Two more conference posts from David Spark (see also How to Web 2.0 Enable Your Event). David’s a social media strategy consultant and has been doing a lot of work with conferences.

A great example of conference follow up

How to deal with rough crowds: A stand up comic’s advice for Sarah Lacy

Demo.com did a nice overview of Social Networking Tools for Events. They do the world famous and long-lived (18 years) DEMO conference.

I liked how we differentiated ourselves in the article:

“Across the board people discount the social needs of their customers. Conferences are focused on attracting people based on the content of the conference but the people you meet are as strong a draw as the sessions.”

There’s two things we believe strongly.

1. People want to socialize at your conference. We make it as easy as possible for attendees to meet and connect with as many people as they want. Out of all the competitors in the article, our product is the only one that feels social. The rest feel robotic and mechanical and the results are too often that people don’t meet at all.

2. Our company is only as healthy as your conference. We’re always looking for ways to make your conference a consistent draw so that you get more popular every year.

News flash: CrowdVine isn’t the only site on the Internet. We’re not even the only social network. We know this. We do!

So, you’re going to a conference soonish. This conference is smart enough to have set up a CrowdVine. Maybe you’re going to Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco (where you’ll see Tony and myself). Perhaps you’re heading to Miami next month for the 2008 IA Summit, or Amsterdam for ApacheCon.

You want to use us to figure out who do you want to meet when you get there. You want to arrange meetups or whatever. But, the thing is, you’re a person who can speak in complete sentences and doesn’t smell bad. At least, not so bad people run away from you. So you also already have friends that are going to be there. You don’t want to spend too much time reconnecting with them on CrowdVine.

What am I describing? The Social Graph Problem, which has been discussed quite a bit more intelligently than I’m capable of on my best day elsewhere.

So, we’ve taken some small steps already. If you’re a frequent conference goer and you’ve already defined your friends on a different CrowdVine, you’ll see a “import from other crowdvines” link under your “My Network” tab.

Now, we’ve done a Facebook importer. Just click “import from facebook” under the “My Network” tab and we’ll send you over to Facebook. The first time, you’ll be asked to re-enter your CrowdVine username and password so we can associate your Facebook account, and then you’ll see the FB friends that are also on the network you came from.

Easy, right? Also, why aren’t Tony and I friends?

Caveat: At this point, we don’t support our OpenID logins on the Facebook end. I know. It’s on the to do list.

Update: We just added OpenID support to the importer.

So, enjoy! Also, this isn’t the end of the work we want to do in this space. You name it, we want to be able to import your friends through it. Stay tuned, etc.

This is a great guide for panel moderators by Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester Analyst, professional conference goer, and panel moderator).

This guide has everything, even covering how to use your body language to keep panelists talking to the audience. Plus he’s got links to everyone else that ever wrote anything good about panel moderation. If I was running a conference I’d pass this link to all my moderators.

I keep running across stories about how Web2.0 is effecting conferences.

Sometimes people are talking about how technology can help you run a better conference. David Spark’s How to Web2.0 Enable Your Live Event was the first summary that I saw. It’s still the best. But I also just ran across this academic paper, Conference Connections: Rewiring the Circuit. It’s a longer read but full of good info. This is the area CrowdVine is in–we want to use our software to make your conference better.

Then there’s articles about the social changes. These tools can become echo chambers for strong opinions. Here’s the worst of it, witch-hunt for Sarah Lacy. She did a mediocre interview with an extremely hard to interview CEO. In the old days people would have gotten bored and tuned out. Instead they started posting complaints to twitter, which caused a competition for who could make the most acerbic comment.

Web2.0 has also boosted the popularity of user generated content in places that aren’t using any computer technology, most notably unconferences. Unconferences are going so main stream that they now run along side normal conference tracks. MPI, an organization for meeting professionals, ran an unconference inside of their recent MeetDifferent conference. Web2.0 Expo has run unconferences at each of their last two expos and again at their Expo in April (I’m co-organizing that unconference).

Even with the occasional blow-up, this trend is good. Main stream conference content is competing with the web. Why are attendees going to come sit in a session at your conference when they can get the same information for free on the web? You have to adapt. You have to go Conference 2.0. Unconference sections let attendees get up-to-date and often extremely niche info that isn’t available anywhere else. And the social tools help people meet face-to-face. There’s no substitute for dealing with people in-person. That’s the real reason conferences are so valuable.