Friday's BloggingWorks workshop focused on how businesses can and are using blogs and blog tools as their primary engine for delivering content to both the public and to internal groups.
To me, the biggest aspect of the workshop was the idea that blog tools are a means to an end. As the business thinking about using this tool (or any other), you need to determine what you expect of that tool.
We also had several conversations revolving around trust and voice in blogs. The issues are very familiar in the blogosphere, and it was interesting to see how people talked about these things. Those who don't blog tended to have the media view of the free-for-all nature of blogging, and having difficulty seeing how someone could just decide to become "the" expert in a given field or become the "go to" person when you are interested in basketball shoes.
The next several blog posts will touch on the details of the workshop and my further comments, rather than dropping a couple pages into one blog post. The extended entry contains some more info about the workshop and the attendees.
About the workshop:
The workshop was organized by Coudal Partners and 37Signals. Go visit them. The primary content for the workshop was put together in MoveableType and will be opened to the web, once they scrub internal links.
Workshop attendence was kept low to keep things intimate. The 20-25 people in attendance, besides people from Coudal and 37s, included a few public relations people, Peter from SilkRoad Technology (collaboration software), some people from credit union, Chad from Best Software (ACT!, Peachtree, ++), and a pair of people from Monster's recruiter side. And we had Six Apart's Brenna Koch (TypePad's support guru) and Anil Dash (VP Business Development), since both Coudal and 37s work with Moveable Type.
Several of the attendees are bloggers themselves, including the owner of 2strokeBuzz. I'll follow-up if I discover others who have blogged the event. One person was given the opportunity to blog for her very first time on the test blog about recently-rented movies.