is definitely on the map when it comes to celebrating Social Media Day, but it’s the places you would not expect to embrace social media that are now jumping on board.

“It’s really exciting to watch places like Tunisia and South Africa participate, and how excited they are to be part of this worldwide celebration," says Baldwin.

From charity events to revolutionary movements to tsunamis, Baldwin says social media is paramount to bringing the world’s attention to what is important.

On a micro scale though, he says it is a cross-section of what is going on in your city and neighbourhood.

Vancouver City Councillor Andrea Reimer says for her and other city workers, the value of social media lies in being able to hear the community without having to initiate the discussion.

Reimer says a month after she was elected to Vancouver City Council in 2008, she had to ask the city’s communications department for permission to launch a Twitter account for the “Greenest City on Earth” initiative.

She got the green light eventually, but not without a lot of hesitation on the city’s part. Reimer says they’ve come a long way since then.

“Now, a lot of city departments have presence on Twitter, Flicker, Facebook, and YouTube. There is a strong competition between them to get the most followers and re-Tweets, so what a difference a couple of years can make,” says Reimer.

During and after the now infamous Stanley Cup riot that shook Vancouver two weeks ago, social networks were on fire with people sharing information about mayhem on the streets.

Hundreds of people took to social media to talk about their participation immediately after the riot. Web pages were set up to help people report and identify the rioters. Naturally, a lot of anguish about what happened spilled online, raising concerns about online vigilantism.

Reimer says although she is not in favour of what she calls “virtual mobs,” the riots were an unforeseen and unique opportunity to talk about social media in the context of citizen surveillance.

“The level of anger and disgust people felt about the riots was shared by many. With that level of emotional response, social media puts in your hands a mean to extract some justice. Whether that is appropriate or not is a completely different question.”

Meanwhile, VPD is still asking anyone with photo, video or social media evidence of riot involvement to send it to their tip line at robbery@vpd.ca.

More information on Social Media Day:

There are numerous Social Media Meetups happening in Metro Vancouver today. To see the full list, go here.

Ways You Can Participate: