Juliet McEwen Johnson will be presenting at CREATE South 2012 on the topic of Pinterest. Through her own original research she has worked out methodologies for measuring the effectiveness of your boards, how to make your blog or website more Pinterest-friendly and what monetary opportunities are available on the site.

Juliet most recently ran a successful home staging company in New Jersey where she “owned” the #1 spot on Google for “home staging NJ” for 3 years!! Upon relocating to the Deep South, she has built a service to share her social media know-how with small businesses and solo-preneurs.

She has 10 years of corporate event planning experience for Showtime, American Movie Classics, Volvo, Pfizer, Merck and Bristol Myers-Squibb, just to name a few. She was also a voice over artist, voicing characters for MTV’s ‘Celebrity Death Match’ and ‘Liquid Pavilion’ and promos for Comedy Central’s ‘Adult Swim’, CNN, Netscape, Verizon, AT&T, ABC Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio’s First Wave.

Heather Solos has attended every CREATE South since the conference began and served as an organizer for several. For years we’ve considered her one of our success stories so we are delighted to welcome her as a keynote speaker for 2012. Her talk is entitled “Beyond the Jargon: A Personal Look at Building a Brand in Social Media.” The terms and platforms change, the death of various platforms are proclaimed with regularity. Consistency and dependability are key to success in social media (which isn’t going anywhere).

Hidden by her monitor, Heather is charming, witty, and can answer household questions with the greatest of ease. In public, she’s a little reserved and happiest at the nerd’s table riffing on web tech and shiny toys over beer and nachos. Over the past five years she’s turned Home-Ec 101 into a trusted resource for recipes and household advice and now she’s launching SpinPicks with Paul Reynolds. This is her 5th CREATE South and is honored to speak.

CREATE South regular Tee Morris will be on hand to reprise his popular talk from a few years ago, “Remaining Safe in a Social Setting.” As is common in the social media world, much has changed in the few years since the original presentation so there is much of value to even attendees of the original talk.

This is an offering to mediators, moderators, and members of a Social Media or Forum. As we know about online communities, it is all about sharing, all about an exchange between the community. Right? But when is your information too much information? Where is the line drawn, and just how secure are the networks online. Blogging security. Facebook. Twitter. From hack attacks to user error, Tee Morris (who worked as a Social Media Manager for an identity theft prevention service) will talk about the lines drawn in the cybersand from user to user on just how much is safe to share…with a roomful of strangers.

In 2005 Tee Morris took his novel Morevi to the then-unknown podosphere, making his novel the first book podcast in its entirety. That experience led to the founding of Podiobooks.com and collaborating with Evo Terra and Chuck Tomasi on Podcasting for Dummies and its follow-up, Expert Podcasting Practices for Dummies. Tee returned to fiction in 2011 with Phoenix Rising: A Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences Novel. This steampunk novel co-written with his wife Pip Ballantine won the 2011 Airship Award for Best Steampunk Literature and was a finalist for Goodreads’ Best Science Fiction of 2011. In April and May, Tee returns to the Ministry again with the Tales from the Archives podcast and The Janus Affair: A Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences Novel.

When he is not writing, Tee enjoys life in Virginia alongside Pip, his daughter, and five cats (3 female, 2 males). Considering the male-to-female ratio in his house, Tee understands how General Custer felt near his end.

This year at CREATE South, Dorien Morin-van Dam will present an introduction to online social media engagement in order to enhance your marketing efforts. Her talk will include tips for business and individuals looking to jump start online conversations about their product or service and examples of great conversation starters and content curating tools.

Dorien works in creative content curating for increased online engagement. She is a blogger, networker, and connector and specializes in social media management, planning, training and networking. Find out more about her at More in Media.

Here’s a special set of CREATE South photos by Imabug.

Bobby “XactO” Williams and Seth “Spark” Alcorace created DomeCandy in early 2011, and through research and development have created a product that is not only functional, but will help promote global creativity. Their session will explore the creative process including their vision of the creative future and the skills necessary for crafting a movement in the music art form.

This session is presented by the two founding members of DomeCandy, Bobby Williams and Seth Alcorace, who call Crescent Beach their home.

CREATE South regular and co-author of the Teach Yourself WordPress in 10 Minutes book, podcaster Kreg Steppe will present a session designed to get anyone up to speed using WordPress as a blog or website quickly and easily. We will walk though setting up your own WordPress site from installation all the way to writing your first blog post, taking a close look at common tips and tricks. Additionally, we will cover the differences between WordPress.org and WordPress.com and why you would want to use one over the other.

Kreg is a husband and father of one. He has several interests in Creative writing, Photography, Audio Production, and Web applications. Currently working as a Web Developer he has 12 years experience with web technologies including HTML, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, Apache and IIS. Kreg also co-host a tech, science, and sci-fi, podcast called Technorama currently in it’s seventh year. He is also a writer co-authoring Teach yourself WordPress 3 in 10 Minutes as well as several audio podcast plays.

Cooking BBQ is an art. Understanding how to properly cook BBQ is a science. Part history lesson part science experiment learn some of the basics as it comes to understanding fuel, smoke, sauce, meat and temperature as its applied to age old artform. Get hands on with a few tools of the trade and learn some of the finer points as they apply to cooking BBQ.

Session presented by Andre Pope.

Andre Pope dabbles in many different arenas. From teaching college students to running the Proud Purveyors of Pork competition BBQ cook-team to his entrepreneurial endeavors.

One of the more fun parts of CREATE South is seeing all the cameras being used throughout the day. Here’s a selection of photos from the very first CREATE South in 2008.

We’ve grown a bit since that first get together, but many of the same people return year after year. They’ve always got news of a new project or interesting creative ideas. We hope to add even more friendly faces this year; hope to see you there!

Have some photos of a past CREATE South? Let us know! We’d love to feature more photos here.

CREATE South is proud to welcome author and podcaster Philippa Ballantine as a keynote speaker for 2012. In 2006 she became the first podcast novelist in the nation of New Zealand and she has gone on to publish nearly a dozen novels in her career. She has three different series which will have new books published in 2012 – her Books of the Order series from Ace Books; her Shifted World series from Pyr Books; and her Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences series from Harper Voyager, co-written with her husband (and CREATE South regular) Tee Morris.

Philippa’s keynote talk is titled “Reckless Optimism” and will discuss how she began as a young person in New Zealand with the dream of being a working writer in the United States. Over the course of many years she worked to achieve that dream, even when it seemed like an unreasonable and unrealistic goal. She will talk about how she found the inspiration and motivation to continue the struggle and about some of the steps she took to build the reality she wanted to inhabit. Part advice to dreamers of all stripes and part inspirational tent revival, her talk is guaranteed to light a fire under all attendees for CREATE South 2012. Come be a part of it!