GroundFloor Media And PRGN

GroundFloor Media is part of the Public Relations Global Network (PRGN), a global organization of leading independent public relations agencies. As the exclusive Denver member of PRGN, GFM is represented by Vice President and Managing Partner Ramonna Robinson at the semi-annual PRGN meeting currently taking place in Brussels. Watch this short video to learn more about our partnership with PRGN and to hear about what Ramonna hopes to learn at this conference.

Measuring SXSW

Social media measurement was one of the recurring session themes at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive conference, and one that GroundFloor Media and our clients are constantly tracking to ensure we able to justify our efforts in the online space. From the value of a Facebook fan to finding out which influencer has the most relevant following, here are some of the highlights from the sessions we attended:

§ Social media is not a sales driver, but it does lead to intent-to-purchase.

§ Of all of the measurement tools and systems available, there is still no silver bullet. Understanding your executive’s or client’s goals and then building your measurement system accordingly is the norm.

§ That said, Bill Parkes of nFusion tells us that while measurement vendors are still evolving, the opportunity exists for agencies to work with their vendors and create tailored measurement systems at little to no extra cost.

§ Some things that panelists mentioned that might not always be top of mind:

o Only 8% of U.S. adults are using Twitter

o Social media ROI has to be measured as a part of the greater communications/marketing ROI, not by itself

o Consumers aren’t online 24/7 – when you post is just as important as what you post

§ Since so many metrics tools are measuring so many different things, there are a lot of inconsistencies. You have to measure the value of fans and influencers based on one tool, otherwise its apples to oranges.

§ Jason Falls (one of my favorite panelists) didn’t mince words: Cost per view is worthless, as is measuring short-term results. Real measurement stats and value are found over time (translation: be patient!)

§ Lots of great discussion in “The Value of a Facebook Fan” panel. One panelist said his cost to acquire a Facebook fan is 46 cents. Another said you have to approach fans as if their value is $0. What you do with the fan once you have them is where the value exists.

§ Focusing on brand analytics through social media is more productive than trying to put a dollar value on your ROI.

So what’s the common theme from all of this? I believe it’s finding out what matters most to your executive team, and then building your strategy and measurement method accordingly using the tools that effectively measure those metrics.

That said, I think the most important thing to remind your executives about social media strategy was summed up by Forrester’s Melissa Parish, “To derive value, you need to provide value.” In order to realize true value in social media we need to treat it like a cocktail party, not a broadcast booth.

- Jim

BlogFrog Visits GroundFloor Media

Earlier this week Holly Hamann, co-founder of BlogFrog, stopped by GroundFloor Media to chat with Kimmie Greene and some other members of our team about what BlogFrog has been up to.

If you're not familiar with BlogFrog but you have an interest in connecting with female consumers - specifically moms and other niche female audiences - you'll want to watch the quick video below and also read this Forbes blog which gives a great overview of the company. We're thrilled to offer our clients services from partners like Holly and BlogFrog! Thanks, Holly, for sharing some time with our team.

An Unexpected Gift of Art

Last week I got a double dose of the arts. It was refreshing, invigorating and empowering. The first was from a session at the NACHRI conference called “The Power of Art: Healing Families, Communicating Purpose,” led by Linda Hill and Jennilyn Utkov of Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital in Memphis. The second was from the Colorado Business Community for the Arts (CBCA) Business for the Arts Awards Luncheon.

Imagine a hospital as an empty canvas. Then imagine the power of one volunteer with creative vision of pulling together art from workshops, children and professional artists. This one volunteer, Jennilyn, organized the hospital staff, schools, students, parents, donors, and businesses to capture the heart of the community through art.

Jennilyn spoke about many workshop art projects held at the hospital, but my favorite was about a group of children with Down syndrome who collected materials from a nearby field, put them into clay and molded them into a giant mural. For children’s art with schools, she shared a story of a shy child who gained confidence and blossomed at school because his art teacher encouraged him to enter a simple black and white picture he had drawn of two birds into the hospital drawing contest. His drawing was chosen, blown up and framed to hang in a hallway. During the “Juice & Cheese” children’s art reception, this boy dragged his family and teacher down the halls to find his masterpiece—life impacting and priceless. A professional artist created giant murals by rolling up old hospital brochures and blueprints to create a landscape with a heart placed in the middle. These artistic endeavors gave the hospital layers of stories to tell. And on the development side, the hospital saw a 40 percent increase in new donors because they tapped into a new donor base.

The CBCA awards luncheon was a great reminder of the amazing arts community and resources we have throughout our state, including The Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Colorado Railroad Museum, University of Denver Lamont School of Music, The Colorado Ballet, and many, many more. In a time where art programs are being slashed across the nation in our schools, it is imperative that the business community continues to support and leverage the arts. CBCA calls businesses to recognize the link between cultural vitality and creative and innovative success. I’d like to congratulate the workspace, philanthropy and John Madden Jr. Leadership nominees and winners for advancing arts and culture in Colorado.

How is your place of business connected to the arts in your community? Maybe it is time to get more involved. It might be easier than you think. Take a walk through your local library. Visit a museum during lunch. Take a group to the symphony. Volunteer or collect art supplies for a school. On Facebook, “like” cultural facilities and programs supporting the arts to keep up with news and events.

GroundFloor Media has two events coming up to connect our team to the arts. The first is a “Cocktails & Canvas” event this Friday. The second is an employee, friends & family art exhibition that will be juried by the CBCA in April. We’ll post photos and share our learnings and inspiration in the coming weeks. If you are involved as an individual, team or business, we want to know. Share your stories with us below or on our Facebook page.

~ Amy

Creating Connections

You may want to think twice about checking in via social media at your favorite coffee shop or pizza hangout if your doctor has prescribed you a low sugar or low cholesterol diet. In the very near future social media platforms will link to electronic medical records. And that means for better or worse, your doctor and health insurance provider will be watching you.

This is just one topic of conversation that is being discussed this week at the National Association of Children’s Hospitals & Related Institutions “Creating Connections” annual conference in Baltimore. I’m attending with our client, The Children’s Hospital, and have enjoyed meeting other communications professionals and learning more about how they are incorporating social media practices into their hospital communications programs.

I sat in on a session with Kerting Baldwin of Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital at Memorial Regional Hospital in Hollywood, Fla., where she discussed how Web 2.0 has allowed user-generated contest to flourish, but stressed traditional media relations is still fertile ground for those practitioners who can leverage two powerful tools – relationships and technology.

“We need to put heart back into what we do. We’ve lost the art of caring and creating connections,” said Baldwin. She talked about treating media like a customer and when we do, we create an experience, and that experience creates trust and a relationship.

Baldwin also urged us to rely on the power of our social networks to expand our community. A few simple takeaways/reminders from Baldwin included:

• Create a group of loyal ambassadors who can tweet, post and blog about your brand (employees, other agency PIOs, community partners, neighboring businesses, etc.)
• Ask reporters who are covering your stories to tweet and blog about them (hey, they have a Facebook page and Twitter account outside their media accounts too)
• In turn, post their stories in your organization’s social venues, and your own Facebook and Twitter platforms
• Adopt these practices and integrate them into your current
communications plan

She ended the session with a great quote from Hermes, “It is not the strongest of our species that will survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones who are most responsive to change.”

I may not be ready for FourSquare or to have my doctor know how many Chai lattes I drink in a week, but I am ready to create and enhance current connections for myself and GroundFloor Media’s health & wellness practice. It is a small world after all.

~ Amy

SXSW Weekend Recap

Its been a crazy few days in Austin, and despite everyone warning me that it would be overwhelming, its still surprising how much goes on at South by Southwest (SXSW). New product launches, bloggers, social media discussions, panels, keynote speakers and tons of swag. It really is an amazing mix of Silicon Valley start ups, thought leadership, communications folks, established online brands, established corporate brands, marketing people, advertising experts, tech geeks (I say that lovingly) and anything and everything social media. As an agency employee who focuses on communications and social media strategy, it's a pretty amazing place to be. I will be recapping some of the specifics from the show after I've had a chance to sort through the ridiculous amount of information and let some of it soak in, but for now, here are a couple of the main items that stand out in my mind so far from SXSW 2011:

• Lots of discussion about measurement and metrics – what are the best ways to show clients that social media is moving the needle? No one really seems to have the silver bullet on this topic, but there are a lot of solid methods for proving social media's worth.
• Mobile sites vs. Mobile Apps – who is doing what, what is working, is it better to have a mobile site or create an app from scratch? There seem to be a LOT of "app in a box" companies popping up as well, making it much easier for brands to enter that space in the future.
• QR Codes – you can't swing an iPad without hitting a QR code down here. Scavenger hunts (see below), branding microsites and quite a few free drink offers!
• Video – The advent of Flip cameras and the like have made everyone a producer in today's world. There is a lot of discussion surrounding video strategy and how to actually make videos that provide value to your customer. It's one thing to upload a video, it's another to post a video that will make a difference (see "metrics" above).
• Location-based media – FourSquare and Gowalla have gone all out for South by Southwest. I checked in at a few Pepsi-related locations and earned a "Golden Ticket" badge that got me into a private concert on Monday night. There are a lot of fun things happening in the location-based world despite the fact that no one totally has it figured out from the business side yet.

Below is a video to show you a little more about SXSW 2011 – thanks to Doug and Lauren, our friends and clients from Qdoba Mexican Grill for chipping in.



And I would be remiss if I didn’t give a shout out to www.rightnow.com for "The Game" scavenger hunt. Using QR Codes and Twitter hashtags, I ended up winning Sunday's grand prize – a new Nikon D7000 with a lens that will make me the envy of my photo-snapping friends. As the lucky winner, it's easy for me to say, but The Game was a great use of multiple platforms that really fosters the type of engagement we're all working to achieve through social media.

- Jim

TED2011: Only if. If Only.

As I think back to the final session of TED2011, "Only if. If only," I'm lamenting, "if only I could have gotten my blog up sooner." But, the good news is that the messages remain "ideas worth sharing" and I'm excited to highlight key takeaways.

Joss Stone sings, “Right to be Wrong” and Kathryn Schultz, author of “Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error” took the concept a step further as the opening speaker of the final session of TED2011: The Rediscovery of Wonder.

Schultz is a wrongologist who has dedicated the last five years of her life to the study of why we misunderstand the signs around us. To start, she asked the audience “how it feels to be wrong?”

Dreadful, thumbs down, embarrassing…were a few of the responses, which Shultz cheered as all good responses and then immediately framed as answers to a different question – “how does it feel to realize that you're wrong?”

She pointed out that we all go through our lives conditioned to understand that people who are “wrong” are lazy, irresponsible, dim wits and that those of us who achieve success do so by being “right” more often than not.

However, in order to continue feeling right, we create a reality based on assumptions that everyone around us is either with us or wrong. Those assumptions generally focus in three areas:

• Ignorance Assumption: not aware of the facts
• Idiocy Assumption: not smart enough to see the error of their ways
• Evil Assumption: aware of the facts, but manipulating them to their own benefit

After I stopped laughing at the three levels of wrongness, I quickly picked up on Shultz’s point that this life would be an incredibly boring place if we all saw it the same way – without all the supposed ignorance, idiocy and evil.

So, this crazy wrongess lady (her term, not mine) challenged us all to step outside our tiny, terrified world of rightness and look at the vastness of the universe and say, “maybe I’m wrong.” And that will be OK.

Ten years from now, as we look back on TED2011, many of the theories and discoveries discussed this week will have been forgotten, but I hope this sentiment about the need to reach beyond our comfort zones to accept new ideas and people (including ourselves) in a new way will persist for decades to come.

~ Kimmie

Lessons Learned: how to avoid fake reporters

Following recent "gotcha" issues faced by NPR and Wisconsin's governor, to name a few, GroundFloor Media's Gil Rudawsky provides some smart tips to ensure that you don't get scooped by someone posing as a reporter.

For more from Gil on this and other crisis issues, visit GFM's crisis blog.

TED: Invention and Consequence

I recently sat through a session on "Invention and Consequence" as part of GroundFloor Media's participation in the 2011 TED Conference. Numerous presenters really caught my attention – not only because of their incredible minds, but also because of how they used their intelligence to impact the lives of others.

Dennis Hong is the founder and director of the Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory at Virginia Tech University. He worked to develop the technology for a car that enables a blind person to drive and unveiled the Blind Driver Challenge at this year's Daytona 500 in January. Working with his engineering students and blind engineers from around the country, Hong developed a moving seat called a SpeedStrip that dictated the car's speed. Gloves with small moving motors, DriveGrips, let the driver know how to steer the car. The spinoff technology can be used in the future for sighted drivers to help with fog, darkness and other challenging driving conditions.

Another speaker, Google engineer Sebastian Thrun, talked about how losing his best friend at 18 to a car accident changed his life. He and a team at Google came up with a driverless car and tested it over 140,000 miles throughout California – mountain roads, freeways and the winding, hilly streets of San Francisco. The cars are designed using artificial-intelligence software that can sense anything near the vehicle and simulate the decisions made by a human driver. As Thrun explained, driving accidents are the #1 cause of death in youth, mostly due to human error. Not only could this technology save countless lives, but also don't you think it would make our highways safer if we didn't have to rely exclusively on human decisions?

Last, the CEO of Berkley Bionics, Eythor Bender, provided a demonstration of eLEGS, "a wearable, artificially intelligent, bionic device that enables people with paralysis to stand up and walk again." Berkley Bionics also developed the first practical exoskeleton and the Human Universal Load Carrier or HULC, allowing people to carry up to 200 pounds on their backs over various terrains and long distances. The implications for our men and women in the Armed Services are tremendous. Bender explained how up to 30 percent of American soldiers have chronic back injuries due to the weight of their packs.

I was really in awe of what I heard and saw from these men and women inventors, and I can't wait to see what they come up with next.

~ Barb Jones

TED2011: Deep Mystery

Last week was a busy week at GroundFloor Media as the team and some invited clients took to the Internet to watch the live webcast of TED2011: The Rediscovery of Wonder. The fourth session, Deep Mystery, was one of the more dense, mind bending sessions and as such it’s taken me a bit to make sense of what to write in this blog.

The session featured:
• Antonio Damasio, neuroscientist
• Felisa Wolfe-Simon, geobiochemist
• Aaron O’Connell, physicist
• Maya Beiser, cellist
• Deb Roy, cognitive scientist

While much of the science 101 was tough to absorb on just one cup of coffee (or five), I greatly appreciated the progression of the conversation, which loosely boiled down to the fact that we are all made up parts and that those parts have both physical and emotional elements that make up our selves. As individuals walking through this world, our selves are not just insulated beings, our environment regularly influences us – just bump us in one direction or heat us up slightly and we will change.

Layer a bit of human interaction onto all of this biology, physics and chemistry and you have the whole person – dynamic and ever changing, which is a good thing.

Case in point, Deb Roy’s young son had every move tracked for the first two years of his life by video surveillance cameras installed in every room of the home. The cameras captured his movements, but also recorded every word he heard and later spoke in his young life. The point? To track his language acquisition and identify patterns not only in how we learn language, but also in how information is communicated and shared.

Extrapolate this household experiment out to the conversations taking place daily via social media and the potential is extraordinary to identify what captures our collective attention and who cares. Roy and his team may have created the best social media monitoring tool ever!

The PR industry may not get our hands on it for a decade or more, but it’s exciting to understand what’s possible with new technology and how the work we are doing today mapping out conversations for our clients is a precursor to something much bigger in the future. A future that connects us all based on our passions and shared interests – with or without the coffee.

- Kimmie

TED: Knowledge Revolution

I had the opportunity to sit in on the “Knowledge Revolution” session of the 2011 TED Conference earlier this week, and given the panel of speakers, I was definitely humbled and amazed by some incredible accomplishments. From working to rid the world of Polio to debt relief in Nigeria to creating new solutions for our educational system, the work these individuals are involved with and the results they are experiencing speaks for itself.

As I thought about the content of the session that was, frankly, way over my head in many ways, it occurred to me that the common theme between the speakers was building off what we already know, and collaborating to find solutions to amazingly complex problems.

These are not difficult concepts, but they are often overlooked. How many times have we all tried to solve a problem from scratch without researching what is already known about the issue, or without asking someone else for help in finding a solution?

There is power in taking the time to learn from history, to learn from our own successes and failures, to tuck ego and pride away and collaborate with others who have similar goals to solve similar problems, big and small. It is invigorating to think about what can happen (and what is currently happening) when those small steps are taken.

~ Jim

TED: Beauty. Imagination. Enchantment.

When viewing TED2011 last night, these three words kept running through my head, and I realized when exposed to art, they all lead to one another, but not always in that order.

For two hours last night, I was simply enchanted by the artists who shared a brief insight to their imaginations by displaying the beauty they create. It was inspiring; especially to this fledging artist who found her passion for clay work a little later in life. Not enough room here to tell you all I took away, but here are a few thoughts.

Beatrice Coron, is a papercutter artist who found her calling at nearly 40. After walking on stage draped in the most beautiful cloak cut from a single piece of paper, I washooked. Fascinating me with the simplicity of a silhouette, I was left enchanted by the complexity of the stories she tells in one single strand of paper.

Sarah Kay took my breath away! She was lucky, finding her passion at the age of 14 and harnessing it to become a remarkable performance poet. Not only beautiful, her imagination is bursting from her core and she clearly knows how to look inside herself to discover what matters most. Now 22, she is wise beyond her years advising us to put the things we know to be true into the work we do. So honest and so enchanting.

Kate Hartman is a funny and thoughtful artist and technologist. She creates devices and interfaces for humans, houseplants and glaciers in a playful manner that questions the ways in which we relate and communicate. Her recommendation to discover the act of listening is simple, yet so underrated. I mean, we all have two ears and one mouth right?

I want to thank Shea Hembrey for the laughs. This artist and curator is immensely talented, brilliant and amusing. We should all live by his three H’s – putting Head, Heart, and Hands into our work. And I will always keep this thought in mind: if you can’t find what you like, create it yourself.

And to Jason Mraz – you are A-W-E-S-O-M-E! I didn’t think it was possible to adore you even more but “You #$*&ing did it!” Thanks for the anti-Sesame Street performance. I promise to be better at acknowledging others around me each day.

~ Wendy

TED: Threads of Discovery

Printers that can “print” human organs in less than 24 hours. Artistic sculptures that are as tall as skyscrapers but as soft and pliable as lace. Solving brain disorders like depression and epilepsy with light. Modular energy packets that reduce households’ energy usage at peak times. Using strands of silk to make everything from biodegradable cups to fiber optics.

Do such wild and fascinating things exist in our world?

Yes, or they will soon thanks to the brilliantly creative and dedicated minds of Fiorenzo Omenetto, Daniel Tammet, Janet Echelman, Ed Boyden, Christina Lampe-Onnerud, Steve Gullans and Anthony Atala—the featured speakers of the TED “Threads of Discovery” session I had the pleasure of listening to yesterday afternoon.

The overarching theme was so simple. What already exists, and may even be considered old, that you can reinvent to do something new? From strands of silk or handmade fishing nets from India, to the concept of a LEGO or our own organ cells, these TED speakers questioned conventional perceptions of items we are already aware of and discovered or invented something entirely new, and in some cases lifesaving.

Parts of the session were well over my head. I never excelled in math, so neuroscience hypotheses are lost on me. Yet TED brings it back to the practical, the understandable, and probably most important, the wondrous.

What is “old” in your life, or your profession, that you can challenge and make new tomorrow?

~Alexis

TED: Radical Collaboration

What do political unrest, deep-sea creatures, pop-up art and food movements have to do with radical collaboration? During last night’s TED presentation, experts from a variety of movements showed us how communication and collaboration are similar at their core, it’s the medium that differs. Along the way, they touch on connectivity, passion and being heard.

Wael Ghonim, a former Google executive now living in Cairo, reviewed how social media was instrumental in bringing together a country fed up with its existing regime.

“Because of the Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, the truth prevailed,” he said speaking from Cairo. “It connected people from the virtual world with the real world, and overthrew a government.”

Deep-sea explorer Edith Widder showed that even at the bottom of the ocean, creatures communicate via a bioluminescent light show.

“We live on an ocean planet, in which more 99 percent of life lives under the water,” she said. “You don’t have to travel to another planet to see alien life forms. Just visit the bottom of the ocean and turn out the lights.”

Street artist JR, a dynamic French artist who travels around the world and pastes large formal photos in unusual locations, commented that art can’t change the world. But, it can “change the way we see the world and change perceptions, and may end up changing the world.”

The gregarious and somewhat manic Jamie Oliver gave TED an update on the next season of “Food Revolution” in which he takes on the Los Angeles Unified School District.

For him, it’s about communicating with children through food, and getting them to understand that they are what they eat.

~ Gil Rudawsky

Facebook and Social Networks' Role in Egypt's Revolution

Consider the facts: More than 500 million active users, or one in 13 people on earth, are Facebook users. About 70 percent of Facebook users live outside the United States.

I don't know about you, but I'm riveted by the continued news coverage of what's taking place in the Middle East and I do wonder what role social networks like Facebook will continue to play as we watch unrest continue to spread.

I recently watched a webinar for TED, where Chinese artist Ai Weiwei secretly participated and submitted a short video, in spite of the enormous risks of defying Chinese laws (he had been jailed and tortured for internet communication in the past). He's an artist, but also uses the internet to reach youth throughout his country to expose government corruption and abuses. His story is similar to what recently occurred in Egypt.

I was particularly taken with a recent news story on 60 Minutes regarding Egypt's 18-day revolution. The segment featured a lengthy interview with Google’s regional marketing manager for the Middle East, Wael Ghonim, who was jailed for internet organizing. Ghonim explained how in a country of 85 million people, where one-third are under the age of 30, the revolution was "fought through Twitter and texts, not tanks and guns."

Ghonim turned out to be the anonymous Facebook page administrator called ElShaheed, meaning martyr. He played an important role in communicating information to Egyptian youth and organizing protests online. He soon had more than a half a million Facebook followers.

Ghonim proposes that the biggest strategic mistake that the Egyptian Government made was initially blocking Facebook, which led people out onto the streets, eventually bringing about the successful uprising that overturned the government.

What I find so compelling is that while many of us (me included) use Facebook as a way to share information, reconnect with people and find out who is going to be on Ellen, others in the world are using Facebook as a lifeline for communicating, organizing and expressing freedom from tyranny. And did you read about the Egyptian man who named his baby "Facebook"? It puts things into perspective about the unlimited power of social networks.

~ Barb Jones

TED: Worlds Imagined

I tuned in for Session 5 of the TED2011 conference yesterday – Worlds Imagined. This was my first TED experience and what an amazing gig. Speakers included:

• Julie Taymor
• Morgan Spurlock
• Bill Ford
• Terrence McArdle + Ben Newhouse
• Indra Nooyi

I wish I could write about all the speakers, but three will have to suffice in this blog.

As a theater buff, I was thrilled to hear Julie Taymor, film, theater and opera director, speak about “being true to what you believe as an artist.” Her latest film is "The Tempest," with Helen Mirren. She's recently produced "The Magic Flute" at the Met, and created "The Lion King" and the new "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" on Broadway, which is a collaboration with U2’s Bono. She spoke about focusing on how the story is told, how the mechanics are just as important as telling the story, and how playing with a medium can change perspective. This will become my new motto for rolling out programs for clients.

Morgan Spurlock, who makes documentary films and TV programs that are personal, political, and, “above all, deeply empathetic,” walked us through his new film about the greatest brands ever sold. His crazy concept of having an entire movie promoting brands and trying to sell this concept to major corporations resonated with this communications professional. It was the smaller brands that decided to take the risk because, Spurlock says, “within that risk is opportunity.” A great reminder that sometimes we need to encourage our clients to not be afraid of taking risks.

On the new technology front, we were introduced to “Bubbles,” a magic window that takes a photo and allows you to swing around 360 degrees. Using a camera on a phone, Terrence McArdle + Ben Newhouse created this interface that blurs the distinction between the digital and the real. By “sharing space” you are able to relive the experience and have a memory surround you. For me, this was just as cool as a 3D chalk art painting that I always throw into brainstorms. Just think of taking your wedding photo, vacation photo, or even a weekend hiking trip picture and being able to swing it around to a 360 view.

And if you really want to be inspired by Worlds Imagined, check out the Let’s Colour Project video of a local community rolling up their sleeves to paint schools, streets, homes, and squares.

~ Amy Moynihan

INSPIRED

Ramonna Robinson and I tuned in for the second session of the TED2011 conference yesterday – Majestic. Speakers included:

• Handspring - Puppeteers
• Sunni Brown - Visualizer and gamestorming
• Paul Nicklen - Polar photographer
• Thomas Heatherwick - Designer
• Bobby McFerrin - Musician

We chatted afterwards about overarching themes, and the one that really jumped out for both of us was the idea of taking old ways of thinking, deconstructing them and coming up with whole new approaches in the process. For me, it boiled down to the word “inspiration.” Specific examples included:

• Handspring took the concept of a horse and recreated it in the form of a majestic puppet. At the same time, they took the concept of puppet and turned it into an entirely new thing – incredibly convincing and lifelike.
• Sunni Brown discussed the topic of doodling. Rather than viewing it as a waste of time, she positioned it as a powerful thinking and learning tool. Here’s to freely doodling during work meetings!
• Leopard seals typically have the reputation of being vicious predators. Paul Nicklen spent four days in frigid Arctic waters to test that perception and ended up bonding with a female leopard seal that was bound and determined to take care of him by feeding him penguins.
• In designing apartment buildings in Malaysia, Thomas Heatherwick and his team turned typical design principles on their heads. Rather than giving the buildings square bases, they reduced the square-footage on the ground level, added it to the more valuable higher levels of the buildings and opened up space for rainforest regrowth in the process.
• Always innovative in his music, Bobby McFerrin turned the audience into his band, pulling audience members up onstage with him as he improvised songs for a good 20 minutes!

It’s amazing what we can do when we let go of old ways of thinking and approach concepts and projects with a fresh, new perspective!

~Amanda Brannum

Connected

Today marked the start of the TED2011 conference, and this year GroundFloor Media generously signed up for the live webcast of the entire conference to allow team members to audit sessions throughout the week. I am lucky number one – and just watched the opening session: Monumental, which featured a wide range of speakers from a physicist to a media executive to a composer. Their expertise was diverse, but the overarching message was the same – connectivity.

Favorite takeaways:

• Janna Levin, physicist: together in this tiny microcosm of time, scientists are working together to understand more about where our planet came from and where we're going. Did you know that black holes make noise when they collide?
  
• Sarah Marquis, explorer: Sarah is rediscovering the connection between humans and nature by walking the world. She starts each trek with questions in her left pocket, and hopes to answer them by the end of her journey. Follow Sarah on Twitter @sarah_marquis.
• David Brooks, New York Times columnist: maybe it's because I'm a new mom, but I loved David's message about the power of the unconscious mind, the importance of emotions and the importance of connecting with other humans. I'm interested to read David's latest book, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement.
• Eric Whitacre, composter/conductor: I was blown away by Eric's Virtual Choir project. The connections he's made among people across the globe are extraordinary and brought tears to my eyes. Follow Eric on Twitter @ericwhitacre
• Wadah Khanfar, media executive: Wadah is the Director General of Al Jazeera and the timing of his presentation was remarkable, given current events in the Middle East. Wadah inspired me to think differently about what’s going on in that part of the world and his message of hope, tolerance, security and friendship inspired me. Amazing stuff.

GFM team members will be posting blogs related to the sessions throughout the week – but in the meantime, see below for the opening comments recorded by Cady Coleman who is currently on the International Space Station. I actually found myself clapping at the end of the opening session even though I was sitting alone in GFM's playroom! Remarkable the connections that can be made thanks to technology!

TED2011 : Cady Coleman @ The International Space Station from TED Blog on Vimeo.