But even the minimum level, merely announcing the existence of the network, is a huge boost in the value of a conference. Many attendees go to network but have no way of finding the people that they would really want to meet. It’s pretty easy for conference organizers to solve that with a social network, and attendees are pretty reliable in using it.

The maximum level takes a lot more work and communication, obviously, but can do a lot to amplify the conference. For some, especially associations, that’s a goal. For others, and we have many conferences like this, the whole point is to create something valuable enough to pay for.

Strangely, I often talk to conference organizers who think that a public attendee list will result in competing conferences poaching those attendees. Is that a legit concern? I try to operate under the assumption that all the concerns of our customers are legit, but I don’t know about this one.

As far as how people judge our software, I think this is part of the education process. There are a lot of companies that offer networking tools for events, but still only six or seven that work, and that small group seems to have a market penetration that’s still less than 1000 events. A year ago, that number was probably less than 100. In the future, you will judge these products because you used them at a conference you attended, and everyone will have a better understanding of what their capabilities are. Certainly, complaints about closed networks are best to be taken up with the conference organizer.

My experience with three conference social sites in the past six months is that they were closed velvet rope communities. These were large conferences, and the public and virtual attendees could not access the conference social site without paying full conference registration fees. The conference blogs were behind the site login and the content was not shared outside of the community. Unlike NMC 2009, the value of the conference social site was limited to paying attendees only. This will be an ongoing barrier and challenge within some organizations, and therefore some people that can’t access the site will have negative reactions towards the conference social site companies.

My take away from the three comments above is that event organizers should clearly think-through having a closed or open conference social site. And, that event and meeting professionals should intentionally include some additional AV and specific room sets so people can easily create and share content from the event. Inviting bloggers to a conference is a step in the right direction. The meeting professional should go one step further and ensure those bloggers needs are met with adequate electricity, adequate wifi and bandwidth, tables and seating for those bloggers. Then bloggers and attendees can access all the social tools possible during the event.

NMC 2009 is clearly ahead of most conference and events and meeting professionals should emulate many of their practices to bring events into the Web 2.0 world.

PS…yes, welcome to my world where you are charged for every extension cord, powerstrip, room setup change, etc. As a professional meeting and event planner, we address a lot of these concerns upfront in our contracts so we are not nickel and dimed for everthing. Now if we can just merge the meeting logistics with the strategic elements of Web 2.0 world that you address Alan, we’ll have great success.

Jeff- I liked your tips and appreciate you sharing your experience. The Bloggers Hub you describe is pretty much what we did for our invited conference bloggers (which only covered the main sessions). Our Pathable site was most certainly *not* closed or behind a velvet rope – it was (and is) all public viewable (and we tracked a lot of access by people outside the registered users). As Tony suggests, the Pathable site was not a single solution to social media, it was in conjunction with the other things we were doing. The primary purpose was for attendees to be able to find and communicate with each other before, during, and after the conference.

I think Jeff, above is misunderstanding what conference social networks do.

First, twitter, blog, and photo aggregation are standard features for at least three of the conference social network providers (we’ve had them since we launched). That means they work as a hub.

Second, at least for CrowdVine, we often run in a public or semi-public mode so that anyone interested in the conference can follow the content.

Third, the content of general interest ends up in blogs. The content that ends up in the networks tends to be very focused on the conference experience. If you didn’t attend, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of value.

The whole idea of social networks for conferences is relatively new though (kudos to NMC for being an early adopter), so we have a big education challenge ahead of us.

Here’s more information about the WIF09 Blogger’s Hub:

http://jeffhurtblog.com/2009/05/19/eight-ways-to-make-your-meeting-blog-twitter-friendly/