And, we're up and running!

Welcome to Awareness Is Everything, the blog of Sentient Services, a knowledge studio based in Austin, Texas. Several Sentientians (now, say that fast 5 times!) will be contributing to this blog. They'll introduce themselves as they begin posting.

I am Renee Hopkins Callahan, and I come to this blog after five years of writing IdeaFlow, a blog about creativity and innovation. I'll continue to write about those topics here, and I'll also be writing about topics related to what we at Sentient do -- research, branding, and marketing, both in this world and in virtual worlds.

To start off with, here's a link to a recent Austin Business Journal article about Sentient.

And here are some links to some of the stuff I'm currently reading:

Bruce Nussbaum writes in Business Week about current research that's being done into how different demographics participate in social media: "The point is that we have to go beyond the hype of technology and get to the groups of people using social media to really understand what they want out of conversations if you want to talk to them."

John Hagel of Edge Perspectives summarizes his excellent keynote address from March's Community 2.0 conference: "We are moving from a stage where virtual communities were largely associated with consumers and hobbies to a new stage of opportunity where communities become a rich environment for bringing people together to accelerate their talent development and deliver even more value to their relevant constituencies.