The New Media Consortium's 2009 conference made use of a wide range of new and social media -- this page is a great example of what's possible to connect people, including:

• Their own social networking site (and it's phone-friendly)
• Twitter (and Visible Tweet)
• Flickr (with geo-tagging for Flickr)
• Conference bloggers

The Conference Tech Tools page is loaded with links to more services and new media resources -- a great set of ideas to get you started thinking about how you want to create new media that engages people.