The Power Of Doing Nothing

It is time for some Sentient employees to take off! Don't worry they will be back. We have Julie reaching her 3+ year mark and Kristen is in year 4. At Sentient we provide a little extra time off (you must take 2 weeks without email or contacting the office) and $5,000 travel allowance after 3 years and then every 3 years after that. The only catch is that we get to keep their computer and they can't call in to the office or contact us.

As we are fond of saying:
We all want to be proud of our work. But as important as our next project is, we know that it’s not our greatest gift or the greatest good that we can do. We have to work for a living, but it’s the living that defines us, not the work. 

Well, this is part of that "living" thing we strive for. So, Julie will be gone part of this Summer and Kristen in the Fall. I could try to explain the benefits of this, but I think this video from TED says it very well. (Though we have not figured out how to take a year off just yet.)

Got Old Biz Cards?

A small problem that all working people have to face at one point or another - what am I supposed to do with all these old biz cards?

When we moved to our new digs, we didn't order new biz cards right away because we still had a TON of the old. After a little bit of using the old ones and having to explain several times that the address on them wasn't correct anymore, we decided it was time for a newly designed biz card. That's when the question arose. My first reaction was to just throw all the old biz cards in the recycling bin, but then after a quick search, I found many other ways to recycle your old biz cards:

• You could use them for making a grocery list, jotting down a note for a loved one or taking down messages when on the phone. Plus, since biz cards are made of thicker stock paper than your normal sheet of paper or post-it note, if you wish to take your notes or list with you, you can put it in your pocket and it won't get crumpled as easily.

• You could use them for entering drawings for door prizes or free catering as long as you make sure you have updated contact info on the card before you enter.

• You could use them as luggage tags because they hold up better than a thinner piece of paper, but again, make sure you update your information by hand on the card before you use it.

• You could use them as labels for organizing & identifying CD cases, files or hanging folders.

• You could use a folded corner of a biz card to make a nice toothpick or fingernail cleaner if you are in a pinch.

• You could fold up a biz card and use it as a wedge for a wobbly table or chair.

• You could use the back (if it's blank) as a gift label.

After reading a few articles on what you could do with old biz cards, I thought that most of the suggestions for uses were kind of boring and expected. I ended up searching for more creative and unexpected uses for old biz cards and found the following:

• You could use old biz cards as noisemakers for the wheels of your child's bike (or even your own for that matter :-) All you have to do is tape or clothespin a card to the supporting bars of the fenders on your bike so that the spokes on the wheel create a motorized sound when they strike the card.

• You could make your own deck of playing cards and make up a game with them. This is a great one to keep kids busy for awhile with some creative fun.

• You could cover a wall with the backside of the cards (if they are a solid color or have a cool pattern) for an interesting wallpaper effect. This one would be good for creative agencies or some kind of place that likes to get creative with their work environment.

• You could use them in being crafty or making art. They make great paint scrapers for scraping paint on a canvas, great for creating collages with to add depth, or blend shreds of them together with other paper to make handmade paper.

• You could make biz card cubes and put them all together to construct a house of cubes, cube furniture, or even make ornaments for your Christmas tree! This biz card project may take a while and you might actually find that you don't have enough old biz cards! I found this idea to be the coolest, by far, so I ended up making a few cubes myself. I also found someone who had actually spent the time to make a house of cubes.... it took 66,000 biz cards to make the house of cubes-- also known as Menger's Sponge. Now that, is dedication!

Pretty neat stuff, huh? Well, I hope that this gives you inspiration to do something with your old cards that have been sitting in your desk collecting dust. If you decide you really aren't the type to do anything with your old cards, please recycle them or send them to this guy named Steve Patterson -- he collects biz cards. If you are the type of person to do something with your old cards, I say "happy biz-carding" to you!

Sentient Services - Welcome to our blog.

Welcome to the blog of Sentient Services. If you are seeing this page you are most likely waiting for a web meeting or remote viewing of research. While you wait, please take a look around our blog or visit our website. Links to our site and recent blog posts are over there - to your right. Enjoy and please let us know how we can be of service.

Thanks!

The Sentient Team

Virtual World Guide white paper available for free download

We've compiled a guide to existing virtual worlds that's available for free download. This guide offers info and screen shots on dozens of worlds from Second Life to Habbo Hotel. There's also more information in the paper about our Virtual Awareness research offering, designed to help companies understand more about how, when, and where to take their brand into virtual worlds.

To get a free copy of Sentient's Guide to Virtual Worlds, go here..

Bottled water and other disasters

Our environment is melting away, small artisan and high quality “shops” (farms, journeymen…) are slowly disappearing – well you know the story. While the woes of these happenings are becoming less and less disputed the solutions are not becoming any clearer that I can tell. There are still some who see this as simply the market economy and make some valid arguments – for one of my favorite back-and-forth discussion on this “Rethinking the Social Responsibility of Business” there is a spirited discussion between Milton Friedman, Whole Foods' John Mackey, and Cypress Semiconductor's T.J. Rodgers (http://www.wholefoods.com/blogs/jm/archives/2005/09/).

Another great recent article in Fast Company (July/August 2007) by Charles Fishman (auther of The Wal-Mart Effect) talks about the $15 billion dollar a year bottled water industry and the branding psychology behind it. What seems like a healthy choice quickly becomes an environmental and humanitarian crisis. Fishman points out that bottled water is a recent invention, like the iPod and 10 years ago we did not know about it or “need” it – now it is the must have lifestyle accessory – both the water and the iPod. The issue with the water is that "we" (I buy it by the box) are spending billions, producing plastic and shipping something around the world (all steps eating fossil fuel and resources) for something that runs in our homes and offices - thought provoking to say the least. Read it here and let me know what you think: (http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/117/features-message-in-a-bottle.html).

So my question is this. How does a research, marketing and advertising shop like Sentient along with our clients build worldwide brands, reach out to consumers, built market share and all that other stuff and be part of the solution and not the problem. Let me know what you think, please!

A Sentient History

The history of Sentient Services, LP? Well I guess that has to start with my history. No, I am not “Sentient” – the company is much more and I have been lucky enough to hire smarter and more creative folks than I. However, here is how the company started. I came out of undergrad at UT Austin with dual degrees in Government and Economics and took a job with The Gallup Organization (yes, the one that does all the political polls). However, a little known fact is that the political polling is a small part of the company. They have great brand consulting, employee strengths and hiring practice, customer engagement, and a myriad of other research and consulting practices. I was lucky enough to work with an amazing team in California doing market research and brand consulting for Intel, Microsoft, Toyota, Nissan and others. Alas, Austin came calling – well actually it was the birth of our first child (my lovely daughter) and the desire to be able to own a home. So, back to Texas we came and during this time I left Gallup to join one of my research clients from Intel where he started a market research and branding company catering to the technology sector. There I worked around the globe with clients such as HP, Intel, IBM and others to develop new products and services, build and track brands and conduct just about any flavor of quantitative and qualitative market research.

At this point I knew I wanted to become a professor and get my Ph.D., so I enrolled in grad school at UT Austin in the Government department specializing in political behavior (a lot of sociology and psychology) and survey research methodology. And, we had our second child (an adorable little boy). During this time I worked as the Branding and Research Director at an advertising agency where accounts included Dell, Seagate and others. Needless to say, I was busy, too busy. So, realizing I wanted to see my children and wife and not move somewhere in the middle of nowhere to get my first teaching job (I won’t name undesirable cities at the risk of offending) I left school with my Masters and started Sentient Services, LP right as the .com bubble burst. Our (I use that term liberally, it was just me) first clients were Business Objects and working on the largest IPO ever at the time – the Freescale spinoff from Motorola. I worked around the clock doing brand tracking and consulting in 8 countries for the Freescale spinoff which turned out to be extremely successful. From there the business continued to grow – I moved out of the house into office space, hired former clients, travelled the globe and developed a list of clients that I truly consider friends and am blessed to be able to work with to this day.

Sentient today is a thriving company and we pride ourselves on our amazing employees and clients that work with integrity and respect for each other the end customers to create better products, brands and experiences. There you have it – a short history.

Howdy from the CEO

I am Paul Janowitz, Founder and CEO of Sentient Services, LP. I am going to use this space for some open dialogues with customers, friends, partners and whoever else happens to be reading this. Those of you that know me, know that I want Sentient to be at the forefront of social responsibility and an amazing place to work, first and foremost. If we do not do this, the business is simply not worth running for me personally. I want clients to work with us for who we are and how we operate before they even consider our portfolio or skill sets.

However: I also want to be profitable, work with large global clients and local clients alike, push the boundaries of technology, develop new products and work within consumer goods, real estate, technology, and other brand centric categories.

As a market researcher first and foremost I see my job as developing better customer experiences by listening. The art and science of market research helps build better products and deliver them to the right market. This I see not as pushing stuff people don’t need, but as actually reducing corporate waste, increasing customer service and delivering more of what works and less of what doesn’t to the market place. I also see our advertising practice as helping those companies that do this the best – our clients that employ market research. So, am I putting lipstick on a pig and trying to make myself feel less like a consumer? Let me know your thoughts.

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.