In case you haven’t already, the last day to submit a blog for the 2010 Eventprofs Blog Awards is August 20. Back for its second year, the Eventprofs Blog Awards will acknowledge and celebrate the pioneers in the event community who drive our industry forward. The awards will be presented at Event Camp Twin Cities in Minneapolis, MN on September 8^th and 9^th, with the winners announced live at 5 p.m. on the 9^th.

Feel free to submit your event blog, another blog you can’t do without or as many as you think serve the events community. All nominations will be reviewed by a panel of judges to ensure each blog fits the criteria of the awards, is in the right category or if required, to re-categorize any entry. Nominees will be announced on August 23^rd, and then voting will open until September 9^th.

Follow this link to submit and good luck! Which blog do you want to see win and why?

Want to see where you’ve tweeted from in the past? Or maybe get a global view of a specific hastag? Twitter has some cool mapping tools that show real-time streams of relevant tweets and topics.

TrendsMap
This service displays hashtags, @mentions or keywords in a real-time mapping of Twitter trends across the world. Follow trends from various cities or focus on a trending topic and watch it worldwide.

Tweography
With a geo-location-enabled Twitter account, Tweography maps all the places you have tweeted from. This app is perfect for jet-setters to keep track of where you’ve been in the world.

TwitterMap.tv
TwitterMap.tv lets you hit “play,” sit back and watch the tweets roll by. Search a keyword or name and see all related tweets play across a regional or city map. This service also provides a profile picture and some basic user info about each tweeter.

MMMeeja’s Twitter Google Maps
This service will show you the locations of the people you follow on Twitter. That is as long as they have given their locations. If you follow more than one person in a geographical area, you can zoom in and hover over a particular person to see where they are tweeting from.

Do you use any of these mapping tools? Where was your most recent tweets sent from?

#luxurychat is a new live chat on Twitter hosted and organized by seven tech-savvy women. The site was launched in June 2010 and addresses the connection between social media and luxury. On the third Wednesday of every month followers can discuss how luxury brands can and have effectively used social media in marketing strategies and campaigns. Last month #luxurychat featured Mr. Simon F. Cooper who is not only the president of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, but a social media pioneer and travel industry expert. The site plans to feature more high-profile industry experts in the coming months, so search #luxurychat and get ready for the next live discussion on August 18.

Are you going to tune into the discussion? Who do you think they should feature next?

For all you iPhone users in the event industry, here is a list of handy apps you should add to your event planning tool belt:

• AccuWeather- AccuWeather offers a GPS application to provide worldwide forecasting to “weatherproof” your event.

• Evernote- Create an electronic ideas scrapbook containing notes, photos and voice memos using Evernote, accessible at any time from your iPhone, computer, or the web.

• Foursquare- Keep tabs on your clients’ locations using the geolocation social networking site, and explore your city in new ways with the Foursquare application.

• Skype- The Skype download connects you to contacts anywhere in the world, which is perfect for destination events or long distance clients.

• LinkedIn – LinkedIn for iPhone allows users to access and share their professional profile with clients at the touch of a button, and connect with over 70 million professionals worldwide.

• Twitterific- Twitterific lets you update clients about the event planning process, and allows easy access to your business and social networks.

• Facebook- To keep track of and check in with clients and staff, Facebook quickly connects you to all of your networks.

• Alarm Clock- Though it seems simple, every event planner knows the importance of being on time, so ensure your punctuality with the Alarm Clock application.

How have these apps contributed to your event planning? Are there any other downloads every event planner should use?

“A day to celebrate the revolution of media becoming social. Celebrate Social Media Day with Mashable by attending or organizing a meetup near you June 30th. Connect with your social media community!”

Mashable is hosting the first worldwide celebration for Social Media Day today, June 30th. As of now, Mashable has over 350+ social media day meetups planned around the world! Who doesn’t use social media these days??

Here are some social media facts that I discovered on Socialnomics:

1. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
2. Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
3. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia (note that Facebook is now creeping up – recently announced 300 million users)
4. comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
5. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
6. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
7. % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
8. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
9. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres (combined) have more Twitter followers than the  population of Ireland, Norway, or Panama.  Note I have adjusted the language here after someone pointed out the way it is phrased in the video was difficult to determine if it was combined.
10. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
11. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
12. Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
13. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
14. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
15. Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
16. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
17. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
18. Only 14% trust advertisements
19. Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
20. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone

Clearly social media is becoming a huge part of all of our lives! I use Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, our blog and many other websites to help gain online visibility for my event planning company. Social media has become the best way to non-invasively spread the word about what you’re doing, so I will very happily celebrate this day. Afterall, It has saved me from dreadful sales calls.

Jed Singer, the coordinator of the Social Media Day celebration in Philadelphia said, “I just love how social media tethers everyone together, and brings people closer in the real world. It’s amazing how far we’ve come from forums and message boards, to blogging, uploading video, microblogging, geolocating,” he said. “The fact that anyone can instantly publish anything to the web has really changed the world.”

Want to participate??

• Meetup Everywhere Mashable: Sign up to attend or organize your own event on the Meetup Everywhere Mashable.
• RSVP to the Facebook Event: RSVP and upload photos from your meetup to Mashable’s Facebook event page.
• Upload to Flickr: Upload photos to Flickr and tag them with #smday.
• Follow @mashSMday: Follow @mashSMday on Twitter for updates and developments on the celebration.
• Tweet: Use the #smday hashtag on Twitter. With so many participating, it will be a trending topic on Twitter on June 30.

There will be prizes for those that tweet or post the event on FB! How has social media helped you??

In this video, five simple rules are exampled on how to build trust, use the tools you already have to build and grow, as well as communicating and using feedback in a positive light.  There are many tips explained in this video, some are literally spelt out for you, while others are more “read between the lines.” It’s a short clip, but the abilities to help you are endless!

[Image from VatorNews]

There is a new controversial social media tool in town! Well actually, not really in our town, but the promotion of the social networking service dubbed “Bubbly” is making quite the splash in India even without the efforts of any real advertising. That, however, does not mean we will be seeing Bubbly in the US anytime soon. There is a marketing scheme to officially launch it in India, Japan, and Brazil first, which are faster growing mobile areas. This reason, however, is somewhat debated among critics who believe there might be other reasons involving literacy and cultural differences.

Bubbly is a fast networking medium that is based in about 30-second voice clips (there is a cap at a minute), instead of 140 characters like Twitter. The principle idea is you buy air space to listen to a new recording, after which you can follow it or post new messages for free. This was originally thought to be an application for smart phones, but when the social media boom occurred, they changed their take on the pilot.

At this point it is unclear if this idea will truly take off, especially since voice mediums like this are available entirely for free. Furthermore, listening to a 30-sec clip requires much more time and attention than reading a short sentence something. But in the end, you never know. For now at least, this bubble shows no sign of popping.

Today’s TV on Tuesday is a TED Talk by James Surowiecki, finance writer for the New Yorker and author of The Wisdom of the Crowds. He pinpoints the moments that social media became as relevant and informational as traditional news (such as the 2005 tsunami or the Haitian and Chilean earthquakes) and how it may even trump traditional media in its ability to preserve personal stories in their most direct form.  How do you get your news these days? Is it from social media (tweets, Facebook updates, and the like) or more traditional sources (such as the New York Times)?

The media landscape has changed over time from the printing press to the telephone to radio waves that allowed TV and radio.  However, the internet is the first source of media that gives us the man-to-many conversation pattern, rather than the one-to-one pattern of the phone, or the one-to-many pattern of radio and television.  Everyone is a listener, everyone is a producer – it’s like having a phone that could turn into a radio if you pushed the right buttons.  Listen to Clay Shirky as he addresses how this powerful paradigm shift has affected how we receive news – from all around rather than the top down – and how that affects the workings of the world and the politics within it.  This is an amazing talk about the power of social media, and the power that social media endows people with.

We’ve all heard of Facebook, MySpace, Linked In, and Twitter.  Maybe you have an account on one or the other, or even all four.  You, with millions of other users, are along the ride of being available 24/7 to have friends, family members, and other networks to see your information, profile, and pictures.  Now being able to share posts on your daily life exercises and thoughts, we- as a social networking obsessed world- are now officially spend 82% more time on these sites compared to the amount of time we put just a year earlier.

So much time that some of us are putting in the number of hours equivalent to a full-time job – a full-time job that doesn’t take a break on weekends. If the average person spends around five and a half hours a day, seven days a week, that leads one to a little shy of forty hours. Didn’t think you spent that much time each week, did you?

And it’s not just the United States that is infatuated with social networking. Australia, Switzerland, Brazil, Japan, Italy, Spain, and the entire U.K is shortly behind us. In Fact, the US may have the most people belonging to these groups, but Australians have the lead for times-per-day visits. Around the globe, people are interested in having people follow them and have people interested in what they are doing; all day, everyday.  Are we in a self-obsessed world, or just a world that loves to communicate with each other? With social networking up by 82% from last year, how much longer will it be before all of our time is spent on the computer?