On October 23 in Durham, North Carolina, I’ll be speaking at Social Media Business Forum. I’m featured on a pair of panels during the first half of the day’s programming.

From 9:00 AM to 10:00 AM, I’ll be participating in the “Advertising and the Social Web: Can it Work?” session with Gregory Ng, the Creative Director at Brooks Bell Interactive and other panelists to be determined. With my articles relating to the Sports Legends Challenge spam marketing practices, I’ve talked about how not to penetrate the social web, as an advertiser or a marketer. So, this should be a lot of fun.

The “Building and Managing an Online Community” panel will be my next stop, from 11:30 AM to 12:30 PM. For this one, I’ll be joined by Angela Benton, the Publisher of BlackWeb20.com; Ryan Boyles, an Advisory Software Engineer for IBM and Laurie Smithwick, Founder and Creative Director of LEAP Design and Founder of Kirtsy.

Social Media Business Forum is shaping up to be quite an event with an excellent speaker lineup. If you are within 5 hours of Durham and you are involved or have an interest in business, social media, web development, marketing, online community or any related subjects, it is definitely worth checking out. You can register online. If you’re coming, please let me know!

Last October, I had the pleasure of speaking at the Independent Blogging Conference at Greensboro. I spoke on both the opening panel for the day and gave a solo presentation on “Promoting Your Blog Through Social Media.” It’s taken me a while to process any video from this event, but I finally am able to share the panel and it’s been posted over at ManagingCommunities.com.

The panel was titled “The Blogging Revolution” and we discussed blogging in general, the responsibility of it, where we saw the medium going and more. We had a great Q&A and discussion with the group that attended. Thank you to Kelby Carr and Dave Slusher for having me.

What’s up with October? I don’t attend any conferences since South by Southwest Interactive in March and now, all of a sudden, I’m going to three in the month of October. I’ve already mentioned that I’ll be attending Blog World Expo (Las Vegas, October 15-17) and Social Media Business Forum (Durham, NC, October 23). Now, I’ll also be attending IZEAFest in Orlando from October 1-4.

It’s a single track conference with a solid lineup of speakers including Chris Brogan, Wendy Piersall and others. The last day of the conference is a day at SeaWorld, as well. Coupled with the friends in attendance, it should be a fun experience. I managed to win a pass from Elizabeth Edwards of Table for Five, so a big thank you to her.

If you’re planning to attend and would like to meet up, please let me know. I’ll see you there!