Must. Be. AWESOME!!!

A friend of mine with whom I’m doing business coined an AWESOME term around the same time as we were discussing how to get my business, @Du4.llc, off the ground. I wanted to share that with you, O Faithful Consumers of AWESOME, and elucidate on the concept of Weaponizing Oneself.

Jon Iadonisi (or the more nefarious “Jonny I,” as I like to call him), with whom I’ve worked in a variety of irregular roles, once told me this:

“Du4, what you’ve got is unique, innovative and creative. The idea of Du4 is made up of all those things that people get access to when they ask you for your opinion on a white paper or your help ironing out a contract. You need to find a way to weaponize Du4: to take all those unique things do and put ‘em into a delivery mechanism that’ll get you PAID.”

I’ve never forgotten those words, and I’ve been thinking on them a lot since launching my own business. The idea of “weaponizing” oneself, I believe, emerges from an entrepreneurial spirit that galvanizes ones to capitalize on what’s most AWESOME about themselves.

Businesses or organizations may not want to hire you as a full time consultant, whether because of how much you cost or other reasons. But they still want what you got. So they’re willing to plop down something to take you out to the firing range, fire off a few shots, and see how you perform. They may want to buy a limited deployment of YOU and drop you into a project or business scenario to see what kind of damage your particular weaponized payload may deliver.

The bottom line is that you should start figuring out what it takes to weaponize yourself too. Find the unique mechanism that allows you to deliver AWESOME on the timeline and scale that YOU want. I can tell you this: it has been fuckin’ FUN figuring out how to deliver precision strikes of Du4 upon unsuspecting populations in Meagerville and Bullshitberg. No matter your trade, passion, or profession, I guarantee you’ll never regret it.

Here are a couple questions to ask yourself to help you pursue your own personal weaponization strategy:

• Who are you? Answer this question first. Really figure out who the hell you are and what you’re all about. Tyler Durden says you’re not your fuckin’ khakis. I say you’ve got some AWESOME in there somewhere.
• Who enables your AWESOME? Communities will always rise around subjects of interest. Who’s in your social circle that engages you about your passions? Find those people and spend more time with ‘em. Ask questions. They can help.
• Where do you want to go? Weapons have to be deployed, so identify the places you want to drop your Fuckbombs of AWESOME. Best thing I ever did was scrape together enough money to go to TWTRCON DC in 2009 and speak in the Open Mic Contest.
• What are you offering? When you launch your AWESOME Missile, you gotta have a payload already loaded. Is it consulting services? What kind? Are you writing papers, blog entries? Are you delivering physical items on Etsy? Figure it out.

One last piece of advice, at the risk of pissing off the gun control crowd: BE BOLD. Jonny I didn’t use the armaments metaphor to be cute… he did it to show me that I’M A FUCKING WEAPON OF AWESOME and MY BULLETS ARE LIFE CHANGERS. Weapons are loud and leave large swathes of damage, so don’t be afraid to kick over some enemy emplacements on your way to the arsenal. There will be a lot of naysayers and a TON of adversary fire coming at you. You’ll have to take a couple head shots and keep returning fire.

Only YOU knows how rad YOU are, and you’ve gotta make BIG SPLASHES sometimes to show people that your particular brand of machine gun rocks the house.

{Jonny I is only one-half the creative powerhouse of the White Canvas Group. I am also indebted to Tim Newberry for his guidance, mentorship, and partnership in the arts of creatively blowing your mind.}

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• Station Ident: The Year We Make Contact (mustbeawesome.com)
• State of the Media: Adversarial Exploitation of the Digital World (whitecanvasgroup.eventbrite.com)
• White Canvas Group State of the Media Trailer (youtube.com)

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!

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 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.

(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

Sometimes, AWESOME simply defies description. Sometimes, the best emotional explosions and reactions to AWESOME are unexpected. Sometimes, it just happens. You can’t explain it. You can’t predict it. You can’t model it.

It just works.

Such is the case of The Venture Brothers.

GO, TEAM VENTURE!

The Venture Bros. premiered to Cartoon Network‘s Adult Swim time block in 2003. Over the course of its 3 seasons (currently in its 4th), the cartoon exemplified an unabashed and unadulterated love of classic genre staples – from depictions of a drug-addled grown up Johnny Quest to a Fantastic Four amalgam voiced by Stephen Colbert. However, each and every episode attacked and murdered genre expectations. The comedic timing of this sharply dialogued show arose not from the stale trappings of one-off jokes or sarcastic parodies of real life, but from the adoration and respect of the humor inherent in the show’s inspirational material. Jackson Publick, along with his showrunning cohort Doc Hammer, has even said that despite the rolling hilarity, the show is ultimately about failure… and how we can find humor in it.

Now, if this hasn’t convinced you to check this wondrous show out on DVD yet… GOOD. What??? Now, I’m discouraging you from checking out this sexy sin of AWESOME? Well, that’s part of the beauty of The Venture Bros’ AWESOMENESS.

The Ventures’ audience grew slowly, almost dismally over the past six years. Indeed, the producers have only just now begun their 4th season. That’s what’s brilliant about the show’s appeal: You have to self-select in to get the joke.

What I mean by that is that The Venture Bros is something of a private club. Part of what has made the show such a phenomenon is its use of the genre culture as marketing. In season 3, for example, Doc Hammer announced a special weekly gig where hardcore fans of the show could order exclusive T-shirts based on each episode, but only for a limited time. These shirts became hot commodities even amongst non-fans, and they drew in larger numbers to the show. Why? Because everyone who discovered the show not only liked the content (and let’s be honest, the content fucking RULES YOUR FACE), but they also liked being in on something exclusive. Something… underground.

This sense of exclusive insider knowledge perpetuated the AWESOMENESS of the show. Granted, there is a level of geektitude and nerdosity built into many Venture Bros fans. As a fan myself, I value that niche fandom too much to let the hoi polloi in on it. Except y’all. Y’all are OK.

One you get in on the inside joke, it’s something you can never come back from. The AWESOME inherent in The Venture Bros makes you a fan for life. You can’t help but ask when the next season is due out, or be mildly curious about the live action dress-up the show’s creators performed on the season 1 DVD, or wonder why the hell you keep coming back to watching stuff like THIS despite its mind-shatteringly weirdness:

I’ll tell you why.

Because it’s AWESOME.

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• Venture Bros. Season 4 Trailer, (or, Why Aren’t You Watching the Best Show On Television?!) (tor.com)
• Why aren’t Doc Hammer and Jackson Publick crazy-famous? (tvsquad.com)
• Animated Shorts 610: The VENTURE BROS Return! (newsarama.com)

How in the name of Sir Isaac H. Newton is there not more of this show online? David Lynch’s abortive 1992 follow-up to Twin Peaks, On the Air, was probably the funniest thing I have ever seen… EVER.

It is the SOUL of AWESOME.

Look for Blinky Watts at 6:11 and feel my LOLZ. Anyone who can find high quality video clips of this show (including the 4 unaired episodes), send ‘em my way and I’ll give yez a prize.

This is Must. Be. Awesome. Dot com.