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!

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.

If you notice the sidebar of this blog, you’ll see my blogroll looks a little anemic: only a couple links there in no particular order, some related, some not. Instead of throwing a bunch of links up to sites and blogs I visit often and/or love, I figured it would mean more to YOU if I added these things organically. Or, more to the point, socially.

If you’re anything like me, you visit blogs and any other website with an RSS feed and, if you like them, you check out their blogrolls to see what else you may be interested in. This was the 1.0 version of the Web, back when content creators simply blasted shit out into the ether via their platforms, caring not who was paying attention. Blogrolls were one of those methods: endless lists of the author’s favorite sites, people, etc.

Image by inju via Flickr

I’m taking a different approach. Must. Be. AWESOME!‘s blogroll is gonna be just that: AWESOME. Each link will track back to something I’ve either written about or linked to within a post. This way, it will develop naturally and organically. I hope this will create a steady buildup to a larger list of good, productive content on the actual site that people will come back, check out from time to time, and perhaps add to their own RSS readers or newstreams.

Today, I know a bunch of y’all are reading Must. Be. AWESOME! through an RSS aggregator or other service. You may not be coming back to the main site every day. This is OK. While I would love it if you came back all the time and participated in comments discussions, I understand that it can be hassle. No worries, I won’t hate ya for it. But hopefully, every so often when you DO come back, I’ll have some cool new links for you in the blogroll section.

If you’re someone who wants on the Must. Be. AWESOME! blogroll, I only have one piece of advice for you: be social. What’s so great about the internet of today is that I get to feel like I have personal relationships with anyone I interact with. If you’re looking to advertise or sponsor something on my blog, I at least want to get taken on a date first. Talk to me. Socialize with me. Be human. You’ll thank me for it in the long run.

[An addendum: I understand that the formatting for a lot of the text on the sidebar looks kinda dopey and can be hard to read when it runs over a single line. I'm working on fixes, but if anyone out there is a WordPress theme master and wants to help out, I'd love to have you on board. I freely admit my XHTML and CSS skills are totally weak.]

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I should apologize right now.

I should… but I’m not gonna.

This is about as close as you’re gonna get from me in terms of a manifesto for this blog. What you’re about to read? This blog?

Just you wait.

Flashback to January 2009, and my buddy Matt Armstrong asks me for a hand. Says he needs some new content. Says he wants me to stop flappin’ my gums about how shitty everything is and COWBOY UP. What am I complaining about? The veritable lack of AWESOME in damn near EVERYTHING these days.

He asks me, “So what’s awesome?”

So I give him this. It’s a guest post. It gets some convo started. It gets some new traffic for MountainRunner. It gets laughed at, linked to, pointed at, sloughed off. Like most one-offs on the seas of the Internetz, it gets forgotten.

But not by me.

I keep thinking, “Dude, I can’t cover EVERYTHING AWESOME in ONE GUEST POST on a public diplomacy blog! There’s gotta be more!”

Right?

RIGHT.

It’s on the tip of your tongue. It’s scratching at the back of your throat. It’s driving your top left eyelid to pulsate in iambic tetrameter. It’s the all-encompassing, all-knowing THING you feel every time you see it. Every time you hear it. Every time you taste it. Every time it touches you.

It’s AWESOME.

You KNOW it when you feel it, when you see, hear or read it. It makes your eyes blow up wide, your mouth open, some weird mouthbreather noise escape the depths of your gullet. “OMFG,” you say. “THAT’S AWESOME.”

And THAT’S what we’re gonna explore here. Together.  AWESOME.

I’m not gonna rehash my original call to AWESOME from MountainRunner; you can find that here if you want to read it in full. But for the Cliffs Notes kids out there, here’s the deal:

If you are going to do something… do it AWESOME.

Doing something shitty or to a preset standard is lame. Anybody can do that. If you are not doing everything you can to achieve the absolute pinnacle level of badassness… well, that just sucks, dude. What’s the point? Just to maintain? We’ll get into that too.

It’ll all happen here. Comedy. Music. Movies. Government. Social media. Marketing. Influence. Public diplomacy. Defense contracting. Comic books. Writing. Family. Happiness. Blue Meanies. Harsh language. You name it. Nothing is forbidden because everything has its degrees of AWESOME.

Now, I got problems just like the rest of ya. It’s a hard road to slog being AWESOME all the time. We all can get a little down on our own shit, and we all need a little help from our friends. So I’m lookin’ at YOU to chime in. Call me out on wrongness… or lameness. Point me to other examples of AWESOME.

Conversate, people!

My name is Christopher Dufour, and I wanna be AWESOME.

I hope you do too.