After several slaving hours and sending tweeting (and oh yes, retweets) about BarCamp Nashville 2009, it is almost upon us — Saturday Oct. 17 at the Cadillac Ranch. I am ridiculously excited to see so many great pitches for speaker sessions. However, for anyone who is attending BarCamp for the first time, I did want to recommend a few. Below are my picks for speaker sessions about content and marketing.
Content
TV 2.0 Producing New Media for the XBOX 360 – Stephen Lackey
Many people are missing out on the innovations that Microsoft & Crew have been brewing with the community they’ve garnered from XBOX Live. My theory for this is simple: in our close-knit crew of new age techies we like to ignore Microsoft on all fronts even if we enjoy playing video games. This is, of course, extremely detrimental — especially so if you ever want to produce your own webisode (short episodic videos available over an internet connection). Why? This is a NEW market place ripe for innovation and with a huge-ass company facilitating to anything that’s generating any sort of buzz. If you want to make it as an entertainment producer, you really owe it to yourself to sit in on Stephen Lackey’s session that will walk you though the process of producing such a XBOX show. And he ought to know, having done nearly an entire season of Con Trek, a series that covers fan conventions across the country (and exclusively produced for XBOX Live) — not to mention producing original content for his geek reviews and news site Cinegeek.
We’re all going to DIE!!! – Dave Delaney
I feel like anything I could say about this session would ultimately cheapen it — much in the same way a 12-year-old boy would ruin the real life experience of seeing his first set of dirty pillows by telling his adolescent friends about it. [Honestly, if your lost with that analogy, disregard it and remember it has nothing to do with MR TECHNOLOGY] No matter how awesome it might be, I’m not going to be able to adequately describe it. With that said you should just visit the BarCamp Session link or go to Dave’s site, davemadethat.
Marketing
Social Media ROI: Take Your Conversation And Shove It (Into A Spreadsheet) – Bill Seaver
We’re entering into a new age of marketing — no not the web, that’s old news. By that I mean everyone at least knows that they *need* some sort of web marketing but don’t exactly know how to do it. The same is becoming true for Social Media, which up until now has only cost a person time and energy. Soon the cost will turn into dollar signs and you’re going to need to understand how to calculate the worth of your social media efforts when it comes to your business. Bill Seaver is good at that because he’s the first person I met that started exploring the new realm of social media marketing. Albeit I was very skeptical at first, but Bill has more than proven that he’s willing to seek out the new and different forms of social marketing on the internet. I recommend sitting down for his BarCamp session to anyone who has a business and wants to learn about how to make sense of the social web’s data.
Evolution, not Revolution: Why Optimizing Beats Redesigning – Kate O’Neill
I’m not attending Kate O’Neill’s session at this year’s BarCamp, but I have good reason for that — You do not.
I’m not going to attend because I’ve spoken to Kate about the principles of form and function, optimization over redesigning. I’m going to go ahead and predict that I’d agree with everything she states in her session and at some point in the near future we’ll probably end up discussing this subject because that’s how I roll. With that said, I’ll likely hear this session’s content (or some version of it) in the near future and you won’t. Check out part of the session quoted below…
Redesigning a web site without data and testing is like cooking in the dark. Someone is probably going to end up burned, and it’s likely to be you.
How do you keep the CEO from designing the site him or herself? How do you hold back the committee of people who want home page real estate for their pet projects? And if the answer is through analytics, how do you make good aesthetic decisions while paying attention to data?
More Session picks on the way…
If you missed the centre{source} Halloween party then you probably also missed the opportunity to see entrepreneur Nicholas Holland dressed as Princess Leia from Star Wars, which is why I’ve taken the time to post the likeness recreated in beautiful Photoshop glory.
Posted by Tom Cheredar 
