Are webinars part of your marketing mix? Why? and How do you measure success?

I am a fan of webinars, and have been from the beginnign days of this medium. It has only gotten better. Like anything else in marketing, this is not a silver bullet. To be most effective it has to be part of other supporting activities that will determine it's success.

So here's the secret sauce (or at least my secret sauce): A compelling topic, a 1 hr slot (around lunch time for the time zone of most interest), a 2-hit pre-event email campaign to a substantial mailing list (prospects and customers), a complementary promo splash on your website (and hopefully your partners' site as well), an easy "click to add to your calendar" functionality both in email and on the web splash, an engaging speaker with an efective sidekick throwing in some pearles of wisdom to change things up, listener ability to pose questions for the end, and see questions posed in real time, audience participation poll questions with instant results at least 2-3 times to shift gears a bit, at least 10 minutes for live questions at the end, and a follow-up email with links to the on-demand replay, and prezo and any background documents attached.

If all (or most) of the above ingredients are in place, I would bet you'd have great success, regardless of the end-game you are looking for. My past experience tells me that these are great nurturing/relationship marketing tools - less effective for pure demand-gen, but that is a function depends on compelling nature of the offer you put on the table...