Last Thursday, June 30 was Mashable’s second annual Social Media Day, a day to acknowledge and celebrate the revolution of media becoming social. Mashable organized more than 600 meet-ups all over the world to celebrate the event. Mashable used Twitter handle @mashSMday to provide real-time updates and developments on the celebration and encouraged people to upload photos to Flickr, post comments on Facebook, visit their SMday.com website and tweet using the #SMDay hashtag.

We used Social Radar to analyze conversations online comparing 2011 vs. 2010 chatter.

Social Media Day chatter

Overall chatter around Social Media Day increased in 2011. The number of mentions for Social Media Day and #SMDay were higher on June 30, 2011 vs. June 30, 2010.

Social Media Day sentiment

Conversations around Social Media Day were 95% positive. Mashable appeared in 13% of all Social Media Day mentions.

Content category distribution

More than 80% of overall chatter around Social Media Day came via Twitter.

Gender distribution

Approximately 65% of Social Media Day mentions were by men and 35% by women.

Mashable buzz

Overall Mashable’s second annual Social Media Day was a success from the standpoint of generating conversations online. The event also created buzz for Mashable, which generated its highest number of mentions of the year on June 30.

How did you celebrate Social Media Day?

In Buzz 10, we use Social Radar to determine the 10 most buzzed about topics across the web via Twitter, blogs, discussion boards, media, and social networks. For this Buzz 10, we analyzed chatter around Time Magazine’s 50 Best Websites of 2010, Alexa Rankings, and other popular websites to determine the top 10 most talked about websites in 2010.

10. Flickr

The popular image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and online community is widely used by bloggers to host images that they embed in blogs and social media.

9. WordPress

WordPress is an open source Content Management System (CMS), often used as a blog publishing application. It has many features including a plug-in architecture and a template system and is used by over 13% of the 1,000,000 biggest websites.

8. MSN

MSN (originally The Microsoft Network) is a collection of Internet sites and services provided by Microsoft.

7. Yahoo!

Yahoo! is best known for its web portal, search engine, Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, advertising, online mapping, video sharing, and social media websites and services.

6. Amazon

Amazon.com is America’s largest online retailer.

5. Tumblr

Tumblr is a microblogging platform that allows users to post text, images, videos, links, quotes and audio to their tumblelog, a short-form blog. Users can follow other users, or choose to make their tumblelog private. The service emphasizes ease of use.

4. Facebook

With more than 500 million active users, a blockbuster movie and millions of links, photos, comments, wall posts and ‘likes’ happening every day, 2010 was a big year for the social network service.

3. Google

Google continues to expand on its Internet-based services, which now include real-time search.

2. YouTube

YouTube users have uploaded more than 13 million hours of video content to its servers in the last 12 months, resulting in more than 700 billion YouTube video views — which means that YouTube’s users have uploaded 850,000 minutes of video and watched 1.9 billion videos per day in the past year.

1. Twitter

Twitter grew exponentially in 2010 thanks to support from major celebrities and the masses, enabling users to follow and connect based on common interests. Twitter enables its users to send and read messages called tweets, text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the user’s profile page. Tweets are publicly visible by default, however senders can restrict message delivery to their followers. News sources from ESPN to TMZ to CNN regularly rely on tweets during news broadcasts.

One of the biggest stories of the week has been Iranians’ use of social media to communicate with each other and the outside world during the Iran election crisis. Protesters used Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Wikipedia and blogs to disseminate information and help people take action.

The Iran crisis has literally given journalistic power to the people, as individuals spread news of developing events in the country. Twitter users adopted the hashtag #CNNfail to proclaim that “new media” (individuals using Twitter) had provided better coverage than “old media” (CNN) throughout the early stages of the crisis.

We decided to use Social Radar to analyze and compare the reach of messages posted by individuals with low influence vs. high influence. Social Radar tracks influence based on the number of links to a specific blog or account. For example, most average Twitter users or bloggers would be considered low influence, while sites like Engadget or CNN would be considered high influence and major media news sources.

The chart below provides interesting results. We measured the number of posts over the last few weeks for low influencers vs. high influencers on the topic of Iran or Iran election. Iran election conversation among low influencers is spreading twice as quickly as conversation among high influencers. The Iran crisis has proven that individuals can report relevant news quickly. What does it mean for “old media” in the future? Will we continue to see more and more examples of individuals using social media to beat established journalists to news stories?