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.

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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