Must. Be. AWESOME!!!

{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.

I’ve just escaped the Snowpocalypse that ate DC this past weekend for the fair airs of Fort Worth, Texas. Said Snowmageddon gave me a few days to test drive Mass Effect on Xbox… which is AWESOME (more on that, perhaps an Experience Series post, later).

Everybody have a lovely Christmas holiday and enjoy your New Year. My plans involve a lot of Mexican food, some cool eBooks on my new Nook, and mucho consumption of adult beverages. Your humble author is hard at work on some Evil Plans for 2010, so stay tuned.

In the interim, to make up for periodic inebriation of the author, here’s some AWESOME shit to delight you Here At The End of All Things.

• This hilarious Twitter hash (if you miss the joke, get thee to a Die Hard screening ASAP): #TweetsFromNakatomiXmasParty
• The best new Saturday Night Live skit in YEARS: What Up With That??!
• An interview with futurist Venessa Miemis, one of the most amazing headspace challengers and my odds on pick for best social media personality of 2009.

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

I just discovered this AWESOME new tool for identity management: HootSuite. For social media users with multiple lifestreams, it is essential to your well-being.

You can tie your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Ping.fm accounts into the tool and manage then using a variety of options. They just developed Twitter List support, which provides even more functionality. This would be an ideal tool for social media powerhouses who manage multiple Twitter identities. I’ve even set up a number of Twitter searches for specific hashtags and subjects that update continuously.

There’s even an RSS reader from which you can pull in multiple feeds and organize according to your preferences. I haven’t monkeyed around with that one yet, and it looks cool, but I’m a diehard Google Reader user.

Also cool: a built-in URL shortener, an iPhone app (as yet untried), and built-in analytics tools with which one can use to measure each Twitter user, hash or other stream they’ve integrated into the tool.

Also AWESOME: there’s a bookmarklet (the “Hootlet”) that you can embed on your toolbar. As you browse, you can punch that thing and it launches a separate browser box that takes you instantly to a status update poster. You can choose your social media network here and choose to post a link to the page or media file you’re currently browsing or something completely unrelated. GREAT functionality for the power browser.

I’ve been hesitant to adopt a third-party tool to manage my Twitter account primarily because the best of them are desktop downloads (Seesmic, TweetDeck). The great thing about HootSuite is that it’s all web-based. I can’t even tell you how handy it is to have one dashboard from which to manage my outgoing posts/tweets/updates. No more bullshit getting caught between my Twitter audiences and my (profanity-fearing) family networks on Facebook. HootSuite will be even more functional to me once they integrate other social networks I use like Goodreads (hint, hint).

Check it out, social media mofos. I think you’ll like it.

I am a diehard DC Comics fan. I can remember all the way back to when my dad brought me to the E-Z Mart in Longview, Texas, and bought me my first few comics: a Superman comic; an old Star Trek adaptation; and Legion of Super-Heroes #311, the comic that forever changed my life and turned me into a Legion fan.

That said, I have to give Superfly TNT props to Marvel for its Digital Comics subscription program. I’ve grown lukewarm to the stories and shenanigans Marvel’s pulled over the years, such so that I barely pick up one or two series in print anymore. Because of this, I’ve missed out on a lot of stuff, and it’s great to go back through their digital archives and check out a lot of what I missed. Plus, at the price offered (~$40 on holiday discount for a year), I end up saving tons of cash on expensive hardcover collections I’d otherwise have to buy sight unseen. It’s the ultimate “try before you buy” program.

Image courtesy of dailyskew

While there are some obvious gaps in the online archives (Marvel tends not to put a lot of new comics online, which I suppose makes sense from a business perspective), there are some pretty good runs on here. I recently finished reading Warren Ellis and Adi Granov’s six-part Iron Man: Extremis, and I’m glad I read it online instead of forking out the cash to buy a trade paperback. It was decent, but not up to the standards I expect of Ellis. But I don’t feel cheated about this since I acquired the story through the Digital Comics subscription.

The digital reader Marvel employs is a little clunky, and I find it crashes or slows down on browsers or systems it wasn’t designed for. Running it on an uncluttered Dell Latitude E5400 with a Chrome browser seems to work pretty well though.

Marvel’s foray into digital comics has had me thinking on the issue of comics distribution for the future. I tend to believe that comics are going to price themselves right out of the industry soon, so that only diehard fans pick up actual print books anymore. For periodical series to survive, companies must turn to digital distribution, where new audiences live. IDW Publishing has stepped up their game in this arena considerably lately by publishing comics directly to the iPhone.

This is good fodder for a future post on digital comics distro. More to follow.

(Preface: I’ve been wrestling with whether I should use Must.Be.AWESOME!!! as a venue to write about my experiences, opinions, and encounters with any one of the thousands of consumer brands with which I come into contact. Ultimately, I’ve decided to write about only the ones that display some sense of AWESOME about them and not abuse this blog as a platform for complaining. Whatever the subject, we’ll call this The Experience Series.)

Everyone I know has had some kind of problem with Comcast Cable in the past. Be it service interruptions, poor internet speeds, limited channel selection, or crappy equipment, Comcast is like the AT&T of television and internet providers. My own poor experiences with their customer and technician services date back to 2004, but this post will focus on my most recent encounter with them, which was also my first exposure to their @Comcastcares Team.

Image courtesy of Crown Heights.info

I’ve been getting gang raped on my Comcast bill for years. There’s a very specific menu of services I want from them, often which don’t correspond to any of their packages. HDTV is important, fast internet is important, but home phone service I could care less about. In fact, if my condo association allowed satellite dishes, I would have already transferred over to one of the digital satellite companies because of their wider offering of HDTV programming. I am, unfortunately, stuck with Comcast.

This makes me an easy customer to forget about. My options for gravitating toward the competition are limited, especially since Verizon’s FiOS hasn’t been extended to my neighborhood. Comcast essentially has me in a stranglehold, so why should they waste valuable customer service time placating me?

This time, I decided to air my concerns over Twitter to @comcastcares, Comcast’s realtime Twitter customer service handle. Much has been written about Frank Eliason’s success in satisfying Comcast customers via Twitter, so I won’t rehash. Suffice to say, Frank has a whole digital outreach team now that monitors Twitter for any mention of Comcast. Where they find users complaining, their instant answer is, “Can I help?”

The instant gratification of this attention is great. One of the team members replied to me pretty quickly. I explained my dissatisfaction and described what I would ideally like to receive. The conversation moved from Twitter to email where the team member indicated she would like to get more details and then engage other Comcast people to figure out what they could do for me. This all sounded reasonable to me, and I loved the interaction.

However, interaction dost not make satisfaction. The team member who had taken my issue never responded back to me. After a week with no contact, I prodded her to remind her. Nothing. Frustration level: elevated. So I took back to Twitter and blasted out another series of tweets describing how @comcastcares abandoned me… just like Comcast’s usual phone-based customer service. This time, I got replies from two different digital outreach team members. I had to re-explain my situation and forward the email trail to these new folks.

Within a day, I got a phone call from a customer service rep named Lisa who then connected me with another rep in my area. (This was the first inclination to me that there may be a disconnect between their corporate offices, where @comcastcares sits, and regional offices, where accounts are managed and technicians dispatched. More on that later.) Lisa, as it became apparent to me, had been assigned as the “case manager” for my issues.

My local rep, Darcy, was supercool. Darcy examined my account, saw how I was indeed spending way too much money, and made several fixes that would save me about $50 a month on my bill. Furthermore, she arranged for a technician to come out to replace my aging wireless internet setup with a faster one, and even credited my account for a couple free movies. THAT was AWESOME customer service. I only had to wait for the technician to arrive a few days later.

Here’s where it got real frustrating, and this part serves to really illustrate the critical disconnect between Comcast Corporate and Comcast Regional Office Wherever. First off, the technician called me at the end of the three-hour window in which I was to have waited for him and told me (in the worst broken English I’ve ever heard) that he didn’t have any of the equipment he needed to upgrade my home setup and that I would have to call Darcy back and schedule another setup time. This was completely unsatisfactory, demonstrative of Old Comcast that didn’t give a shit about its customers and employed Lazy Assholes.

I called Darcy and Lisa back. More phone calls were made. Broken English Tech called me back saying he would actually get off his ass and go get the required piece of equipment from his office and come back later in the day. Thanks, buddy. You’re a class act. Lisa promised to call me back later and check to make sure everything was fine.

Broken English Tech arrived at my home and immediately set to his mission of showing me how inept he was at his job. After connecting the new device to my modem, he could not figure out why the interwebz wouldn’t come on and proceeded to call someone at his home office to literally walk him through how to fix the problem. Once he was finished, I asked him if he would help me connect what was supposed to be a new wireless router to my laptop.

Take a breath. It gets RETARDED after this.

Broken English Tech informs me that this new piece of equipment isn’t a wireless router. I ask him why I would want another router that does nothing beneficial to my connection at all and forgo all of the wireless networking I have set up in my home. His answer to this is to call his boss and receive top cover for telling me I was shit out of luck, buddy. Call your local Comcast customer service rep.

Image courtesy of The Contrarian

I am barely containing my fury at this point in time. I have internet but no wireless networking, so now my fiancee and I can’t work from home at the same time. Thanks, Comcast. Lisa calls me back to see how the installation went. I give her a double barrel shotgun blast full of ARGH. There’s just no excuse for this kind of idiocy, and I have to reschedule with Darcy again to have a technician come out and re-install the wireless router.

The next day, as I’m contemplating whether I’ll tweet about my Comcast experience, I realize my internet connection on my desktop has stalled out completely. The lights are on but nobody’s home. Cue one metric assload of Twitter-induced fury. Frank Eliason himself picks up my angry tweets this time and manages to remotely activate everything so that I’ve at least got some connection. If he could do all that remotely… why the hell do I need an incompetent technician to come into my home and push a couple wires together?

A second technician appears the next day, this one much more understandable, affable, and competent. He installs the new router. He does some courtesy tests on my connections, TV and internet, to make sure everything’s working properly. He helps me set up the wireless networks on all my peripherals. It’s all good in the neighborhood this time.

Now I have three separate devices taking up space in my office: the cable / phone modem, a wireless “booster” (which has no real appreciable speed increases over my old equipment), and a wireless router. It looks like the prop department from The Matrix downstairs.

After all is said and done, Lisa and the corporate Comcast customer service peeps are all in agreement that the level of service I received was unacceptable. The most telling facet of this whole experience is how shitty local customer service can totally destroy any positive virtual customer service. I appreciated their acknowledgement of that fact. I also appreciated Lisa and Darcy making personal phone calls on their own time to check up on me and make sure everything had been straightened out. While there’s only so much someone can do from behind a phone, those two really made me feel like I was being taken care of.

Here to help Comcast with future customer service upgrades, I offer a simple breakdown of the highs and lows of this, My Comcast Experience:

The Good

• Quick, timely communication from the customer service reps
• Reps genuinely wanted to make things better
• Reps had authority to credit accounts
• Technician #2 was friendly, competent and effective

The Bad

• Long wait time behind initial request for help
• Technician #1 incompetence
• Technician #1 laziness
• Technician #1 unable to communicate effectively
• Services not fixed to standard
• No technical follow-up to ensure everything’s working properly
• Obvious gap between corporate and local customer service
• Comcast equipment is still not high end

More on Comcast:

• Comcast’s Twitter Man (Business Week)
• A Former Customer Berates Comcast (Comcast Sucks)
• Comcast Voices: The Official Comcast Blog

There’s been a slow, creeping movement in DC these past few years to renovate the way we think about government. The Gov 2.0 Summit and Expo, put on by O’Reilly Media and TechWeb, drew a monstrous crowd of people last year to explore challenges, requirements, and strategies for adapting the phenomena we associate with the social media movement to the government of the future.

I just submitted a Must.Be.AWESOME!!! pitch for the Gov 2.0 Expo in May 2010. My topic is called Instituting a Culture of AWESOME in Government. The approach I intend to take on this preso involves analyzing a case study of how  AWESOME can exist and flourish in government today. I chose to use a very specific case study, one near and dear to my own heart: my experience with the IED Task Force Tech Team from January 2003 to April 2006.

Du4 pretending to be King Shit at the old Tech Team trailer

My intent behind examining the Tech Team stems from the entire team’s own reminiscences about our time there. Not a single one of these exceptional people would tell you that working on this team was anything less than AWESOME. The team’s mission was to seek out, evaluate, and rapidly equip lifesaving counter-IED technology to American soldiers serving in Afghanistan and Iraq. There were long hours and a lot of opposition to our methods (our approach basically bucked and made irrelevant the entire Army acquisition system), but our cause was just and we celebrated it joyfully every day.

I’m really looking forward to digging into this study. It gives me a chance to catch up with a lot of my original teammates, all of whom left an indelible mark on me due to their profound professionalism and loyalty. I loved working with these guys, and I’d lay down in traffic for ‘em any day. That’s the kind of culture we need to instill in government today.

With some luck, my submission will get picked up by the Gov 2.0 folks, and I can get to work putting together a badass preso. I’ll blog about how it’s going as new developments occur; maybe something I’m looking into will help YOU in instituting a culture of AWESOME in your own organizations.