3. What is commonground?
commonground is the award
winning social network and
business information
resource for environmental
and commercial real estate
professionals.
4. About commonground
Launched five years ago,
largely as an experiment
Exemplified EDR as an
early-actor in new media
6,900 members or about
half of the industry!
About 1 million page views
last year
11. Technology’s profound
impact on how we
communicate
200 years ago, all of the
information a person would
come across in a lifetime…
…would fit in 2 weeks’
of the New York Times
Good morning everyone and welcome to day 2 of EDR’s Client summit 2012. I’m Lauren Rosencranz with EDR and to get today started, I’m going to kick off this morning to by talking for a few minutes about how technology is shaping the way we communicate and share information.
But very quickly before we begin, I’ll just quickly ask you to answer the same demographic question we started off with Yesterday.
Ok, thank you. For those of you how are unfamiliar withh commonground, it is the award wining social network and business information resource for environmental and commercial real estate professionals.
We launched commonground in April of 2007. At the time, social media was much more for college students than it was for business people and we were going out on a limb a bit that our niche industry would want to participate in an online social network. But today, we have almost 7,000 members. We estimate this is about half of the individuals that comprise the Phase I ESA industry. Every day they share insights on business in technical issues through discussion posts and blogs. We also have thousands of information resources, webinars, and our online training program, commonground University, Which not only brings you our industry developed courses on Environmental Due Diligence and PCAs, but also ASTM courses on E1527 and E2600. All of these great tools added up to about 1 million page views on commonground last year, putting us in the top 2% of all websites in the world.
So just to get a gauge on the audience, lets do a quick poll. Please let us know which best describes your involvement or experience with commonground:
The way we communicate is changing extremely rapidly. Every day, 12 million people post or comment on facebook.
Every week, there are 350 million tweets sent out.
Every month, there are 31 Billion Google Searches.
Does any one want to guess how many there were in 2007 when we launched commonground?
What all of this means is that there is an explosion of information for us as business people and really as humans, to take in, process and remember. In fact, did you know that just 200 years ago, all of the information that we may come across in our entire lives, would fit into 2 weeks worth of the New York Times. The web is both the problem and the solution to the profound amount of information out there. For everyone in this room today, you know that on commonground, you’ll get information that is important to you and your work.
I’m excited to announce this morning that commonground now has a whole new look, feel and navigation.
These changes now make it even easier to find answers, discuss new and trends, follow issues that matter to you and access resources.
This is the second year in a row that we put together a retrospective video of some of the top posts on commonground . This is just a tiny sample of the great conversations that happened in the past year. So without further adieu, let’s watch.
A lot of familiar faces in there! Thank you and thanks again to Joe Pitkin, our video extraordinaire, for putting that together for us. So before I pass the floor over to xxx, I just wanted to mention that commonground has an exciting contest underway to collaborate with EDR’s client summit. Yesterday we heard a lot from our panelists about how technology has changed the way we work. Until June 1st, if you post your stories about how you used technology in the past, how it is changing your work today, or how you anticipate it to impact you in the future, you’ll have another chance to win a New iPad.
We’ll be posting lots of pictures from this week’s event in addition to lots of great updates.
