This past weekend I had an opportunity to attend my first ever BarCamp in Chattanooga (check out Its a New Experience… BarCamp Chattanooga!). I promised a recap and so without further ado…

By most reports there were about 75 attendees at BarCampChatt Saturday July 25th with folks coming from Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. The event took place on the campus of Chattanooga State Community College (a wonderful venue by the way!). There were five meeting rooms setup with a variety of topics and speakers. One of the cool things about a BarCamp is its agile, self-defined nature. Speakers sign-up to present of whatever topic they want in the morning and the schedule is posted, even updated, throughout the day. The final schedule for BarCampChatt 2009 will give you a pretty good idea of the wide variety of topics covered.

So which ones did I go to? How interesting that you should ask…

Being the blogging hound that I am, how could I have passed on the Hyperlocal Blogging Panel at 10:00? I mean, come on. The panel consisted representatives of four local blogs (in all honesty, I’m not sure I’d call them hyperlocal, but that’s just me…and possibly another post) from Birmingham, Nashville, Chattanooga and Knoxville. The discussion was interesting and broad as they all discussed the startup, maintenance, and monetization of their sites. It was especially interesting to me how each of them indicated the difficulty they’ve had with finding a revenue model that works. I guess that begs the question, is there money in hyper-local blogging? (Hhmm, sounds like yet another post topic…the list grows!) Big thanks out to the panelists on this one, @MorganLevy and @ChristyFrink from Nashvillest.com, @acnatta from theTerminal.com, @brandonclarke and @caseypeters from Knoxify.com and of course @davidm89 and @jehawbaker from Chattarati.com. (video of the Hyper-local Blogging Panel)

After a short break it was off to the Social Media Roundtable. We had a pretty full room for this one but Daniel Walters (@SocialMediaBham) and Dave Barger (@lalunablanca) did a great job hearding the cats, keeping us all in line and on topic. This really was a lively exchange of many of the good and bad examples of forays into social media by companies both large and small. Excellent discussion, just wonderful! I hear there is rumor of trying to put together a regular roundtable like this… count me in!

After a break for lunch and some impromptu sessions in the hallways, it was on to Market the Right Way with Facebook and Twitter by Wade Kwon (@WadeOnTweets). Wade did a most excellent job covering some basic marketing tactics along with best practices for pursuing and implementing them on Facebook and Twitter.

Next up was Advanced Wordpress Techniques by Mitch Canter (@StudioNashVegas). By his own admission Mitch broke from his usual presentation and took a more free-form approach to this session, covering useful Plugins and some programming / development around the WordPress model. Many of the plugins Mitch covered I already consider invaluable but the few that I was not aware of plus the development insights made this a great session for me… lots of notes to work through from this one.

My final session of the day was back on the Social Media track, again with Daniel Walters (@socialMediaBham) to discuss Hot Topics in Social Media. The group here was small but opinionated (go figure) as we talked about how social media can be used to point out really bad customer experiences, oh say take the United Breaks Guitars example. (If you haven’t seen this video, you must!)

Over all my first BarCamp experience was an awesome one. I had an opportunity to meet lots of really great folks, face to face, and talk about some things we’re all interested, maybe even passionate, about. As usual, a lot of the really powerful stuff came outside the “scheduled” meetings in side discussions or ideas shared over lunch. I do regret that I wasn’t able to make it to the after party, but hey, vacation packing awaited and that HAD to get done. I suppose there is always next year, right?

For everyone involved, thanks! I’m really looking forward to applying much of what I learned and developing the relationships started at BarCamp Chattanooga. If you have any comments, things you learned, really anything about BarCampChatt, lets hear it. Leave a note below… I promise I’ll reply!

- Thom

PS – Thanks to Dave Barger (@lalunablanca) we have some Flickr pics of BarCampChatt!

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