The prediction, published Tuesday, comes a month after eMarketer nearly doubled its estimated increase for online ad revenues for 2011 to 20.2%, thanks to a surge in display advertising. U.S. online ad spending hit $26 billion in 2010. The new report assumes a continued growth in search advertising, but also in banner ads from large sites like Yahoo, Google and Facebook.

Video will continue to be the fastest-growing format in online advertising, according to eMarketer. Spending for video ads hit $1.42 billion in 2010, but will reach $7.11 billion in 2015. That’s because video “generates greater audience attention than other digital ad formats,” says David Hallerman, eMarketer’s principal analyst.

Another factor in the rise: a shift in local advertising from newspapers and Yellow Pages to online ads.

eMarketer’s figures are by no means the only ones. The IAB reported a 23% jump in online advertising revenues in the first quarter of this year. The IDC also estimated that global online ad spending grew 14.3% in Q1. Online spending is far outpacing increases in traditional advertising. Nielsen estimates global ad spending rose 8.8% in the first quarter, and TV advertising was up 11.9%. U.S. advertising was up 5.9% in the first quarter, according to Nielsen, which didn’t include online ad spending in the report.

Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, 123render

More About: banner ads, display advertising, emarketer, facebook, Google, IAB, idc, online advertising, search advertising, Yahoo

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The build-up for the event, which runs the week of July 31, begins Tuesday with on-air promos. The cable channel also ran a contest from June 13 to July 1 seeking 30-second video commercials from fans. Sixteen of the top videos will vie against each other in a bracketed competition on Shark Week’s website. The top two ads will run on the channel during Shark Week.

That effort builds on last year’s contest on YouTube that asked fans to make videos promoting Shark Week.

A Discovery rep says that the channel is stepping things up this year because “Shark Week” was frequently a trending topic on Twitter when it aired. Overall, there were 91,000 tweets related to Shark Week.

To foster more such communication, Discovery has partnered with GetGlue for a sticker campaign that began Tuesday (and featured Lady Gaga’s Teeth). There’s also a @SharkWeek trivia contest on Twitter and a Shark Week Live app for the iPhone and iPad and on Shark Week’s website that will aggregate all the social media conversation on Twitter and Facebook around Shark Week and include extra content like behind-the-scenes photos.

The channel has also drafted social media favorite Andy Samberg as “chief shark officer” to star in promos, interstitials and a program called Shark City.

Shark Week, now in its 24th year, continues to be a success for Discovery. Last year’s Shark Week brought in 30.8 million viewers — a new record. The channel has also added seven new hours of content this year and will run a total of 18 hours of shark-related programming during primetime.

More About: andy samberg, Discovery Channel, facebook, getglue, Shark Week, twitter

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Creating, executing and evaluating a social media plan takes a healthy amount of time, money and talent — resources that are scarce in today’s business world.

Mashable spoke with Altimeter Group Industry Analyst Jeremiah Owyang and Intel Social Media Strategist Ekaterina Walter to get their thoughts on how businesses can save time, money and other valuable resources by creating more efficient social media processes. Here are five essential tips.

1. Utilize Your Existing Team

“Leverage your front-line workers who already support customers in different mediums like live chat, phone, and in person,” says Owyang. “Use the support and customer service teams that already know your products and services and have been trained in customer relations. Take a page from Best Buy’s ‘Twelpforce‘ that empowered thousands of retail professionals to take to Twitter than just train a new social savvy workforce.”

Tread lightly when figuring out how to organize social media efforts, though. Walter says that too much time is spent “fighting over who owns what” when developing a social media strategy. “Different stakeholders (PR, web, legal, privacy, security, marketing, HR, etc.) need to partner on this and work closely together on the structure and processes that are beneficial to everyone,” she says.

Walter suggests against “putting [social media practitioners] into a box with too many guidelines,” and instead is all for “unleashing the employee potential and giving them some freedom to engage online.”

2. Build a Plan That is Nimble

While a triage system can be helpful for novice social media programs, make sure your communication process isn’t complicating problems. After all, social media is meant to make communications easier, not more tedious.

Walter says, “The biggest issue is the amount of time it takes to make a decision internally. It is a time of ‘now marketing,’ or what I call ‘agile marketing’ — we cannot afford to spend too much time making decisions or creating elaborate processes of approval. We need to act quickly and nimbly; otherwise, the opportunity is gone forever. This is the biggest hindrance to digital creativity.”

“Most companies like an effective triage system to pass information around the company directing who will respond and how,” says Owyang. “As a result, more than one business group may respond to customers — reducing efficiency and of course, potentially confusing customers.”

3. Minimize Spend on Tools & Consultants

From her experience, Walter points out two areas where businesses tend to spend too much money — social media tools and consultants. Here are her thoughts on both:

• Social Media Tools: “A variety of tools perform similar functions. If you utilize several key tools and establish the right infrastructure centrally, it will allow a number of business units and geographies to use the same tool across the company. This will accomplish a number of things: It will allow you to compare results apple-to-apple across various campaigns; negotiate global contracts centrally to achieve huge cost-savings across the company; and have central enablement in place where key training on the tool and its support will be provided in the right way.”
• Social Media Consultants: Stay away from “bringing expensive consultants in who only provide high-level information that is already knows internally. Management needs to trust their employees internally to know the subject and provide the best strategy and direction.”

4. Hire Qualified Talent

After searching your ranks to find the right talent internally, don’t be afraid to hire experienced social media and community managers. Granted, you probably won’t need to hire a full social media team, but bringing on at least one strategist could save your organizations dollars in the long run.

“Most of the time we want to hire interns to do the work of experienced community managers, but then we complain that they didn’t handle something right,” says Walter. “I think the issue for most companies is that they don’t hire enough seasoned people to truly manage communities and online conversations on behalf of a brand. You need to have experienced people in place to manage communities, advocacy programs, etc. — these are the voices that know and represent your brand appropriately. And most of the time we are not willing to pay for people like that, citing lack of resources and then paying the price of damaged brand reputation or dead or inactive communities.”

5. Learn From Others

Equipping social media practitioners with the proper knowledge will save them lots of time, says Walter. This means building social media education programs, creating spaces where colleagues can discuss best practices and learning from other organizations.

Leading Intel’s social media strategy has enabled Walter to figure out the best ways for educating employees of social media processes and best practices. Here are her tips on how to effectively communicate new information about your company’s social media plans to those in the field:

• Implement social media training across the company, including face-to-face and online programs.
• Create playbooks around specific platforms — such as Twitter and Facebook — that will allow social media practitioners to learn about them.
• Create an internal best-practices forum and monthly calls that bring the company’s social media practitioners from around the world together to talk about particular internal case study and discuss learnings gleaned from them.
• Distribute a monthly newsletter to help social media practitioners keep up with the ever-changing world of social media.
• Become a member of organizations like Social Media Business Council or Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), where you can easily connect with other brands that have experience with any particular topic/project/vendor/platform and pick their brains on what worked and didn’t. Walter says, “This is huge. These types of connections and interactions saved me a ton of mistakes and headaches — it’s a huge value-add!”

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Your Thoughts

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Walter and Owyang provided a great base for professionals looking to create efficient social media processes. Have you learned a few tricks of the trade while putting together your organization’s social media plan? If so, share your thoughts in the comments below.

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Series supported by The Awareness Social Marketing Hub

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The Social Media for Business Leaders Series is supported by The Awareness Social Marketing Hub, the leading social media marketing software for marketers to publish, manage, measure and engage across all their social channels. The Awareness Social Marketing Hub is leveraged by companies of all sizes including Sony, MLB, American Cancer Society, and Starwood Hotels. Request a demo here.

Download a complimentary ebook from Awareness: A Marketer’s Guide to Social Media: Developing and Implementing a Social Media Marketing Strategy.

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More Business Resources from Mashable:

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- 6 New & Innovative Social Media Campaigns to Learn From
- Social Media Marketing: 5 Lessons From Business Leaders Who Get It
- 5 Innovative Facebook Campaigns to Learn From
- HOW TO: Optimize Your Social Media Budget
- Gaining Authority in the Age of Digital Overload

Images courtesy of Flickr, Mulad, MiiiSH, JanneM, Mukumbura

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CSS can be compared to the sculptor’s tool set when crafting a sculpture. We as web designers utilize all the assets CSS brings forth to create structured layouts for our websites. Over the years this design process has become more organized and fitted. Rules have been put in place for best-practice procedures when coding.

We’ll have a look at some ideas you can apply to your stylesheets to help speed up your code in future projects. Efficient CSS is easy to manage and easy to read while also supplying a resource to the web designer. Keeping everything organized is a big step forward, but things get a bit more complicated than that.

Throughout the article keep your personal idiosyncrasies in the back of your mind and try to absorb as much information as possible. The best advice you can get from any developer is to find your own way of working. Try combining a few of these techniques with your own workflow to see how you can benefit the greatest as a CSS developer.

Why Bother to Streamline CSS?

Many web designers get lost in the comparison of frontend to backend languages when talking about parsing code. CSS and HTML are frontend design languages used to format and style elements on your website. Files are downloaded and parsed by the web browser your visitor is using.

This means frontend code still has a quantitative load time. Code developed and parsed by a browser still takes time to be read and computed, just like backend languages such as PHP or Ruby. This is where streamlined CSS can provide a huge benefit to your site in seeing shorter load times and quicker structuring of page elements.

This may not be so obvious with much of today’s high-speed connections and advanced Operating Systems. You may want to try viewing your site through a mobile browser to compare not only load times, but how the website is loaded.

When CSS is coded efficiently you should see elements form and style as they are processed. This can change browser to browser but it’s a common occurrence you’ll see the more you test your website’s code.

You’ll also want to keep your code standardized and simple. When you’re updating your blog or personal website a few months after initial development it’ll be a lot simpler to churn through CSS styles you’re already familiar with. Adapting to a set structure for best industry practices will help in the long run.

How to Work with Efficient Code

To begin coding with ultimate efficiency in your styles you’ll have to adopt some fresh new ideas. These are some basic CSS techniques being used even today by high-tier Internet websites and app developers.

Keep your Code Simple

This seems like an easy one that many will overlook. When mapping out a set of data for how your styles will develop keep it all simple – create data sets in a column stack if you need to.

Start by creating a list of the different sections you will work on in your styles. These can include text, forms, layout boxes, headers, footers, anything you may need. If you’d like to really get organized you can even break things down into a few known styles you will need, such as an ID or class for navigation links.

Afterwards this makes things much simpler when you go sit down to code. Having your resource list in front of you will almost create super-human coding powers to be pouring out code so quickly. This first step helps create a blueprint of your website mockup using “plain words” before going into any style language.

Keep Blocks of Code Delineated and Sparse

There has been an ongoing debate for a while between how CSS code should be written. When I first started I used block notation since it was all I had seen before. However single-line notation is much, much quicker when it comes to parsing and being able to read from a human eye.

This isn’t to say I’m making a case to ignore block-style CSS, far from it. When you are dealing with a key element or ID holding 6 or 7 major properties it will be easier to keep it in blocked form. You’ll be isolating the important pieces and elements out of your style so they’re quicker to find at a glance.

It’s also much simpler to read longer styles in block notation. This is because most text editors will wrap longer lines and reading property:value pairs can get very confusing when you’ve got 10+ to go through. As the web designer it’s your call how you space your CSS code. Just keep the efficiency issue in mind while doing so and always use your best judgement.

Working with Other Developers

This can be an annoyance or a blessing depending on the team. However the fact stands that if you’re currently or aspire to be a professional web designer, chances are you’ll be working with a team at some point.

As designers we can be especially difficult with making major changes to our works. With CSS code it’s a bit different since you’re trying to portray a beautiful layout using only property values. This can get messy when files pass between a few hands so be sure to keep things organized.

Comments can be a major help here. Adding comments to lines or blocks of code which may be confusing or misleading to some will save hours of working time. You want to communicate all of the work you’ve put into a stylesheet in the most elegant way possible.

Ensure while you work there aren’t any duplicate styles or appended styles being overwritten. For example imagine a website’s page headings h1-h4 are styled earlier in a CSS document but some code changes the fonts deeper in. This could be imminently confusing for somebody who didn’t even write the code and now has to go through and fix this bug.

Communication is also very important in web development teams. You can write some of the most efficient code around, but lack of communication is what kills projects. Keep your mental processes focused on the task at hand and work within the boundaries of your team, not just your own creative ideas.

Keep Track of Separate CSS Documents

Another way to keep code clean and organized is to separate the many types of styles you may be applying. This works much better on larger websites which require so many styles that a single document holding them all is an unrealistic sight.

One example of such a site could be Facebook. They would have so many different pages for styles to load on – profile, search, registration, photos. I wouldn’t want to be the guy sorting through all that code to apply a simple bug fix if it were in one consolidated file.

Granted Facebook may be garnering a lot more traffic than you would expect but the principles are the same. If organization is an issue separate stylesheets can go a long way. Commonly today you’ll see web designers keeping code organized based on how it structures the document. For example you may have layout.css, text.css, and forms.css.

The benefit here is not all of these style documents need to be loaded on every page. This allows for greater customization when it comes to building your website. You’ll cut down on parsing time tremendously just by creating separate views and styles for each one.

Testing Support for IE

Internet Explorer has always portrayed the evil bandit for web developers, CSS coding especially. Luckily Conditional Comments can be applied to your HTML which look like regular comments to most browsers. In Internet Explorer they can be used to implement new styles based on the browser your running.

This has always been an issue and with the release of Internet Explorer 9 beta we’re getting just a bit closer to a more solidified Internet experience. Only problem is how many people are still running browsers as old as IE6 or IE7. These have serious processing bugs and sometimes require external styles to fix them, appearing only based on their flawed rendering engines.

Thankfully support has gotten better and Microsoft seems to be turning things around. Keep an eye out for conditional comments if you haven’t worked with them yet. They can prove to be invaluable in many cases where CSS properties just won’t work right and you need an alternative.

Adding a Table of Contents

This is an optional step which I have found to work wonders in my stylesheets. You can keep a table outside of the CSS document itself, but I have found this to be a bit counter-productive. Especially when it’s so easy to add comments in-line.

The main purpose of placing a Table of Contents into your styles would be ease of access and streamlining the editing process. Place markers in the beginning of your document to separate your code into easily-dividable sections.

A good way to approach this would be to create your own table key. For example, if you were splitting your table into each main area of the document (layout, font, header, navigation etc.) you could key them with a set of unique characters.

=!layout and =!font could be used to delineate the layout and font sections, respectively. Since you probably won’t run into those exact pairs of characters anywhere in your code it’s easy to add them both in your table and at the start of each section in comments. Then using the Search or Find feature of your text editor you can skip down the sections of your CSS styles with ease.

This is also a great way to approach a teamwork project where many people will be looking at the same code. It keeps things organized and easier to find in the mess of styles we see today.

Conclusion

Although there are many ways to approach optimizing the efficiency of your code these examples are a great way to get started. CSS is an ever-changing subset of the design industry and has a lot of new ideas being built around it.

Passion and dedication are required to make it in the design industry. If you can hold onto your passion for digital design it shouldn’t be difficult to keep up with the curve on CSS practices. Reaching out to the community of web designers found all over the web is a leap forward. The experts of industry are more than happy to share their techniques for streamlined CSS which evoke bouts of innovation into others.

Most people quit blogging — and most companies do too, for that matter.

Like healthy diet, frequent exercise, proper posture or any other New Year’s resolution, blogging results take time. A 2008 Technorati survey put the abandonment rate of blogs at about 95%.

Part of the reason for low blog success rate is that most of us have a hard time predicting what kind of return blogging will achieve. “If I blog every day for a month, will I get more leads?” Probably. But it may take six months, not one.

That doesn’t mean it’s not worth the fight.

Before the Internet put publishing and distribution tools in everyone’s hands for free, companies that wanted brand exposure paid for time and/or placement on a third party media property (radio ads, TV commercials, banners). Many still do, but a general shift is occurring online – away from outbound marketing and paid media, toward creating one’s own branded content and spreading that media across the social web.

According to the Custom Content Council, 68% of CMOs say they are shifting budget from traditional advertising to this type of content marketing.

But measuring the return on investment (ROI) on content is difficult, especially if you’re not judging success by ad revenue.

Nine out of ten organizations market with content, according to a recent B2B content marketing survey. Companies like Mint, American Express and Hubspot are now competing with “traditional” media companies for eyeballs with their own content. They’re seeing results -– not necessarily in the form of advertising, but rather, through leads, subscribers and brand awareness.

A recent study by Hubspot indicates that Hubspot customers who practice inbound marketing (of which content is a core element) increase leads an average of 4.2 times within a few months. Other studies have shown similar results, that consistent content output increases conversions.

Content costs money, and measuring the results of your content effort is important. But an effective content strategy is like planting a garden: it takes consistent work that eventually pays off in large quantities. However, failure to water or plow that garden will result in weeds, in other words, a blog post every three months whose only comments are spam.

So how do you convince your boss, your partners or even yourself that content is a good investment? Here are three steps to effectively measure your content strategy:

1. Understand What You’re Measuring

Traditionally media companies use readership and ad revenue as the yardstick for content’s success. In content marketing, however, the goal is typically to achieve some sort of conversion or to build “brand awareness,” a rather ambiguous metric.

A conversion can consist of a mailing list or an RSS subscriber, a user signup, a phone call, a sale or any number of user interactions. The first step to measuring ROI on your content strategy is to set a goal.

If your content goal is to increase user signups, you first need to know your baseline: how many signups are you getting now, and from what sources? Once you start your content efforts, you want to be able to measure the results against that baseline.

2. Use Proxies to Measure Initial Success

Unless you’re already starting with a large audience (huge mailing list, captive user base, etc), it’s going to take a while to build momentum, and even longer to start seeing conversions. However, several proxies can help you chart your progress.

These proxies present immediate signs of encouragement, more so than, say, search engine ranking, which can take a while to manifest. Here’s a quick list of proxies for measuring a blog’s ROI:

• Facebook likes
• Retweets
• LinkedIn and other shares
• Reblogs
• Links back
• Comments
• Time spent on page
• Average page views per visitor (especially if you’re effective at internal linking of your posts)
• Followers
• @mentions

These proxies will monitor how well your content is resonating, how you’re building trust in your brand. That trust will eventually turn into loyalty, advocacy and continued conversion.

It’s important to note that absolute measurements are rarely useful. What you’re looking for is a trend line. The number of retweets relative to previous content on your site or peer sites is a more useful yardstick than the total number of retweets.

Though it may not seem like much, an average of five tweets on a post today versus an average of one tweet three weeks ago is a great sign of progress.

Also, because some pieces of content will be outliers (whether spikes or duds), it’s important to pay attention to aggregate trend data rather than isolated post data. For example, the average number of retweets in June compared to April is a better measure of progress than the number of retweets on today’s blog post versus yesterday’s.

3. Measure Both Primary and Secondary Conversion Indicators

From a practical standpoint, measuring conversions can be as simple as installing Google Analytics, or keeping a spreadsheet of leads or even tick marks on a whiteboard.

While keeping track of the raw conversion numbers (How many leads are we getting this month versus five months ago when we weren’t blogging?) is important, it’s also crucial to measure secondary indicators. If you’re measuring leads, these might include the following:

• Quality of leads
• Retention period
• Lifetime value per lead
• Length of sales cycle
• Number of new customers referred by lead

“One way we try to quantify ROI is to track content users very closely,” says Sam Slaughter, a producer at Comcast.net. “That way we can tell if they went from consuming content to buying a product, or to bookmarking the page, or to digging deeper into the publisher site or any number of actions that the publisher might be able to monetize. From there, we can often come up with an actual dollar value from that piece of content.”

Patience Is the Secret

Content strategy for most businesses isn’t about instant advertising metrics anymore; therefore, clear ROI data can take a while to manifest. Once it does, however, returns will generally increase as you continue to consistently publish.

“When we talk about ROI for content we often use terms like ‘adoption,’ ‘time on site,’ ‘page views per unique’ and things like that,” says Slaughter. “The idea [is] that while you might not be monetizing the content on your site directly, you are using that content to attract new and better users who you can monetize down the road.”

In the end, planning, tracking and consistency will help you succeed. As Problogger founder Darren Rowse recently tweeted, “Building blogs is like building muscles.” Great content properties, like muscles, take patience.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, pearleye

More About: advertising, blogging, business, content, MARKETING, online marketing, ROI, social media, twitter, web

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The Book Depository claims on its site that it is the fastest-growing bookseller in Europe and the UK’s largest dedicated online bookseller, with more than a million customers.

Amazon has been pushing ebook sales as of late, with notable success. Kindle sales began outpacing hardcover sales in July 2010 and paperback sales beginning in January. A mere five months later, Kindle books were outselling hardbacks and paperbacks combined.

The Book Depository, on the other hand, is built on a “Long Tail” business model, noting on its site, “Of the 30 million titles ever printed in the English language, only a few million of these are in print. We are seeking to make available as many of these titles as possible.” For books no longer in print, the UK bookseller republishes them via its own Dodo Press, which has printed 15,000 titles to date.

There seems to be a disconnect between the two brands, but it doesn’t look like Amazon will be incorporating the new purchase into its larger infrastructure anytime soon — The Book Depository tweeted on Monday that it will continue to operate independently.

PaidContent writer Ingrid Lunden sees Amazon’s acquisition of The Book Depository as a sign that Amazon “might be trying to beef up its long tail cred with some direct in-house expertise, rather than simply relying on its third-party reseller network.”

It is unclear whether Amazon will continue to permit The Book Depository’s promise of free delivery to its base of 100+ countries — a lofty goal that probably results in quite high shipping expenses for the company — and whether The Book Depository will maintain it’s Long Tail model or shift its focus to bestsellers.

[via The Wall Street Journal]

More About: amazon, book publishing, books, online books

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The website is operated by Slide, a social gaming company that Google acquired last year. Prizes.org allows users to create “contests” where they post questions or tasks. The user can then award a cash prize to the best answer received.

Users may ask for trip-planning assistance, advice on naming a startup, best product for infants, etc. Each post contains a time allotment for forum feedback, during which time visitors vote on the best advice submitted. The user who gains the most votes wins the cash, often a $10 to $50 prize.

At the moment, Prizes.org requires a Facebook or Twitter sign-in to participate. However, curious users can view the contest lineup here, where many posts nonetheless require logins.

The website features little Google branding; however, the privacy link on the homepage reveals a standard Google privacy agreement. Slide has been quietly releasing other products without Google branding, including group-texting app Disco.

[via Geek.com]

More About: business, contest, Google, launch, prizes, slide, social media

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As we mentioned in our last showcase of minimal web designs back in May, minimal layouts are the new black and we are glad about that cause this way we can show you more and more new and inspiring minimal websites. Today we decided to gather a new list of fresh minimal websites to inspire our readers, so enjoy it and remember, less is more.

Pure – Minimal WordPress theme

Assembly

deladee

us design studio

Hocus Focus

vnsaga

Touchtech

Aker Brydge

Nizo

Vonrosen

weltunit

Daily – Dustin Heerkens

Studio Antwork

François Deladerrière

Grain & Gram

Andfold Studio

Ryan Todd

Chance Graham

Infinise

Headlamp

Fox Johnston

Source:

The Best Designs
Minimal Sites

Participation in the event more than doubled since last year with more than 1,400 Meetups and nearly 11,000 attendees. Seven cities and one U.S. state joined Vancouver and Victoria, B.C. in proclaiming the day official. The state of Arizona and the cities of New York, Toronto, Dublin, Las Vegas and Reno, Nevada and San Jose and San Carlos, California officially marked June 30 as Social Media Day.

Around the world, Social Media Day Meetups took place in 90 countries across six continents. Some of the most well-attended events occurred in places like Sao Paolo, Panama City, Toronto, Detroit and Santa Ana, California.

Nearly 43,000 tweets were sent with hashtag #smday, and 26,000 of those were on Thursday alone. Notable accounts such as Facebook, DKNY, WWE Universe, and the Miami Heat mentioned #smday on Twitter, showing the event’s reach across a wide variety of communities. There are more than a thousand photos on Flickr, Instagram and Facebook as well as hundreds of videos on YouTube with hashtag #smday.

A number of media organizations, including Fox News, CNN Money, The Christian Science Monitor, the Los Angeles Times and The Examiner covered the event. Many news stories focused on social media’s growth and how it has affected many of our lives.

A huge thank you to everyone who organized or attended a Social Media Day 2011 Meetup. Without you, this global event wouldn’t be the success that it is.

Who’s ready for next year?!

Social Media Day 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.

Detroit

Detroit had more than 1,000 people attend their Social Media Day events held at Soundboard in the MotorCity Casino Hotel. Guests were treated to djs, prizes and speakers.

Key West

Mashable Director of Communications Stacy Green and attendees at the Social Media Day celebration in Key West, Florida.

Miami

Miami's Social Media Day celebration was hosted by SocialBuzzTV at Sugarcane Raw Bar and Grill.

New York City

Mashable celebrated Social Media Day at Brooklyn Bowl, where many attendees took to the lanes. Photo by Stephanie Haberman.

New York City

NYC Chief Digital Officer Rachel Sterne presented the city's proclamation declaring June 30 Social Media Day to Mashable Publisher Sharon Feder and Community Manager Meghan Peters. Photo by Stephanie Haberman.

Tunis

Tunisia's capital city held a large Social Media Day celebration at Barista's Cafe.

San Francisco

Mashable staffers Kate Hayden, Louis Dorman, and Jennifer Van Grove celebrate Social Media Day with Mashable fans at House of Air.

Istanbul

More than 100 people met up in Istanbul, Turkey for Social Media Day. The organizers said they even made frozen shot glasses with the #SMDay logo on them.

Sao Paulo

Sao Paulo, Brazil had several Social Media Day Meetups, including one led by Anderson Criativo that had 1,000 attendees. "The most successful part was the engagement of our community," Criativo said.

Social Media Day Videos

Thumbnail photo courtesy Flickr, Anthony Quintano.

Mashable community team members Stephanie Haberman, Todd Olmstead and Chelsea Stark contributed to this report.

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Name: BreakoutBand

Quick Pitch: Hone your musical skills and compete against others for prizes and virtual fame.

Genius Idea: A music-based social game that require skill — but not too much skill.

Music-oriented games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band have allowed everyone and their mother to have a rock star moment. Online social game BreakoutBand kicks that experience up a notch, letting users create, record and share songs, as well as compete against other users for fame and glory.

“Guitar Hero and Rock Band were awesome, but it seemed that the natural evolution was to enable players to actually become the artist and make their own songs,” says founder David Moricca. Moricca has more than 10 years experience working in youth media and entertainment; he previously worked as director of online learning services at Scholastic.

There are a ton of platforms out there for musicians that allow bands to share music and enter remix competitions. BreakoutBand is like training wheels for services of that ilk. Users can join for free to create their band profiles, after which they can start making music. All jams are created via the site’s beat maker, where users can choose a song kit, complete with all the instruments one requires to compose a tune. One can then go into the vocal booth to warble away.

Naturally, users have to pay for said song kits. The site has a virtual currency called Breakout Bucks that you can purchase or earn by achieving certain milestones as an artist.

Once a song is completed, users can release their song, which will then be posted to their profiles and played on the site’s radio station. They can also share songs to Facebook and Twitter. One can even download a song for later listening. Naturally, the goal is to record palatable tunes, so as to accrue fans — and Bucks.

The site also hosts competitions, adding tangible prizes into the mix. In the past, BreakoutBand has partnered with Old Navy and Pepsi Max on branded song competitions, but recently it added a new competitive element featuring up-and-coming musicians. Users will be able to check out new artists via the site, as well as remix their songs in order to win prizes, such as video responses from the artist, VIP passes to shows, chances to meet the artists in person and merchandise.

The first artist on the digital block is rapper Kellee Maize, but BreakoutBand plans to feature a new band every five days.

When it comes to rights, all original songs created on the platform are owned by BreakoutBand, and remixed songs are owned by the artists. Still, Moricca says this state of affairs could change in the future.

“We will continue to evaluate the appropriate rights approach as the company progresses,” he says. “We have actually been blown away by the creativity of our artists and the quality of their songs, and our goal is to work with all of the different constituents to promote them. Hopefully, a superstar will emerge on the site and we can help them get discovered.”

Photo courtesy of Flickr, southerntabitha

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