An Action Learning Project in Persuasion and Positive Recognition

This post is about persuasion, influence, the power and importance of positive feedback and recognition, with a sprinkling of marketing and social media thrown in for good measure.

For all of those reasons everyone in corporate leadership, executive leadership or ANYONE interested in developing effective leadership skills should read on.

First a back story.

For years in some longer workshops, I have invited people to give each other positive written feedback on post it notes.  I’ve called it “I Like You Because” notes (with a hat tip to Zig Ziglar for the title and the germ of my idea).  This exercise has reinforced and highlighted the extreme power of positive reinforcement and urged me to try to do as much of it as I can, whenever I can.

And, it is completely true that while the receiving is powerful, it is even better to give than to receive. 

This week, on Twitter I had an idea to expand this idea to social media.  the idea – to send people I appreciate a “tweetimonial”  Once I sent a couple I realized that I wanted to encourage others to do the same, so I started encouraging people to join my #tweetimonial movement.  (to see a current search of these – whether you are on Twitter or not, go here.)

I have approximately 5800 followers on Twitter (if you aren’t one, I’d love you to be! – http://twitter.com/kevineikenberry), but there is no guarantee that anyone one of them – let alone all of them will see my efforts.

So I’m creating my own little action learning project – to see how I can use what I know about persuasion, influence, role modeling – in short what I know about leadership – to create a #tweetimonial movement on Twitter.

While I have have been learning lessons already, I know there are more to come.  And even if the idea never reaches my ultimate goal of widespread Twitter use, I know that every message written and read will make a positive difference world.

Isn’t that what we should strive for with all of our organizational leadership (and personal leadership) efforts anyway?

I’ll keep you updated on what I am learning, in the meantime, if you are on Twitter, send a #tweetimonial – or two or five (and use the hashtag so we can track overall usage easier) and if you aren’t, practice giving people genuine, authentic recognition more, starting today.