I mentioned last week that I want to start looking at some of the social networking tools I use and evaluate their usefulness and think about how I use them. An opportunity to do so came up last week with the LOEX of the West Conference we hosted.

I joined Facebook ages ago but never did much with it. I think the main reason was that most of the people I had connected with in Facebook I was also connected to elsewhere. I didn’t have much need to check Facebook for updates on people I Twitter with or whose blogs I regularly read.

A while ago, a co-worker created a Facebook group for the conference, and I joined as did 124 attendees. The group was pretty quiet until a week or so before the conference when people started a few discussions about getting to the conference from the airport, about things to do while here, and one person organized a meet-and-greet for a handful of people who were arriving early. I was able to help out with these plans and got to go out to dinner with them and show a few of them around town.

After the conference, quite a few of the attendees I met “friended” me and now I have a critical mass of people with whom I have no other networking connection other than Facebook (and email and real life). I’m still not sure if I’m inclined to play a lot of the game applications that people invite me to (sorry), but I certainly see the value of Facebook as a social tool. I’m sure I still would have met great people at the conference, but Facebook gave me the opportunity to chat with them prior to the conference and see who we knew in common.