I’ve written more than once in the past about the need for marketers to avoid Shiny Object Syndrome and, more recently, to Think Organically when it comes to Social Media.

Guess what?  Not everybody reads my blog.

As we have found ourselves increasingly competing not just against PR firms but against different types of marketing agencies, e.g., advertising, marcomm, branding, we have on occassion lost the bid because the Other Guys wowed the underinformed prospect with the snazziest aspects of Social Media.

Will these happy-shiny approaches work?  Likely not.  But after you’ve spent a million hours developing a sophisticated, achievable proposal (on spec), that’s cold comfort.

Fact is, people like shiny objects.  People like big, swing-for-the-fences ideas.  Hell, we do, too!

The trick, I guess, is to “find the line” between ambition and realism.  And the challenge to finding that line is that the more you know about how goddamn hard it is to create sustained successful programs, the more you may tend to underpromise/overdeliver.

That’s called being too smart for your own good.

Lesson learned.

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