Poor composition, haphazard arrangement; the orange and white check pattern of the bedspread beneath it all.

Impressed with the amount of quality items in the tote bag — posters, notebooks, stickers, candies, graphics and papers — I hastily arranged everything into a sort of aesthetic garbage pile and snapped off two shots. It was a moment of documentation, if anything.

On the return from Lisbon, I selected a set of photographs from the trip which I felt best captured the experience. A quick upload to Flickr, with appropriate Creative Commons licences and tags. It was the ‘uxlx‘ tag that garnered the most attention. The curators of UX Lisbon tracked the social media response to the conference, and quite effectively promoted the results. They were quick to integrate public-sourced photographs back into their website for future events. Including, a sneak peek of the gift bag conference attendees receive.

Less than a year later, that photograph has reached over one thousand unique views: the large majority of referrers are from ux-lx.com.

In retrospect, had I known the image would prove so popular I might have taken the time to arrange a proper shot. It’s nearly taken for granted that the power and influence of social media can return such gains from very little effort. Significant exposure on the wings of quick and dirty categorization — accidental success. Consider the possibilities inherent with consistent effort, energy and focus.