As my alarm went off on 14th April I didn’t have that normal arrrgh, why isn’t it Saturday feeling, because for once I was excited to be up early as I made my way down to help out at the INSPIRE London event.
Volunteers, speakers and mentors all give their time to make the day such a brilliant event. The best thing of all is that all proceeds go towards funding future Merlin’s Apprentices. As a previous winner, I was very happy to support the team managing social media for on the day. The biggest challenge on the day was how on earth I was going to get us to trend on Twitter…
So I arrived at Google HQ promptly at 7:40am, grabbed my pass and headed upstairs. After our team briefing, I set up out tech equipment and bought my raffle ticket in hopes of winning a mentoring session. I won a session the previous year and I gained so much from it, so I knew how brilliant it would be to win again.
The theme for the day was ‘Leadership: Why you need to think and act differently to succeed’. Sherilyn Shackell kicked off the jam-packed day of learning. We also heard from speakers such as Simon Biltliffe (Webmart), Debbie Klein (Engine), Anne Pickering (O2), George Neel (Diageo), David Mcqueen (Author, Poet and Coach) and many more.
After frantically tweeting for a couple of hours, I finally heard the magic words: WE ARE TRENDING! Now those of you who work in Social Media will know how incredible that is. And we continued to trend for the rest of the day. For everyone that attended and tweeted using our hashtag #inspirelondon16, thank you, we couldn’t have done it without you.
If you haven’t had the opportunity to attend an INSPIRE event yet, I highly recommend that you do. You’ll learn new things, meet some brilliant people and will hopefully leave feeling inspired. And from my own personal experience, you can rest assured that your money is being put towards a really brilliant and worthwhile cause.
Reece
Merlin Apprentice
For more info on INSPIRE events visit: www.marketingacademy.org/events
