We'll begin with Lee White, who was a social media champion at GlaxoSmithKline until he departed recently to form his own firm - E Quint Consulting - where he bills himself as Community Architect. Lee is the prime organizer behind Blog Carolinas - A Conversation About Social Media in the Enterprise, a free upcoming conference at the Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society in Research Triangle Park on May 9.
Nathan Gilliatt is another SMT regular who lives in NC and will be speaking at the May 9 conference. Nathan's research and consulting firm - Social Target - is perhaps best-known for its Guide to Social Media Analysis, which has quickly become the worldwide reference to the companies who monitor, measure and analyze online social media. Nathan went to Duke (which lost to my team, the West Virginia Mountaineers, in an earlier round) so he may not need that much consolation.
Hmmm. Looks like Jim Tobin, president of Carey, NC-based Ignite Social Media is a former Blue Devil, too. Ignite is one of the first agencies in the United States to take a holistic approach to using social media tactics, techniques, networks and tools for corporate marketing and Jim's posts at SMT are invaribly crowd-pleasers.
Uber-blogger Andy Beal, co-author of Radically Transparent: Monitoring & Managing Reputations Online, will also be a speaker at Blog Carolinas. Andy's not on the SMT blogroll but his posts appear regularly at The Customer Collective, another one of our community sites. In fact, if you go over there, there's a terrific podcast interview with Andy in the Box.net box in the right sidebar.
That's an incredible amount of social media talent in one rather small and unlikely neighborhood so you won't want to miss the May 9 conclave.
And if you're a North Carolina blogger and a member of SMT and I've
overlooked you, send me a note or write something nice about yourself in the comments.