The Irish in Silicon Valley connect with Social Media Day

20 Jun 2011

The Irish Innovation Center in Silicon Valley has partnered with the City of San Jose, which will become the first US city to proclaim 30 June Social Media Day.

The global online event will be held by social media news site Mashable.com.

Social Media Day is to be one of several high-level networking events that will be hosted by the Irish Technology Leaders Group (ITLG) this year.

The ITLG and the City of San Jose will co-host a panel discussion at 4pm at the Irish Innovation Center in San Jose.

At the event, the City of San Jose will proclaim 30 June Social Media Day.

This will be followed by a panel discussion chaired by venture capitalist Richard Moran that will include panellists Fergus Hurley, founder of Focal Labs and Clixtr, and Charles J Orlando, a screenwriter and Facebook celebrity with almost 500,000 fans.

“Tweeting, Facebooking and Meetups have become part of our daily routine as a result of innovations emerging only miles from Silicon Valley’s urban centre in San Jose,” said Sam Liccardo, council member for San Jose.

“We are proud to partner with the ITLG to celebrate these transformative technologies, and to explore their continued contributions to our economic and social vitality,” Liccardo said.

Social connection = global connection

The first Social Media Day was held in 2010 and celebrations around the world connected thousands of people face-to-face in their communities.

Based on the viral success of the inaugural event last year, the number of Social Media Day participants is expected increase this year at live Meetups and through tweets, photos, live streams and videos.

“With over 40pc of US businesses now successfully using social media, the goal of our event is to educate users on how to best represent their businesses,” says ITLG founder and president John Hartnett.

“We are also very pleased that the City of San Jose will make their official proclamation of Social Media Day here at the Irish Innovation Center in the heart of Silicon Valley and that we are a part of this historic event,” said Hartnett.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com