Failing conferences

Danny Levinson wonders in China Tech News why the search engine conference SES Xiamen failed this year as a media event. I only met one person who went there, Gemme van Hasselt, the only one who wrote reports about the event for the Search Engine Journal.
Compared to last year's conference in Nanjing the number of sponsors - including China Tech News - had already dwindled and the stories about the poor local organization might have scared more people off.
But also the Red Herring Wireless Beijing 2007 event triggered off very few media reports or web references, even though I know them as pretty good organizers and Beijing for sure should be a better location than Xiamen for a smaller conference. But when we would discount their own publication, they caused very little traction on my radar screen.
What I think is a key problem, is the fact that those conferences are still organized in a very old-fashioned way. They get a few media partners, they put up a website and call a few journalists. That can be done much better. It will not save your conference if the organizations is lousy or your speakers have nothing to say, but they do need some good advisers (like Danny and me) to organize participation in a flattened world.
First, they need to engage the digital vanguard, well ahead of the conference. Key discussions can already be started by using down-to-earth webtools. During the conference streaming the content and using IRC-channels and other tools should involve those who were unable to attend physically. And there needs to be a follow up, more than just in the hotel bar in Beijing or Xiamen.
Especially conference that focus on the digital vanguard should adopt also a more social peer-to-peer attitude.