I decided to sit on a free conference call today called Blogging for Business, hosted by Jim Coudal of Coudal Partners and Anil Dash of Six Apart. It is designed to help businesses to use blogs to open up a new line of communication with their customers. I don't know how helpful it will be for me personally, as I work for a non-profit, but I'm hoping I'll catch some interesting nuggets.

I'm in the call right now and I'll update this live if anything interesting comes up.

• A key factor in the success of a business blog is the authenticity of the message. Is the author authentic or are they just regurgitating previous messages? People want a real voice, which is a hard concept for many companies and organizations to swallow.
• Tools effect content. When a blog is used internally for a project, participants tend to take more time composing their message because they know it will be available later in the archives. With email, they are less likely to have well thought-out comments.
• Coudal's site for this seminar

The seminar is over and it was...fine. It seemed to be geared more towards people who didn't know too much about blogging. Also, there didn't seem to be too much information in there, which isn't surprising since we only had an hour.

I'd love to see something similar done just for non-profits. I feel like this is a subset of business blogs that needs to be treated differently Hopefully the powers that be will take notice and start something.