Being awesome

Awesomeness is the new innovation. Well that’s according to Umair Haque – Director of Havas Media Lab. And I couldn’t agree more.
I was super excited when I came across Umair’s piece in the Harvard Business Blog titled “the Awesomeness Manifesto” as we at Rubber towers have also been working on our own bit of awesomeness theory – but rather than vanilla awesomeness we’ve been developing up ideas around “social awesomeness”.

In his Awesomeness Manifesto Umair charts out four basic pillars of what awesomeness is based around:

– Ethical production

– Insanely great stuff

– Love

– Thick value

Ultimately, Umair’s sentiment around awesomeness could be summed up in one phrase “Do epic shit” (and love doing it!) – a phrase coined by the CEO of Zappos.com – Tony Hsieh – at this year’s SXSW.

Within the context of Umair’s pillars of awesomeness, our concept of “social awesomeness” could be seen as the social comms framework to communicate the inner awesomeness of a business.

I won’t give away our full socially awesome manifesto yet – as we’re putting the finishing touches to it – but, to add to Umair’s pillars, when it comes to social awesomeness additional values I think you need to be looking at:

– Be nice

– Give

– Be useful

– Be fun

– Engage not interrupt

– Be open

What excites me most about the idea of awesomeness is that it makes me smile and makes me want to do stuff – awesome stuff – epic shit. That’s something that concepts like innovation could never do.