Technology conferences - worth the cost?

Healy Jones just published a blog post building on a comment I wrote in his previous post. The topic is the "ROI" of technology conferences. The post is an interesting read to get a VC perspective on the fit of conferences for a startup financing strategy. The key messages from Healy for entrepreneurs are:

• Preparation is key
• If at pitch stage, entrepreneurs can line up informal meeting with VCs (while it should not be the sole goal)
• If at due dilligence stage, arrange meetings between the VC and customers or other critical partners/players in your ecosystem
• Leverage your (potential) VC to get introductions to potential customers or key players

Healy's post was voluntarily focused on the fit with a VC financing strategy. There are obviously other potential benefits. My feeling is that the potential main value-add of a conference for a web startup is to increase your overall visibility/awarness ("anchoring yourself in your ecosystem") rather than directly impacting new users growth or pitching a VC. Here are a few examples of how to do it:

• Line up before hand a series of meeting with players in your field
• Organize or sponsor an "unofficial" event related to the conference
• Buy a booth to showcase your product (sort of expensive)
• If you are blogger, try to get a blogger pass to "officially" cover the conference either for your own blog or for a bigger media/blog
• Participate to the startup competition
• Organize a workshop on a secondary stage on the problem you are adressing with your product (if conference permits)
• Become one of the sponsors of the conference (sort of expensive)
• Be on the plenary stage... which is sort of difficult for early stage startup, except if you are among the startup competition finalists

There is probably a lot of other ways but there is no silver bullets. It's the combination of several actions that really increases the ROI of a conference. But it requires a lot of preparation for an uncertain return (especially for early stage startups).

What's your experience?

Update: there is post from Futuristic Play with an extensive list of tech conferences here