Having never attended an SMX meeting before, I wasn’t certain what to expect.

In short – wow!

Starting in April I received regular email updates. In early May they launched a social site using Crowdvine for attendees. The site allows you to search your own contacts for attendees but also search others’ profiles via tags generated from common answers. You can set up a menu of friends, colleagues and people you want to meet.

Want to plan in advance? You can review the entire schedule and select your sessions. You can even see other people who are attending that session.

And to get people familiar with each other, they are even mashing up people’s Twitter feeds!

I only know one or two people going, so getting the chance to find people with similar interests, and reach out to them before the meeting has been great.

So meeting planners take note: get yourself and your events set up with crowdvine – and you will make a lot of people happy AND productive.

And something else very cool is the WordPress iPhone app. Write your post on the plane – post on debarkation.

Update:  Post-conference – I’ve gotten back into the Crowdvine and downloaded contact information for all of the people I met.  Very cool application – hats off.