Much is said about random acts of kindness.
The concept of random acts of kindness as most people perceive it, is already a stretch of the true essence of the concept. A random act of kindness is a selfless act performed by a person or people wishing to either assist or cheer up an individual, promoted by organizations as randomactsofkindness.org. It’s the simple notion that doing something nice for another person is contagious and makes the world a better place.
E.g. When I’m in Amsterdam, I tend to help tourists find their way around town. There’s no commercial value for me. It’s just the notion that helping people actually makes them (and me) feel better.
Brands and organizations try to really connect to consumers again and that means they have to re-humanize. Stop talking like a company and start acting like a person. Random acts of kindness is a simple concept that helped them implement this. Do small ‘human’ things to actually connect to consumers. Turning this into a campaign is already a stretch of the concept. Being nice to people shouldn’t be a campaign, but an ongoing effort. Turning this into a flashmob or something that should go ‘viral’ is even further away from the essence.
To be honest, I am pretty scared that this summer will be all about brands committing random acts of lameness. Or random ads of kindness. That I can’t say to my friends on twitter of foursquare that I’m in a bar without several mobile guerilla random acts of kindness teams jumping on this opportunity to show how cool they are. I already wrote about that in “Battling my fear to end up in a case movie“.
So, maybe set some things straight about random acts of kindness:
Any things I should add?
Note: Many thanks to the team at Boondoggle Amsterdam (Tom, Astrid, Gaston, Simon, Margriet) for helping me understand random acts of kindness.
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