Must. Be. AWESOME!!!

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.

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’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 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.

Related articles by Zemanta (FYI, Zemanta sucks…one article rec? Really?!)

• DoD: military needs to think harder about using open source (arstechnica.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]

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.