ChannelSeven.com: The Elegant Online Event

WebTrends' Director of Marketing Brent Hieggelke has been a driving force at NetIQ for the development of online events. Since his hiring in spring 2000, the product division has launched and steadily grown its investment in Webcasts. This year, it will produce four or five of them — compared to approximately nine live events per quarter. […]

Michael Kushner, director of integrated media solutions for Reed Business Communications, has been at the helm of several sponsored events and knows that getting the look and sound right is a prerequisite for spurring attention.

"For our sponsors, it's all about lead generation. I don't want to go to them with egg on my face and say we had five streams," Kushner said. He has found that tending to production values is key to preventing that.

Web conferences and webcasts are a cost-effective way to handle prospects that are quite interested in your offering (and probably quite far in the sales cycle already,) but are not ready to travel. That said, this article reminds us that attention to proper production values and technical details matters a lot.