EVERNOTE BIRTHDAY MEETUPS: GREAT EXAMPLE OF THE POWER OF PULL

Last night I had the pleasure of joining in an Evernote Birthday Meetup (video of enthusiastic participants). I hadn't realized when I said yes to my invitation that this was a global event. The more I heard about Evernote Global Meetup Day, the more I saw this as a great example of Hagel, Seely Brown, & Davison's ideas of "Pull" (The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion).Evernote (the cross-platform note/info capture tool) invited its community to join them in a global launch of their "meetups." From their blog:

One of the challenges (read: exciting opportunities) that comes with not being an inherently social app is the need to make everyone aware of all the great ways to use your product. That’s why we blog, tweet, tumble, youtube, facebook, podcast, email, and now…meet up!

Though I live about 10 miles from Evernote HQ, I was in Tucson and attended the one organized by Olga Yiparaki. (Thanks, Olga!). Since we had over 20 people, Evernote sent along a care package full of stickers, mints, and a table sign. My favorite, proudly displayed on the lid of my MacBook Pro is, "I'm not being rude. I'm taking notes in Evernote." We had a great two hours of sharing best practices, interesting use cases, and discussions of integration with other tools. There were high levels of systems savvy at play as people talked about how they used the Evernote technology for work and home and how they had made changes along the way to both workflow and technology. Evernote Global Meetup Day's connection to Pull comes from Evernote and their community joining together to access people and resources, attract a community that is relevant and valuable, while pulling insight and performance to achieve full potential. This is very different from top down, pre-scripted "push" approaches and is likely to squeeze more value out of our current opportunities and motivations. (I'll do a full review of Pull soon.) Evernote announced the idea, allied with Meetup to support the arrangements, offered a package of goodies, and left the rest to the community. I think of couple of new users were created in Tucson, and I know I have some great new sites and human resources to follow. What other events have you seen that take advantage of the power of Pull? This is a powerful combination of technology, organizational practice, and human motivations.