Returning to Dan Pink, in his book and presentation of A Whole New Mind, he spoke of the attributes of right-brained thinkers, but he also spoke about the “six most important human abilities that are absolute essentials for professional success and personal fulfillment”. They are as follows:

1. Desgin: deliberate creative input and effective functionality

2. Story: Dan Pink believes that the story is what carries the impact. The marketplace is no longer about just the arguement of why a service or product is best. Consumers want something that they can connect to besides reading facts.

3. Symphony: this is seeing the whole picture; being able to detect patterns, proportions, light and shadow, and negative within that picture. Yes, the picture in this case is the marketplace.

4. Empathy: to not only have logic, but to have understanding of those you work with and those you are selling to.

5. Play: to have lightness and humor within your work and your work space. Encourage laughter.

6. Meaning: have meaning to your work, to your life, and your projects. Place that meaning at the center of all things. Maintain the meaning as the focus.

If anyone embodies Dan Pink’s definition of right-brained thinkers and exudes these six qualities, it is the four guys who started Conjunctured.

Cesar Torres, David Walker, Dusty Reagan, and John Metcalf.

Last August these tech enthusiasts joined forces and opened the doors of Austin’s first coworking space, Conjunctured. This lovely house on East 7th Street is an environment which fuels passions, learning, and growth of all individuals involved. It is a welcoming place for entrepeneurs, freelance designers, and specialists in their own areas of interest to come together and collaborate on projects.

Everyone gives and everyone receives. It is a humble space with a fierce ambition to create exceptional work in the areas of branding, web and software development, search marketing, and consulting for social media, business development, story-based marketing, and community building. Conjunctured focuses on many things as a coworking company, but possibly the main focus is community.  These guys are all interested in bringing together a community of like-minded individuals who are striving for their own personal goals, but who enjoy an active working environment where ideas can be bounced around and developed.

If there is one point that these guys want to get across it is that Conjunctured is a non-traditional work space in which new principles of business communication and marketing prevail above ineffective top-down approaches to business. These guys work to create a conversation between client and consumer. They strive for effective, meaningful online communication.

There is a promising future for social media and further web development in Austin much thanks to these great four guys. Their passion and ambition is contagious.

Check out their personal websites. They offer great insight into each of their personalities and specialties. Also follow their tweets on Twitter. Conjunctured has its own for you to follow as well.

Cesar Torres: blog, Twitter

David Walker: blog, Twitter

Dusty Reagan: blog, Twitter

John Metcalf: blog, Twitter

Conjunctured: site, Twitter

I first heard of Dan Pink in my Media and Professional Presentations class this semester. We studied his presentation style, his slide design, and the actual message he was sending through his presentation A Whole New Mind. In this presentation Dan expresses how the creators, the artists, the right-brained thinkers, have the abilities that will allow them to succeed in the evolving economy and work place. He claims that there will be more of a need for individuals who think of context rather than text, individuals who are artisitic rather than mathematical and scientific.

This shift in the “world of work” place is taking place now. We are seeing it happen in Web 2.0 and soon to come 3.0. As economic ties are pushing employers to trim their employees and make small cuts here and there, the amount of money companies have to spend on marketing has significantly decreased. Web marketing and online advertising is not nearly as expensive as print advertisement, commercial production, or publication costs. This creates a great area for right-brained thinkers to exercise their abilities in web development, online marketing, blogging, application and network creation. It is also an opportunity for companies to keep their heads’ above water rather than sinking to the sea floor.

Austin,TX is a great place to see right-brained thinkers in action. There is such an enthusiasm in the city. Entrepeneurship is on the high rise. Austin is home to an abundance of agencies who focus on marketing, advertising, branding, and public relations, as well as creative development. It is also growing in terms of social media. People are seeking each other out, networking, birthing camaraderie within the creative world. 

A great example of all of this is startupdistrict.com. Startup District focuses on “building a more progressive future for Austin”. Entrepeneur and tech enthusiast John Erik Metcalf was featured in an interview this past August for the Central Texas Angel Network Blog which focused on his personal background and why he is so passionate about creating a startup community for entrepeneurs in Austin. John goes into detail of how the idea of Startup District came about in conversation with friend Dane Hurtubise and how it has developed since.

To learn more about Startup District check out the website startupdistrict.com.

To learn more about John visit his blog. You can also follow him on Twitter.

To learn more about Dane visit his blog. Or catch him on Twitter.

As a follow up to this blog, my next post will focus on another one of John’s projects, Conjunctured, the first coworking space in Austin, Tx.

On November 14, 2008 the new voice-enabled search application powered by Google was released for the iPhone. Too bad it wasn’t available in the Apple App Store until Monday, November 17. But let’s not dwell on the bad, let’s take a look at the good.

This new search app allows iPhone owners to abandon the keyboard and the Safari web browser and search through vocal commands. This can be a blessing or a disaster. When I first heard of the application I was super stoaked that I would no longer have to wait for Safari to load and then have to type and retype what I want to search for. Then I got to thinking of all the automated service providers we all have to face when calling any business, customer service number, etc and all the headaches they have caused. Will this app fall into the same category of annoying automated systems where we have to reply yes or no or punch various numbers into our keypads? Is this the fate of the Google & iPhone application relationship?

I sure hope not. That would be devastating. I’m anxious to see how many updates and fine tuning will be  this application will go through over the course of these next few months.

The two ad campaigns that have really stood out to me are the Target campaign and the Kraft Singles campaign.

Target does all of their advertising in house and has always stood out from the crowd with their wit and very distinctive style. Target is a company whose brand image is outstandingly recognizable and respected. Their new ad campagin focuses on “A new day, new ways to save”. The commercial features people going about their daily routine, but in a way that is more economically concerned. For example, a man in a suit is riding his bike to work rather than driving his car, a father is shaving his two sons’ heads instead of bringing them to a hairdresser, and a woman is doing crunches on a fitness ball rather than working out in a gym.

This commercial encourages consumers to look at life in a different way and get creative with recreating your routine to better fit our times.

Kraft Singles has made the marketing and advertising switch from big dog ad agency JWT of Chicago, over to Nitro Group, a smaller agency out of New York City to put their cheesy singles back into the minds and mouths of their target audience. According to the article The Pursuit of Happiness in a Grilled Cheese Sandwich by Stuart Elliot, Kraft wanted to take their campaign to an emotional level. The theme for their new campaign is “Have a Happy Sandwich”.

Kraft is saying: Look, we know life is tough right now and happiness may not fill every second of your day, but we want to bring happiness back into your life. The time that you spend eating a grilled cheese sandwich made with Kraft Singles, you will be happy. We will be happy.

This is a very humble approach, very much on the level of their consumers. The target audience is clearly mothers, therefore directly speaking to the purchaser. Kraft has also taken a step further to get their brand out by creating a contest which is held on MySpace. On October 15, the contest for the user who creates the best commercial celebrating the grilled cheese sandwich will not only receive $50,000, but their video will also become a part of their campaign. Pretty rad.

Quite possibly one of the most useful apps ever. Shazam started out in 2002. How did we not know about this sooner? Since then the music discovery provider has grown to service over 20 million users presently and is looking forward to the end of 2009 when the service will be available on at least 250 million devices.

I’m sure their number of users have significantly increased since Apple released this commercial.

Shazam can be used in many different ways: to search for new music and information about music genres, artists, tracks,etc that users haven’t heard before, to search for a specific interest, and also to purchase music products. In addition to those services, Shazam also allows users to create music collections and share them with friends.

The Shazam music database contains over 6 million tracks, some of them dating back to the 1950′s. With this database, Shazam has identified over 100 million tracks from across the world. It’s no wonder they are having so much success, they are based out of London, a huge traffic area for music.

I have no doubt that Shazam will be the tool which will carry the music industry through the tough economic times we are experiencing. Especially since the application is so largely supported by Apple. The opportunity for PR in the music industry and advertisement for record labels and independent artists practically seems limitless. If you check out the Shazam website you can read their press releases, which are advertisement enough in themselves, many of them state which artists and tracks are topping the charts and experiencing the most traffic from users.

Get your own Shazam application for free through iPhone, Android, and Facebook.

As I sit in my Media and Professional Presentations class in awe of the magnificance that is Keynote, I am kicking myself. Not for the enjoyment of it, but because I am not a member of the Mac world. For the past two presentations I have created for this class, I have spent hours upon hours trying to make magic from old school PowerPoint. It’s not easy.

Well today I heard of the solution to my all my presentation problems. 280slides.com.

This website allows users to create Keynote-like presentations over the web for free! Along with that wonderful feature, users can download their presentation to PowerPoint 2007 if needed, publish their presentation to the web, and import existing documents.

280 Slides was created by 280 North. 280 North is a startup company created by three University of Southern California students, Francisco Tolmasky, Tom Robinson, and Ross Boucher.

Another genius creation of their is Cappuccino. According to the website, Cappuccino is an “open source application framework for developing applications that look and feel like desktop software users are familiar with”. In summary, it makes the programming process less complex and more user friendly. Definitely something to check out if you are interested in programming.

As for those who aren’t, enjoy making a gorgeous presentation. Just one note: Remeber to Save!

Catch these guys on Twitter.

In the past two months Google has put a lot of time and effort into releasing new features for their prized child Gmail. Last week they released voice and video chat. A couple of weeks prior the ability to send and receive SMS messages. This feature is no longer in service as of now according to informationweek.com. To catch more details on the other seven features Google released with the past two months, catch the article Google’s Gmail Gets Dressed Up in Themes by Thomas Claburn.

By far the coolest themes are the landscapes which change based on your personal location. How much better can that get? Whoever is behind these mastermind creations and updates at Google, keep it up. Google is making all the right moves to improve their services and bring joy to their users’ lives.

I am so glad I switched over from Hotmail. Geez…yes I know…you are probably thinking “Hotmail? That’s still around? People still use Hotmail?” What can I say, I have issues with change.

As some of you may know, my Blogger account went totally wacko on me so I had to create a new account. I am now posting on WordPress and in the past 15 minutes I have totally fallen in love with it. I was super nervous about having to import my posts from Blogger and working with a new blog site, but it has been such a different experience than what I expected.

WordPress is very user friendly. It has straightforward instructions that literally step you through everything you may possibly need to do. My favorite part, of course, was getting to choose my theme and use my own header image. That, I will admit was a bit rough, trying to find a picture that was wide enough so it wouldn’t look horrible as a banner type image, but once I found one that fit it was smooth sailing. On the subject of images. In Blogger you could only add images to the top of your blog (or so I experienced), but with WordPress you can add an image where ever you set your curser. More media =  more fun.

Another thing that I really like about WordPress is the editing feature for published posts. Once you publish a post, you are not sent to a new window, everything is still right there, so if you notice a small mistake or something you would like to alter, there is no excess navigation necessary.

All in all, I think working with WordPress will actually get me excited about posting. In my experience over the past 18 minutes now, it is a much better service provider than Blogger.

Thanks Ashley Brown for referring me to WordPress and stepping me through my first post. Much appreciated.

My video is focused on getting people outdoors. Bringing the indoors, out and the outdoors, in.

The images within the video are from Stone+ Photography, accessed through gettyimages.com.

Ethnography: study of people in their natural or “native” environments

Through social media tools we are creating our own environment. An environment with fun activities such as iPhone applications, news alerts on our favorite topics (RSS), audio shows that fit our interests (podcasts), tabloids/magazines that fulfill our need for juicy information (blogs, and sharing information about our selves while learning about others (facebook, linedin, twitter, etc).

In his ebook, The Essential Guide to Social Media, Brian Solis states

Ethnographers are individuals who observe communities to learn the socio-cultural behavior and interaction to hopefully become accepted by the community and in turn, engage as a true member of the desired digital society

In this case- would we all be ethnographers? Observers of interactions through the digital world– learning and practicing the norms, engaging in conversations, publishing our own work so that we may find acceptance within a certain digital community? My answer would have to be yes, to some extent we all practice ethnography. As do marketing research teams and public relations firms.

Marketers and PR people need to be aware of the environments of their audiences in order to communicate with them properly. If they want to achieve a certain level of success they have to rub elbows with their audiences, become one of them in a sense.

“People establish associations, friendships, and allegiances around content.”

There is more work involved in the digital world for marketers and PR people. They can no longer “market at” people and expect them to jump on the bandwagon of fun- they have to become a part of the digital community and work for acceptance.

“You can’t manage a relationship, you need to be a part of it, fully engaged.”

This statement is one for everyone to read and re-read over and over again in order to understand their involvement and their place in the digital world. We all must be willing to put in the time, work, and effort to stay engaged. We all must bring value to our participation.