Must. Be. AWESOME!!!

Judging by the increased traffic on the blog, and from the influx of followers on Twitter, my recent forays into new web communities like Third Tribe Marketing are bringing in some new eyeballs to This, Our Foul Blog of AWESOME. Greetings to all you new visitors. Please feel free to browse the archives and find a post of your preference to comment on. I’d love to hear what you think about all these shenanigans.

In the meantime… BATMAN, courtesy of Frank Miller and Jim Lee:

Courtesy of CHUD.com

This is Must. Be. AWESOME!!! Dot com.

A couple months ago, I told y’all about submitting a proposal to the Gov 2.0 Expo occurring in May. It is with glad jazz hands that I can tell you my proposal, “Instituting a Culture of AWESOME in Government,” was accepted by the Expo committee! I’m now listed as a speaker alongside some pretty frickin’ AWESOME company (like Gary V!).

As promised, I’m going to blog about this experience. It’s really the first time I’ve ever had the chance to analyze and put forth a case that’s totally unique (at least in my opinion), so I’m really excited about the opportunity. I am deep into collecting data for the case study, and one method I’m using to do this has been reaching out to former members of the IED Task Force Tech Team for stories, pictures, and other info that may help my analysis. It’s been a BLAST reconnecting with these guys. We had a lot of fun back in the Tech Team days, which is one cornerstone of that experience’s AWESOMEness.

I have gotten a crap-ton of fun stuff so far, a lot of which I hope makes it into the final preso. But to give you a tease, here is the first logo one of our Tech Team brethren, Shane Gilmore, cooked up back when we first went joint.

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In a week full of big announcements, I have another for you, faithful AWESOME-ites. Get ready…

This week I started work for a company called The Rendon Group (TRG) as their Director of Strategic Marketing.

I can hear the crow caws and the cat calls already. Not to mention the sounds of quite a few people going, “HUH?!”

For those of you who don’t know, TRG is a global strategic communications firm that has provided a number of services to the U.S. government and other clients for well over thirty years. John Rendon has long maintained a pedigree of excellence in all the communication disciplines. Whatever you want to call it – strategic communication, PSYOP, IO, public relations, public diplomacy, perception management – at its core, Rendon has always understood the deep power of information and how it can be used for influence. I have been an admirer of their work ever since I first encountered their name upon coming to DC as part of the IED Task Force.

I have worked with The Rendon Group (or TRG as we say around the office) before in a past career, and I can testify that despite what anyone may have heard about them, they always bring their A Game. I have learned a lot from their work, and I respect the company’s people immensely. That said, I also walk into this new role fully cognizant of some of the bad press, ill will, and general myopia directed against Rendon. Part of why I’m coming on board TRG is to address some of this criticism head on. I believe that the creative and good things TRG does far outweighs any bad juju people may have heard about in the past. There are some amazing things happening at this company. Things I can’t wait to share with you.

So in that vein, I encourage people to talk to me about The Rendon Group. What do you think about us? Why? Have you worked with us before? What are your experiences? In the coming months, you’ll start to see TRG move into a number of new conversation channels where we can all talk openly about our shared experiences, needs, and solutions in our chosen field of strategic communication. Feel free to leave a comment below or email me directly with your thoughts. I’d love to hear them.

You might be wondering what the hell I’m thinking with this career move. “Didn’t you just squawk loud about starting your own business the other day?” I did indeed. And @Du4.llc is still growing strong. One of the great things I admire about The Rendon Group is their flexibility in allowing me to continue pursuing my personal passions through a business venture of my own. The crew is extremely supportive to me in this way, which engenders even more trust between us as we move forward. For that level of trust between the gang at TRG and myself, I had to give this work a shot.

I’ll be working in a number of capacities for TRG, from sales to social business consulting (a field I am excited to immerse myself in). I’m excited about the opportunity to create new methods for the company to build relationships with people: between the company’s folks, their consumers, and the many others who participate in conversations about us. I fully expect some AWESOME stuff to fall out of these interactions in the near future.

So it’s full speed ahead over here at Must.Be.AWESOME!!! central, and I hope you stick around for the ride. I expect to be blogging about my Rendon Group experience in the near future, so stay tuned for more. But for what it’s worth, Must.Be.AWESOME!!! will continue to rock your world with badass shizznit that’ll sizzle your shizzle. As always, feel free to holler at me if you want to talk more, online or offline.

HOWF!

Within my community of business owners, contract wranglers, and salespeople in DC, I’ve seen a lot of long faces lately. Since the economy crashed and the new administration took office, business development people have had a harder and harder time selling their wares to federal clients and closing new contracts. Most of what the government does award these days often looks a lot like continuation rollovers, wherein some asshole COTR (that’s contracting officer’s technical representative for you neophytes) finds it easier to perform minimal competition compliance just to ensure he or she doesn’t have to deal with the added headache of transitioning between incumbent contractors and new winners.

Despite the reasons for the recent slowdown in federal business, the bottom line is that many companies are finding it harder and harder to deal with their onetime great clients. Contracting officers (COs) and COTRs have become outright hostile to some companies, turning required program management into offensive, often farcical dehumanization of the performer(s). Folks I work with vent often and loudly about how the typical government contracting churn in Washington has gotten even worse.

Also, as hard as it’s become to acquire a contract nowadays, there’s developed the added insanity of dealing with a growing crop of dickheaded contract administrators. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard from businesspeople in DC complaining about how unmovable, boorish, and downright inappropriate some government agencies can act towards their performers. Some government officials who administrate such contracts blatantly tell their contractors that part of the gig is to take shit from them, from simple incompetent management on down to the most revolting of behaviors toward gender and racial lines. There seems to be this attitude that, goddammit, the government knows best and since I’m the government’s representative on this contract, you better listen to me. This behavior is not just unprofessional, it’s insulting, repulsive, and deserving of public punishment.

This situation – Our Great Client Crisis – is not new and is not AWESOME. In fact, it’s pretty fucking lame.

I have one piece of advice for these folks, and it’s advice that’s applicable to any business, company, consultancy, or individual:

If your client treats you like shit, then kick ‘em to the curb.

Subjecting oneself, one’s company, and one’s people to abusive treatment by a client just because they’re paying you money is ridiculous. Despite how many millions of dollars you’re making or could stand to make, it is simply not worth the emotional loss your business will take when scads of your people begin feeling The Mighty Fed in their poop chutes. Furthermore, the added frustration of trying to secure such work from people who may be willing to pay for your service but not understand it (“Let’s get some social media on this advertising plan!”) will only serve to waste more of your time that could be better spent with AWESOME clients.

Image courtesy of She's Unapologetic.com

So, if you’re in such an abusive relationship, what can YOU do about it? Here are a couple ideas that may help:

• Call ‘em on it: The next time one of your clients purposely demeans you in public, call ‘em out on it. Publicly. Federal workers particularly are often not willing to duel over degrees of impropriety in public. Making the behavior public will often cause them to back down. That said, be ready for the dick move of having your contract terminated for no reason afterwards.
• Make ‘em smarter: In a lot of cases, your clients aren’t acting like assholes because they want to. They just don’t know any better. So defuse the situation by offering to help them out. Tell them about other clients you’ve had who have expressed the same educational roadblocks in whatever specialty you happen to deal. You may even make a friend out of them. And friends give friends work in the future.
• Call Fraud, Waste & Abuse: Each government agency has a hotline set up to report instances of fraud, waste and abuse amongst its employees. Use it. It may take time for your complaint to get addressed, so be prepared to go on the record, which can speed things up. Google your department of choice and be sure you’re calling a number at a high enough level that it warrants attention from that agency’s Inspector General.
• Lodge a protest: Federal contractors in particular have clauses in their contracts providing for their right to raise protest against their COTRs for impropriety. Exercise this with caution however: these protests go in your company’s permanent record and may taint evaluators’ opinions of you during future competitions.
• Find new clients: This is my favorite suggestion. You don’t like who you’re doing business with? Get out. Get out and find some dudes you DO like. If this requires you retooling your corporate offerings or marketing, then maybe you should take a hard look at your business and decide what market you really want to play in. Stop being a slave to million dollar contracts. Trust me: the payoff is not worth the stress and abuse you’ll take over the life of the contract if your client is an asshole.

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As my 2010 evil plans evolve, I thought it prudent to establish a professional outpost for business I may undertake. Lo and behold, I give you @Du4.llc.

“What is this crazy madness?” you might ask. “What the hell do you know, Du4, that entitles you to hang a shingle?”

Well, it’s pretty simple. Over the past year, I’ve digested quite a bit of stuff that’s made me question the concept of “work.” Now, financial issues aside, work has never been terribly fun for me. There have been great jobs and great people, but never anything that exactly flipped my passion switch. Ultimately what I came to recognize is that there was no persistent stream of AWESOME in my work. @Du4.llc gives me the chance to change that.

If you believe all the Gary Vaynerchuks and Chris Brogans of the Web, then you may think 2010 is the year of the entrepreneur. Now more than ever, there are tons of resources available to launch anyone into turning their passions into work… or redefining work as passion. Semantics aside, it was that realization that catapulted me over the edge into launching a business of my own.

So what is @Du4.llc?

In short: @Du4.llc enables AWESOME.

The major criteria for work I undertake through @Du4.llc is that it’s AWESOME. This may entail embedding with a client to determine what’s AWESOME about their company… and what’s not. It may entail speaking to conferences and groups about AWESOME stuff (stay tuned for some exciting announcements about this soon!). It may involve conducting research and analysis programs into the deeper concepts that make up the super-concept we all know as “AWESOME.” It may be taking perfectly mundane and pedestrian tasks and turning them into something AWESOME.

For the time being, Must.Be.AWESOME!!!.com will act as the launch point for @Du4.llc activities. Eventually, I’ll get around to retooling the site to deliver better value for my clients, my raving fans, and anyone else who’s been participating in the convo. But I’ve got plenty to keep me busy in the meantime. In future posts, I’ll describe a little bit about what I’m doing for clients, how I’m designing my business around my own personal brand, and discuss some of the successes and failures that happen to me. If you want to do business with me or just learn more about @Du4.llc, shoot me an email at du4 at mustbeawesome dot com.

Thanks to everyone who’s been supportive of this venture. Thanks to you, @Du4.llc is gonna be AWESOME.

Image courtesy of The Comics Reporter

Crazy, out of control madness going on behind the scenes here at Must. Be. AWESOME!!! Central. I wanted to break radio silence though to share an exciting event for people in the Washington, DC area.

Darwyn Cooke will appear at the Smithsonian American Art Museum on Saturday, January 30, 2010, at 4PM. Cooke is by far the absolute BEST graphic artist working in the comics business today. Not only is his style reminiscent of the clean, inspired animation art of Bruce Timm, but his composition on the page changes the way you think about sequential art. He will be reading a few selections from his most recent work, an adaptation of Donald Westlake’s “Parker” novel The Hunter (from which the panel to your left is taken; free preview at this link). If you’re at all into modern art, comics, or animation, Cooke is a great talent to experience. You’ll find his paw prints all over some of the most eponymous prodigious artistic endeavors of the past 20 years, to include Batman Beyond, Catwoman, and Jonah Hex.

Your Intrepid Host of AWESOME will be at the Smithsonian for said event, easily identifiable with the massive Absolute New Frontier hardcover weighing me down as I cravenly strive to persuade Darwyn to give me a personalized head sketch. Prepare for nerdgasm.

This is Must. Be. AWESOME!!! Dot com.

Cooke's seminal New Frontier from DC Comics. (Image courtesy of Geekshow Entertainment)

RCA Type 77-DX microphone used by Edward R. Murrow (courtesy of oobject.com)

In Must. Be. AWESOME!!!’s continuing mission to seek out new AWESOME things, your cuddly and adorable host has been conducting a series of experiments in podcasting. Currently, I’ve found TweetMic to be the easiest program to use in recording and instantly uploading audio podcasts to the web via Twitter, particularly because its iPhone app is so easy to use. I like the quick and dirty, no-edit style of podcast deployment this tool offers, but I also recognize some people’s preference for well-produced regular podcasts that can be downloaded outside of Twitter on channels like iTunes. If you have suggestions on how my podcasts can improve, either through programming or tools, please drop me a line and let me know.

In the meantime, please enjoy the inaugural Must. Be. AWESOME!!! podcast, “HOWF!” (At this link, you can also find an archive of some of my earlier experiments with TweetMic. Be forewarned: they’re not at all up to snuff.)

In this information overloaded culture in 2010, Our Foul Year of the Interwebz, the noise to signal ratio has never been higher. Anyone who communicates on the web these days faces a growing competitive landscape across different media, so much so that it becomes necessary to develop and nurture trust networks amongst one’s social familiars to even have a slight hope of getting your content seen (much less acted upon).

Courtesy of Chris Sims of The Invincible Super Blog

While said trust networks naturally develop audience loyalty and attention over time, there is another method you can employ that will guarantee eyeballs on your content.

Make your fucking content ENTERTAINING.

At the end of the day, people are going to remember the stuff that makes ‘em laugh or tickles their AWESOME bone. As a content provider, you should be aiming to deliver entertaining stuff every time. You want everyone who stumbles across your content to come away having the same reaction you did when you walked out of the opening day IMAX screening of The Dark Knight: “THAT WAS FUCKING AWESOME!!!”

Entertainment enables AWESOME. You must perform. You have to raise your game to match and beat web personalities like Gary Vaynerchuk, whose every video blog is a blast to watch even if you don’t immediately dig his content (which caters to wine). You have to transcend this homogenization of social capital across the web and bring thunder like you’re a goddamn Greek god.

I’ll challenge you to take an even further step out on the ledge: your entertainment must be provocative. Don’t just think that by adding a soundtrack to your podcast you’re automatically more entertaining. What kind of music is it? Is it AWESOME? Do your listeners rock out to it and pay more attention to your content because of it? Using provocative methods like dirty words, shocking images, and flat-out ballsy boldness will punch your signal past all the other noise.

Many will decry my endorsement of such methods as mere shock tactics; causing controversy to draw an audience in. Well, no shit, sherlock. Content providers are competing against so many different channels of entertainment today that you must enable some Shock and Ahhh to be heard. This doesn’t mean you should let these tactics overshadow your content or your message. You can be entertaining, shocking, memorable, and deliver great stuff people will love.

Here are some examples of AWESOME entertainment across a couple different online media:

• Chris Sims’ Invincible Super-Blog raises the bar on comics commentary by incorporating funny, often ridiculous instances of comics AWESOMENESS. Chris likes his comics full of punches and kicks, and not just normal punches and kicks, but punches and kicks delivered in the most insane ways possible. Ergo, the Punisher punching a polar bear.

"Cuddly. Lovable. Docile. That won't do at all."

• Jon Stewart transformed the face of mainstream media and news through the simple art of making fun of it. The Daily Show provides a hilarious take on current events and the personalities that report on them. Comedy Central wisely made all episodes of this show available via its website as more and more of its audience professed that they get their news from The Daily Show versus other traditional news reporting.
• The maestros at The Cheezbuger Network took photo editing comedy to the next level with Comixed.com. In this new crowdsourcing experiment in hilarity, Comixed encourages people to remix 3-4 photos into panels that tell a story (similar to a Japanese manga technique explained here). This entertaining site has birthed several great new internet memes like “The Reaction Guys.”

The Reaction Guys

I confess I’m having a tough time finding some badass examples of online music or podcasting that really flip my shitbiscuits. If you have any suggestions for AWESOME content I should be paying attention, by all means comment away.

Now, I admit I’m just as guilty of not being as entertaining as I could be on this blog. We’re gonna change that today. If the above pics and links weren’t AWESOME enough for you, let me leave you with this little bit of Alec Baldwin love that never gets old:

Welcome to 2010. I’m coming for YOU.

My resolution this year is to make everything I do AWESOME. I will launch an AWESOME consultancy. I will publish an AWESOME book. I will deliver AWESOME content to the readers of this blog. I will get married…AWESOMELY.

In this, Our Year of AWESOME, I invite YOU to join me.

Photo by Sarah Austin

This is Must. Be. AWESOME!!! Dot Com.

Required Reading for the New Year:

• Gary Vaynerchuk, author of Crush It!
• Social Business Design in 2010 by The Dachis Group
• Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith
• EVIL PLANS by Hugh McLeod
• Tyler Durden’s 8 Rules of Innovation, courtesy of Lateral Action
• The Journal of a First-Time Entrepreneur by Aidan Nulman
• Andy Nulman on the Art of Surprise

{I’ve been thinking a lot on how to best approach book reviews here at Must. Be. AWESOME!!! I maintain a separate space on Goodreads for managing and reviewing books. However, some of those books do cross the threshold into true expressions of AWESOME, and I’ll be sharing some of those here on the blog. For everything else I’m reading (or about to read), check me out under username “Dufour” on Goodreads.}

I respond well to influencers who surprise me. I get bored easily by “normal” content, and I yearn for batshit insane, crazy GONZO stuff that will both entertain me and feed my head. Earlier this year, Andy Nulman wrote a book that totally did that: POW! Right Between the Eyes: Profiting from the Power of Surprise.

Nulman really speaks to me. He’s loud. He dresses funny. He comes from a comedy background. He’s irreverent to the point of annoyance. But he’s wily enough to have figured out that there’s something to this surprise marketing thing, and through his book (and accompanying blog), he’s staked a claim as the purveyor of all things Surprise.

The book itself contains plenty of hardcore, actionable lessons that marketers, PR peeps, social business strategists, and others can use to inject a little craziness into their otherwise boring, stale, or usual campaigns. Nulman even spends a little time dissecting what surprise is on the emotional register and how the physical displays of surprise make one more susceptible to suggestion. He’s not a scientist by any means, and I believe from his stated research that it’s probably only Google-deep, but such an understanding of the science of surprise is just enough background for the reader. This is not an academic or scholarly read. It is an AWESOME one. Nulman wisely spends most of his print time focusing on the fun stuff.

Nulman uses his background in comedy as a launching point to analyze why traditional marketing sucks so bad and why crazy, gonzo tactics of the type he describes are so effective. I have long maintained that entertainment is the most effective way into a person’s good graces, and Nulman entertains the crap outta his readers. His writing style is fun, provocative, and completely in line with his stated purpose. I respect an author who so brazenly ignores many of the common rules of writing and blazes his own trail with his own voice. Nulman surprises you on every page, whether it’s a pithy remark about a competitor’s shit-ass marketing scheme or an entertaining analysis of a certain brand’s methods in surprise. Plus, in keeping with his theme, Nulman pulls out the stops with a really cool surprise ending to the book that catapults its engagement from the printed page to other media.

Some of Nulman’s passages may come off as self-aggrandizing and downright egotistical. That’s OK. Be ready for it. Embrace it. You have to accept that the guy who lives by The Art of Surprise is going to be a little shameless in the self-promotion department. While it can be tiring reading about all the cool things that have happened to Nulman that put him on this path, you will still learn some valuable lessons from his overhyped hyperbole.

One of the more interesting aspects of Nulman’s roll-out for POW! involved his blog, on which he wrote about Surprise and presented examples of Surprise marketing in action. For quite a while leading up to the book’s release, the blog was a great place to get real world studies (albeit brief ones) of what makes something an effective mechanism for Surprise. However, shortly after the book’s publication, Nulman began posting less… and less… until finally his regular content dried up to virtually nothing. He has since admitted that he was unable to maintain the blog to any degree of regular value for his audience and thus decided to close up shop. This became an interesting and value-laden lesson for me: using a blog as an experimentation ground for book content and then a marketing vehicle for that book has its advantages and disadvantages. Nulman sits at the other end of the spectrum from blogger-turned-author guys like Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, who not only developed multiple social media streams to promote and market their book Trust Agents but also continue to engage with people on those new and preexisting networks.

That criticism aside, POW! Right Between the Eyes is still an AWESOME book, business or otherwise. It’s filled full of good ideas to use if you’re a dirty influence peddler like myself, and it’s entertaining and fun to read if you’re not.