We’re launching a new service today, CrowdVine for Conferences, a way for conference organizers to give their attendees an online space for meeting, networking, and coordinating.

Back in February we had a surprise hit when we ran a demo version of our social network software for the SoCon conference in Atlanta. We’d gone to Atlanta not knowing anyone at the conference and came back feeling like we knew everyone. To this day I still talk to the friends I met there.

Most conferences give out some sort of attendee directory, usually as a printed pamphlet. Many attendees diligently browse the attendee list hoping to spot someone interesting based on their company or job title. The limitations are obvious, company and job title doesn’t offer enough information to decide if you should connect, and if you do decide to you want to meet you don’t have good options for getting in touch.

We found that the fundamental features of social networks like MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn work fantastically when applied as a replacement for traditional attendee lists. The core social network features are profile pages, creating a network of contacts, and contacting other people in the network.

• Profiles let you put faces to names and find out information that is specific to the reasons you’re at the conference.
• In traditional networks you spend a lot of time marking people you already know as friends. We’re more interested in helping attendees meet new people, so we’ve made it easy to say you’re a fan-of or want-to-meet someone you’d like to know. If the other person is interested you usually end up meeting
• Attendees contact each other by leaving comments on each other’s profiles. Common comments include setting up meetings, appreciating their work, and asking questions about topics related to the conference.

We also found that our focus on simplicity made it easy for lots of attendees to use the site. We call one of our metrics “addicts,” and we define it as how many people looked at more than 100 pages. At our last conference we had 117 addicts and three attendees looked at more than 800 pages. One of our long term goals is to work with conference organizers to track how many of these addicts return to the next conference.

We have two versions of our conference service: self-service and professional-service.

The self-service option is for do-it-yourself conference organizers. We think of these as the people running BarCamps, PodCamps, and other unconferences. It’s a simple version of our social network software tweaked for conferences and a place to integrate Twitter and your wiki. BarCampBlock, run by Tara Hunt, is a nice example of this.

The professional service is for traditional conference organizers who want something they know is going to work. It takes more than software to build a massive community in just a few weeks. We customize the CrowdVine with the conference design and branding, we provide a dedicated community manager to help facilitate networking, and work with the organizer after to pull out attendee data that will help them put on a better conference the next year.

If you’re a conference organizer or conference chair, check it out. If you’re a conference attendee, send this link to the conference committee: http://www.crowdvine.com/conferences/