Making a positive difference in people's lives

Have you heard of ignition? Well, here they are. These people are amazing. Check them out at www.ignition-inc.com.

I had the pleasure to listen to ignition Chairmen and Founder, Dill Driscoll speak at an event sponsored by the GCSU Entrepreneurial Residential Learning Community (ERLC).

Ignition’s mission is to make a positive difference in peoples lives. Dill talked about his personal philosophy of leadership and entrepreneurship.

During his dynamic presentation, Dill mentioned that no person could be an entrepreneur without leadership. He referenced some great leaders of the past including Moses, Martin Luther King Jr. and Sir Earnest Shakleton.

Dill spoke about how great leaders engage the heart, refuse to accept the status quo, create a sense of urgency, call people to act in accordance to right values, acknowledge the sacrifices of others, paint a visual picture of tomorrow, have compassion, forgiveness, joy, peace, inner-strength, generosity, humor, intelligence, complete trust and poise.

In addition, Dill discussed about the 5 screens today. The first 4 were easy to identify and they included the following: Movie, Television, Computer and Smart Phone. However, the last one he mentioned was that of Human Touch.

As public relations professionals, I believe that it is necessary to understand, Human Touch, in order to be the most effective and the most valued to those who we are working with. At the end of the day it is the friendships and relationships that are being built through our personal interactions with other people.

My challenge to my public relations peers is to get out there and start interacting with other public relations professionals. Handing out your business card is a great way to make a personal connection and let people know how much you care.

You may be surprised to see how something so simple as the human touch can be beneficial in connecting you to people and opening opportunities for you in your career.

I wanted to thank ERLC for having Dill come speak at GCSU. The next ERLC meeting is this Monday March 1 at 12:30 p.m. in the dining hall room next to the ice cream machine. Guess who is guest speaking? Yep, that would be yours truly; I will be speaking about the Women’s Leadership Symposium I am organizing to be held on Monday March 15 at GCSU. See you there!

My Tweet Challenge Experience

I hit over 100 tweets, followed more than 25 new people and used everything from #hahtags, RT's, Links and @replies. This challenge was a challenge for me. Thanks to everyone who followed me and tweeted me! The challenge has helped me to see the value of using twitter to connect with other people and learn new things even if it did consume a lot of my time.

I will admit that not having the Internet physically at my fingertips (i.e. smart phone, iphone,etc.) did limit me in this challenge. Although, today while I was sitting on the crammed shuttle to class, I noticed that the guy sitting next to me was tweeting from his iphone. I engaged him in conversation about twitter and we talked all the way until we got off the shuttle. He had mentioned that there was the option to tweet using text messaging on your phone. Sadly, I am still a simple girl at the end of the day and I do not have unlimited text messaging on my phone so I don't see that really being a feasible option for me, but still good to know for all my readers out there.

However, the lack of Internet at my fingertips was not the only obstacle I faced in this challenge. In addition, I did come across the reality that many professional women may be aware of twitter for their organization, but are not at this point in time using twitter personally. I say this because over the last week, I had the opportunity to attend a PBC Women in Athletics Seminar and a Women's Leadership Forum. I got the names of the guest speakers and some of those who attended and looked them up on twitter, the majority I did not find and the few that were found had not updated their pages for awhile.

On the other hand, I did have some positive takeaways from this challenge. I had the opportunity to take a client that I am working with this semester, Aubri Lanes restaurant, and increase their twitter followers from only 1 follower to a total of 4. I understand that this is just a small measure of improvement, but you see that was just from 1 tweet about @AubriLanes. I believe that if Aubri Lanes will move into constantly updating their twitter page, they could have an even better following. My hope is to see that Aubri Lanes will continue to increase their twitter followers and twitter presence. I'm not sure how I can measure the result of whether or not using twitter brings people into the restaurant, but I do know that it will serve to most certainly increase their brand awareness.

In this challenge, I experienced such a variety of knowledge from my exposure to twitter. I think of twitter as a constantly updated newspaper where I can get information readily about everything there is to know. I am glad that this challenge is behind me now. I look forward to tweeting at the healthy medium for me and that does not include 5 tweets a day, everyday.