This past year at TED2010, TEDx Licensees received a few charming additions to their care packages, items speaking to their commitment to the TEDx tribe, family, conglomerate, or other tag of choice. Two of my favourites were the personalized TEDx event buttons and the TEDx postcards from around the globe. The TEDx buttons entailed being given materials to create our own mini TEDx event buttons, and encouragement to swap button bling with other TEDx Licensees. For those of you wanting to learn more about this, I encourage you to talk to Eric Greenspan, who was on tear throughout the entire conference collecting TEDx buttons bling (see photo below).

Personally, I was drawn to the TEDx postcards, which were a stack of about 34 postcards, each with individual TEDx event photos on the front. No postcard was the same, and when scattered out on a surface (which I did immediately after finding them) they create this visual display of global TEDx art. Moreover, the juxtaposition of technology, instant communication, and TED(x) with snailmail postcards is fascinating. In the instantaneous communication world that so many of us occupy, there's something magical about tradtional time-lagged communication. It's quite poetic really... and kudos to the brainchild behind their creation.

I was staring at my set of TEDx postcards for awhile, and finally decided to add them to our guerrilla marketing ventures. What we did was self-address all the TEDx postcards to our office with paid postage, a TEDxKids@TheHill sticker, a bizarre question, and encouragement to write a response. Some of the postcards are being dropped in random places for people to find and enjoy. Other postcards are being strategically placed at local coffee shops, where we gave the staff instructions to watch, observe, and engage with the social postcard experiment. The coffee shop staff are also encouraged to email us any quirky stories or take notes while they were at work. We'll be collecting the findings over the next two weeks.

I encourage other TEDx Licensees whose TEDx postcards are collection dust to upcycle those beauties, try the above exercise (or collect stories), and let me know how it goes.

Happy Monday!

L.