“What Are You Doing For Others?”

There are two reasons today stands out for me:

1. It’s Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, birth anniversary, which is being commemorated as the MLK Day of Service all around the U.S.

2. It’s my birthday.

Now admittedly, my birthday is of far less consequence than MLK’s. But it is pretty cool to share a birthday with one of the most inspiring leaders of our time.

For one, my birthday is always a national holiday. ;)

More importantly, when our national leadership seems bent on imposing some dystopian protectionist version of life on us despite the world being smaller than ever, it feels even more essential to ponder, and answer, the question MLK posed.

“What are you doing for others?”

Now, I don’t believe you have to be MLK, or Gandhi, or a great world leader to have a valid answer to that question.

Perhaps you volunteer once or twice a month at a soup kitchen.

Perhaps you don’t have a lot of money to give, but provide your professional expertise to mentees who could use it.

Perhaps you simply listen to others when they need you to (being able to do that in and of itself is an art form).

“Doing for others” doesn’t have to be grandiose, or dramatic, or earth-shattering.

It just needs to be the most honest manifestation of what you can afford to give, at any given point in time, without feeling put upon, or drained.

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What does all this have to do with social media, or marketing, or Social PR?

Everything.

In the best Social PR scenarios, we always initiate strategy sessions keeping the end in mind, i.e. what it is we’re trying to achieve for our business/organization.

Yet ironically if, in the manifestation and implementation of those strategies we’re not actually keeping the focus on our audience, they will not work.