I’ve received a few invitations to virtual conferences but hadn’t paid too much attention to them in the past. They seemed a little Second Lifey to me. However, while I was at Compendium Blogware, our marketing department sponsored a virtual event and received a huge volume of qualified leads… many more than they would have than had they had a booth in a regular marketing event.

Virtual conferences deserved a second look and there’s an upcoming opportunity for you to check out a virtual event. ON24 announced yesterday that the company has collaborated with Lithium Technologies, a provider of Social CRM solutions to power the customer network, to offer the Social CRM Virtual Summit, the largest online conference for social media and CRM professionals and the first virtual show to demonstrate how social media/communities can work in tandem with virtual events to create a new and powerful business application.

As virtual summit speaker Jeremiah Owyang, partner at the Altimeter Group, noted in his Web Strategy blog:

Tight integration with social technologies is