Social Media Club of Birmingham has announced that Social South, the first annual social media communications conference, will be held August 21 and 22, 2009 in Birmingham, Alabama.
Nationally recognized social media professionals will be presenting on a variety of topics at Innovation Depot, located at 1500 First Avenue North in downtown Birmingham.
The two-day conference will feature the following leaders in social media and communications;
• Mack Collier – a social media consultant, trainer and speaker. He’s been published in the Washington Post, Ad Age, Boston Globe and has spoken at SXSW Interactive.
• Jason Falls – Director of Social Media at Doe-Anderson in Louisville, KY. He has overseen social media campaigns for Maker’s Mark and Knob Creek bourbons.
• Andrew Keen – Author of “The Cult of the Amateur” and founder of Audiocafe.com
• Ike Pigott – a former broadcaster, media consultant and corporate communicator.
• Esra’a Al Shafei – Founder and Director of Mideastyouth.com. Hailing from Bahrain, Al Shafei has won the Berkman Award from Harvard Law School and the Atlas award for New Intellectual Entrepreneurship.
• Scott Schablow, Founder of Social Media Club-Birmingham, former VP of Luckie Interactive and now Chief Strategy Officer at Provenance Digital.
Other notable speakers will include; Tom Martin, Toby Bloomberg, Mitch Canter, Phyllis Neal, Joel Warady, Dana Lewis, Robert French and many others.
Scott Schablow and Ike Pigott are responsible for the event’s conception. “It essentially evolved from a challenge,” says Scott Schablow. “Could we put together an event that would grow to a scope and size that would rival South by Southwest (SXSW), which is now considered the premier media event in the country.”
The conference has two main goals: 1) To create a forum where the future of online media and advertising is discussed and how the tools involved in social media are changing that landscape. 2) To showcase the nation’s most talented social media minds with Birmingham and the South East as the backdrop.
Developed for digital marketing practitioners and their clients, Social South will be beneficial to business owners, marketing directors, web developers and public relations professionals. Social South is produced in conjunction and Social Media Club-Birmingham (SMC), an emerging social media organization that has chapters worldwide and Internet Professionals Society of Alabama (IPSA), a professional non-profit organization for web professionals. The conference is being held at Innovation Depot, a business incubation facility that focuses on emerging technology businesses.
