jonnygoldstein.com

(Notes of Tim O’Reilly’spresentation)

Last week, Jeff Pulver put on the 140 Characters Conference, AKA “The Davos of Twitter.” Great speakers, lively format, timely topic.

Jeff is an innovator–he’s always looking for new ways to add value to events. That means he’s open to new ideas. I was happy to be embodying one of those new ideas–the idea that visual notes add impact to a conference. Here are the notes.

So what was the impact of having a visual notes artist at the event? Many attendees told me that it gave them a whole different way to engage with the content of the speakers’ talks. Tim O’Reilly made a point of tracking me down and sharing my notes of his talk with his 600,000+ Twitter followers. So the in person reaction was very positive. How about the media reaction? I spent some time tracking down media mentions of the visual notes and this is a sample of what I found.

Reactions to the notes:

Big Media:

The Industry Standard-Venture capitalist Fred Wilson used my notes to clarify a point he made at the conference about the growing importance of passed links the web.

Die Welt Kompakt
A German paper with circulation of 200,000 used one of my drawings to illustrate an in depth article about the conference. Download the PDF of the article here (in German).

Blogs:

Marketing Safari

Officially Rad

Inflection Point

Web 2.0…Really

Marlooz

Technology Today

The Twitter Steam:
There were over 100 tweets referencing the notes, including from heavy hitters like Tim O’Reilly, Fred Wilson, Laura Fitton, and Jeff Pulver. These are a few of my favorites, collaged together.

Flickr Stats:
Over 12,000 views of the notes so far, and this only includes what people viewed on Flickr. When people upload photos of the notes to their own sites, views of those images are not recorded in my Flickr stats.

Wrapup

Based on the reactions I got, visual notes provide the following benefits:

–Buzz. Visual notes are “talkable” they give people something to talk about during and after the conference. That adds up to word of mouth marketing for the next time you do your event.
–Reach. Posting the notes on the web on a social photo sharing site, like Flickr makes the visual notes available to a global audience.
–A fresh perspective. Several attendees of the conference told me that the visual notes gave them a whole other way to engage with the information provided by the speakers.
–Lasting impact. Images tend to stick in peoples’ minds. A vivid combination of images and key ideas.

This was an amazing conference, and I am delighted that so many people let me know that the visual notes I created added value to their conference experience. Thanks for having me Jeff.

If you would like to talk to me about creating custom visual notes of your conference or event, drop me line or pick up the phone and give me a call. Lets talk.