Must. Be. AWESOME!!!

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:

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.

(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

I recently spoke at TWTRCON DC about how inserting a little AWESOME into your daily activities will reap large rewards in your life, be it personal or professional. I posit that by adhering to the tried and true K.I.S.S. Principle – “Keep It Simple, Stupid” – you’re actually defeating a creative, innovative urge that leads to all things AWESOME. Worse, by continually sticking to the K.I.S.S. Principle, you may actually do long term damage to your inherent ability to recognize and generate awesomeness on your own. This is the first chat in what I hope is a long conversation about raising everyone’s game in modern communication.

A classic case of AWESOME simplicity.

I am not by any means arguing that simplicity is a bad thing and should be shunned. Simplicity in communication is critical to the imparting of ideas and concepts to audiences small and large. However, I want you to think about this in terms of how keeping it simple can be dangerous if you’re a creative type (or want to be). For that, let me draw upon a sad example from my time working in the Pentagon.

One of the first things you get told when you go to work for any Defense Department organization – be it military or civilian service or contractor – is that you need to learn how to communicate briefly and succinctly. This is important because the Pentagon, like all military bases and commands, runs on a steady stream of documentation, policy, and other “paper” that constitutes the general “work” of the Department. General officers are often required to make several decisions a day, requiring extensive coordination with multiple offices.

So the “staff memo” has become something of a regular item seen in the hands of many poor staff officers running about the Byzantine five-walled maze. While these memos often contain the complete policy or document that requires coordination and decision, the important piece to each one is its cover sheet or executive summary. “EXSUMs” are no more than one page and summarize the content of the documents in bulletized form and clearly note what action is required of the recipient.

Because of these summaries, the main documents they summarize often never get read. So staff officers value the skill of being able to boil the component information down to a few bullets one one sheet of paper. (You all see this a lot on government PowerPoint slides, which constitute absolute abortions of the presentation medium.)

Sounds reasonable, right? Why shouldn’t we communicate so concisely between all these hundreds of thousands of government employees?

Here’s why: Ask any one of those staff officers to author a white paper on their own on any topic of interest, and you will see how massively boring their compositions are.

After a fraction of a career of having the K.I.S.S. Principle drilled into your head, it’s a mammoth task to indulge in original thinking much less creative communication. This causes a state of document fatigue where everything you produce looks similar, sounds similar, adheres to the same style, ad infinitum. The more you do it, the harder a habit it is to break.

This vicious circle destroys the creative impetus to deliver AWESOME content. Even the very word “keep” restricts one to certain, specific actions. While this may help in homogenizing a Defense Department and a government that depends on brevity to survive, I submit to you that it also prevents those same organizations from improving their methods of work and evolving to a modern, 21st century degree of communication and interaction.

Instead of keeping it simple, I invite you to make it AWESOME.

Here are a couple suggestions on doing just that:

• Next time you see a tweet from someone in your network referring to any publication longer than an article or blog post, print it out and read it away from the computer.
• For every business or nonfiction book you read, commit to reading two works of fiction. A book of short stories by your favorite author is a great way to start.
• Instead of writing a summary for someone, go talk to them in person about it. Extra points: bring a couple of photos of the subject with you for visualization.
• Do something risky with your work. Insert a LOLcat pic into that white paper you’re producing. Draw a cartoon, even if you’re not an artist. Tell a joke. Fart.

Simple and AWESOME do not have to be mutually exclusive. Some of the best examples of AWESOME are pretty short and sweet (see the “Dick in the Box” T-shirt design above). Brevity will naturally enable your content to be absorbed more quickly by more people, especially when disseminating via social media tools. As you can see from the examples above, being creative can be as easy as regurgitating someone else’s content from the Web (thanks, socialism!). The tricky part to that is enabling your creativity in such a way that its awesomeness flows out and has the same effect when it’s edited, summarized, abrogated, or otherwise cut down.

I believe that by keeping it simple, you’re making it harder to absorb and produce AWESOME content, no matter the source. I understand that this idea of mine may seem controversial or even mad in this travel-sized world that social media has enabled around us. The authors of Made to Stick, one of my favorite books on creativity, even argue that simplicity is paramount to the permanence of great ideas. I also recognize that I’ve applied some sweeping generalizations using specific examples in this post.

So tell me what YOU think. What are some examples of this that YOU’VE experienced? Where have I gone wrong? Do you have some better ideas to share?

Light up the comments section on this one, folks. I will give out a special prize to the most passionate response to this post I see.

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Du4 & fellow Open Mike winners

TWTRCON DC invaded the Grand Hyatt last Thursday to a rousing rabble of rock stars. My biggest concern about the event – that it would feature merely a poo-poo load of social media jerks wanking each other off – proved to be completely unfounded. In fact, I met a host of cool cats with whom I hope to continue rocking.

Instead of rehashing everything you can glean for yourselves from the #twtrcon hash, I shall instead focus on the things that I found most moving, helpful, and AWESOME about the event.

What I really dug about this event was how learnable everything was. The speakers, combined with relevant and targeted questions from attendees, produced a live narrative that, to me, is the new 21st century version of academic case studies and symposia: realtime, rapid fire analyses of business experiments in microcommunications. Every single discussion revealed a takeaway… some a little more hard to identify than others, but all just as helpful.

Possibly the most AWESOME of the bunch was Scott Harrison from charity: water. Donations made to this cause fund construction of clean water wells. How Scott and his handful of people go about raising money for this charity is quite remarkable. Charity: water organized “twestivals” in over 200 cities. These events drew in certain communities (knitters, for example) who donated what they could. But the focus of these events was on what the communities cared about, whether it was knitting, drinking, or music. This draws in the people who in turn donate as little as $5 for, say, an event fee. This added up to over $250,000 that charity: water gave back 100% to their constituents.

As AWESOME as that sounds, it gets better. Scott gave some no-shit measurable “do’s and don’ts” about using Twitter (and social media in general). While these reflected his experience with a nonprofit, they were perfectly transferable to businesses and government. Themes like transparency to donors, design sense, the art of surprise, and trust all wove in and out of Scott’s preso. It got me both excited and concerned, which should be an objective of virtually any modern influence campaign.

Armano moderating the Real-Time Organizations Panel. Captain Chris is rocking the fatigues alongside FEMA's own John Shea.

Also of note was U.S. Air Force Captain Chris Sukach’s very impressive admission that in social media, “if you’re not failing, you’re not trying.” I hardly ever hear that type of honesty from government representatives in this town, much less those in uniform. We expect so little from our government because we’ve been conditioned to think of it as a maintenance mechanism for status quo, and this often translates to lameness. Chris is the type of change agent we need more of in DC.

I do want to thank everybody at TWTRCON who voted for me as part of the Open Mike Contest. I am a shameless ham, and any chance to get up in front of people and entertain flips my shitbiscuits. That said, I did mean what I said about being AWESOME: keeping it simple often kills innovation and coolness. (More on the shittiness of the KISS principle in future posts.)

I want to spend a little time giving some props to the peeps I hung with on this very rocking of days. Amy, Ira, and Kim of  Chickdowntown were GREAT fun at Brasserie Beck (check out the website for some cool fashion deals and TWTRCON pics). Had a great conversation with David Puner of Dunkin’ Donuts about their social media strategy, which was enlightening and cool. Many thanks to Brian Block for the iPhone charger (he’s using Twitter for real estate and epically winning). Had a great time laff-testing material with my tablemates Andrea Meier, Ali Long, and Adam Zand. Chris and Rachel from Socialware (a TWTRCON sponsor) were supercool– I expect an invitation to come rock it out with you guys in Austin SOON. Lovely connecting at last with Ogilvy rock star Rohit Bhargava who did a great job manhandling Steve Rubel on the Real-Time Business panel. I’d also like to implore people to visit OrphanBracelet.org, a charity benefiting children orphaned by HIV/AIDS which crusader Monique Watkins turned me onto. And of course, the inimitable David Armano– who appropriately knocked Du4 around for sounding like a used car salesman with an aptly delivered: “Own it!”

The Real-Time Brands Panel

You can find all the presos and a list of other con reports and media here. I have to give Tonia, Anne, and Chris super-kudos for putting such a worthwhile and fun event together. I had a great time funnin’ with everyone. I highly encourage everyone to stay engaged in the TWTRCON conversation and help keep it relevant, fun, and engaging for everyone.

[TWTRCON pics courtesy of @vincentgallegos]

Courtesy of vincentgallegos

Nicely done, Twitter peeps. Full report to follow but suffice to day, TWTRCON DC 09 was a rousing success. Very useful collection of people, discussions, and studies. Met a shitload of great people and even won the Open Mike Contest.

Great meeting everybody, and thanks to all who voted for lil’ ole’ me. I love you longtime. More to follow.

This is Must. Be. AWESOME. Dot com.

Had a lovely time this evening bullshitting with some of the crew coming to TWTRCON DC. Despite our disparities, it’s funny how this thing called Twitter has brought us together. Realtors, educators,  marketers, techies: we are all harmonized in some way by this odd little tool. I have to hand it to the Modern Media folks who put this mutha together: so far, this sounds like a great time.

If you’re  not coming to #TWTRCON, use the hashtag to follow realtime updates on any number of tools like TweetDeck or TwitterFall (if you aren’t already). I oughtta be running around, causing a ruckus and fucking shit up, so if you’re attending, holla at a brotha via @Du4 and lemme know where yer at. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you are probably not even reading this blog.

Con report to follow.

Image courtesy of Brian Lane Winfield Moore

Are you coming to Washington, DC next week for TWTRCON? I’m not terribly certain what the unified purpose of this conference is. Like many “social media gatherings” of the modern age, it may just be an excuse for A) some social media startup to charge the fuck out of its attendees, and/or B) a bunch of social media “gurus” to get together and jerk each other off.

To be fair, the prior TWTRCON in San Francisco seemed to go over well with attendees and guests. There have been quite a few of these types of conferences where people wrestle with what Twitter is and how it can be used for business, marketing, or whatever. I like how inherently social this makes Twitter’s users feel if they can actually unplug from their hashtags and muster up the gumption to shake hands with people they don’t know physically.

Courtesy jdlasica.

So… we’ll see how it goes. One of my ulterior motives for going to this thing is to stalk David Armano and conversate with him about all the cool new things happening at The Dachis Group. Something that’s been intriguing the pants off me in this weltering morass of social media madness has been Armano’s (and now Dachis’s) concept of “social business design.” I think this concept is going to be the Next Big Thing, with the potential for crossing all kinds of boundaries that social media doesn’t. More about this in detail in a future post.

Let it be known that Ye Olde Du4 has actually submitted an idea to TWTRCON’s Open Mike Contest, and that tweet can be found here. The basic idea is an encapsulation of the intent of this blog (and potentially a future business!). I’m not sure how the judging is performed, but keep your fingers crossed that I’ll have an opportunity to wow the crowd with the power of my ROCK.

If you’re at TWTRCON DC, shoot me a DM at @Du4 to link up.

Monday, October 5th, I attended an event at George Washington University billed as “New Approaches to U.S. Global Outreach: Smart Power on the Front Lines of Public Diplomacy (PD) and Strategic Communication (SC).” A mouthful of whaaaaaat?

The point of said “event” was to purportedly discuss strategic and tactical issues involved in U.S. government communication. Quite a few familiar and some new faces were on the panels, to include Rosa Brooks from DOD’s Policy shop, Daniel Sreebny from the State Department’s Global Strategic Engagement Center (GSEC), public diplomacy scholar Kristin Lord, some old guy from SOCOM’s Strategic Communication Directorate, and a Congressional lawyer that made me want to commit seppuku on the spot.

A bunch of other PD bloggers are going to scholarly and academically get into the nuts and bolts of this discussion, and the conversation will turn back to how sorry we all are that there’s no strategic leadership for PD/SC, how no one can agree on who owns what, how no one cares, blah blah blah.

I, on the other hand, want to know why this community is purposely avoiding AWESOME.

We’ve been having this debate about the delineations and roles/responsibilities of PD, SC, military information support, and all the other information disciplines for years. Like all good alcoholics, we know we have a problem… we just aren’t going to stop drinking because we’re such assholes. We always end up asking the same questions, arriving at a bunch of solutions, but then drop the ball at implementation. Oh sure, there are reams of reports out there analyzing specific problems with the USG’s communication apparatus… but to paraphrase Dr. Bruce Gregory, no one seems to want to actually LEAD this community and establish a SOLID BUSINESS PLAN for implementing reform.

I'm here for yer publik diplomasees.

So what ends happening? Everybody putters about like a mass of retarded lemmings, hanging on the charity of others, hoping someone else will figure things out and give their lives meaning. Meanwhile, it’s Clown Shoes Day every day on the world stage, and the United States is Ronald McDonald.

The tragedy is that this is not even LAME. It’s just… mediocre. None of these people is purposely LAME. Some are weak, some assholish or crapulous. But ultimately, the community is just… meh.

It’s just a community that shows up. Do they care? Sure. Will they do anything about it? Not… really.

Well, wait, doesn’t it count that we’re talking about the issue? Sure. But we’ve been talking for YEARS. People have been railing against the State Department’s mistreatment of the public diplomacy field since the U.S. Information Agency was forcibly integrated into the department in 1999.

The point is, NO ONE’S DOING SHIT ABOUT IT.

The lawyer at the panel basically defended Congress’ abdication of responsibility for fixing the interagency legislation, oversight and budgetary authority. The SOCOM guy complained about antiquated laws. Sreebny said he was new on the job. The refrain was the same: “It’s too HARD.”

Well, you know what, taxpayer-paid-for govvies? THAT SUCKS.

We do not need more administrators managing the status quo. We do not need more lawyers to find new loopholes in the problems. We do not need more apologists for this bullshittery.

We need LEADERSHIP. Moreso, we need AWESOME LEADERSHIP. If this administration is truly about change, then get off your goddamn asses and FIX IT.

Stop the complaining. Stop the beauracratizing. Stop the crack-addled fantasies that this will all be taken care of by someone else.

If you claim to be a public diplomat, a strategic communicator, a PSYOPper, a Foreign Service officer, a counselor, a scholar, a believer… if you call yourself anything that tracks back to this venerable profession then get involved. I, and many of my fellow taxpayers, are tired of you bitching about how screwed up the communication disciplines are. FIX IT!

Defy mediocrity. BE AWESOME.

[Joker pic H/T to Ben @ LikeCool.com.]

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