Admit when things don't make sense.

Admit when things don’t make sense.

The simplest rule I know of is to just admit when something doesn’t make sense.

And yet, this seems to be the hardest rule to get people to follow, because we’re trained from an early age, to give people what they want.

Humans are irrational creatures. We want things because we don’t have them, because others do, because we see success as related to those things, or status, or power.

In my personal experience, having a passionate community is one of those things that most people want, and many people don’t have a logical foundation for.

But you won’t get a brief from a client asking if you THINK they should start a Facebook page, or hire a community manager, or develop a social strategy. You will be asked to do one of these things. And you likely won’t be given much of an opportunity to ask why.

But I don’t care. Push back. Admit when a request, or even a demand, makes no sense.

Because the true meaning of integrated isn’t “we did EVERYTHING” but “we did what made sense, where it made sense, in a cohesive manner. There’s a massive difference between building a touchpoint everywhere you CAN, and building a touchpoint everywhere that makes sense.

You might not need a mobile app. Facebook might not make sense for you. People might not respond to an email newsletter about your service. There’s a good chance you can’t ‘gamify’ your brand site.

And that’s okay. Despite what requests, briefs, and recommendations you’ve seen try to suggest, you can’t have something that is both innovative, and comes with best practice examples of how it has worked before. You can’t be game changing by copying the other guys.

You don’t win by doing things that don’t make sense. You win by doing logical, rational things that aren’t covered by (the current, accepted definition of) common sense.

And you win by doing them extraordinarily.