Must. Be. AWESOME!!!

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

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.

Spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about moving back to Texas. Raised in Longview, I still call myself a son of Fort Worth (high school and post-college), and I’ve always wanted to live in Austin.

Image courtesy Fort Worth Convention & Visitors Bureau

One day.

This is Must. Be. AWESOME. Dot com.

Star Trek is now out on Blu-ray. If this is waiting for me when I get home, expect not to see me for days. Reviews have said the extra content alone will take a week to get through.

I’m not gonna lie: I was a Star Trek nerd since I was a kid. Yes, I dressed up as Spock for Halloween in 4th grade. Yes, I dressed up as Scotty in 5th grade. Yes, I used to regularly get my ass kicked by all the cool kids.

But dammit, I loved Star Trek. Watched the original badassness of Teh Shatner. Read the books. Cried in the theater when they blew up the Enterprise the first time. Dug The Next Generation. Really dug DS9.

Over time, I lost interest as the franchise faltered and became less and less good. It never evolved. Sci-fi had moved on from aliens with funny heads (see Farscape) and static, barren production design (see The Matrix).

After seeing this year’s Star Trek remake by JJ Abrams, I felt vindicated. Sitting in that theater half full of Trekkie nerds and half full of regular people, and watching all of them love the fuck out of this movie… it was amazing. I got a little verklempt. It hit on every cylinder. There wasn’t one frame of that movie that wasn’t AWESOME. I walked out of there with the same experience I did for The Dark Knight: This wasn’t just a great genre movie, this was a great movie period.

I won’t go into a detailed movie review. There are plenty of those out there that dissect the film by the frame. (I may change my mind after sitting down with the actual disc, so eat it. I’m not consistent.) I will only further say that Star Trek (2009) transcends the boundaries of AWESOME: it is FUCKING AWESOME.

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Having one of those “WTF?” kind of days. Thank God for Captain Picard.

Courtesy of image_macro

Who, BTW, is not nearly as badass as Captain Kirk. So there.

Courtesy roflrazzi.com

Errrr…

This is Must. Be. AWESOME. Dot Com.

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]

I am totally stealing this idea from author and futurist Warren Ellis, who so eloquently resurrected the idea of “station identification” from the annals of radio history to the mixed media malfeasance of today’s Interwebs.

This is Must. Be. AWESOME. Dot com.

[Pic HT: Something Awful]

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.

MustBeAwesome.com… GO!!!

Coming soon: More shizz-nit!