Conferences are a great, great location to recruit new talent; give back to the community, show support and get to know the people who build the software most companies today use.
I work and GoDaddy.com and we put on an internal tech conference. It's 1,000 people with speakers and events but it's all internal only, though we do invite speakers from outside the company (most sound very sales-pitchy though). I think it'd be great for us to open the conference up and contribute back to the community.
Our company spends the majority of it's advertising money and time on sponsoring conferences. Can definitely see it not working for some companies, but works great for us and helps fund great conferences for the community as a whole.
Yeah, I would have really liked to be able to find some metrics to add to the post, but there just doesn't seem to be much out there. I know developers look at companies and what their reputations in the community are, but it's a really hard number to nail down.
