A few weeks ago, I met with
#besomebody founder Kash Shaikh;
Higher Level Art artist Danny Babcock; local marketing entrepreneur Josh Heuser of
AGAR; and his video content guy, Snow Rowe, at Heuser’s rock and roll bar,
Mainstay. The four were working on a
release video about their upcoming #besomebody world tour, which will take them to 15 cities in 11 countries and four continents in about five weeks.
Shaikh, 32, is not only the concept man behind the #besomebody inspirational movement (he dislikes the term “campaign”), but he’s also the most experienced in terms of traveling the world for the purpose of engaging an audience.
For nearly a decade, the Texas native was based in Cincinnati while working with developing markets in Latin America, the Middle East and Asia for
Procter & Gamble. During his tenure with the global company, Shaikh regularly “country hopped” four to five countries at a time—flying business class and traveling at a whirlwind pace.
When he left Cincinnati for a position in Silicon Valley as senior director of global communications and social marketing for
GoPro in early 2012, he had already been using the #besomebody hashtag on his own social media outlets and had thousands of online “followers” who related to his message of positive self-accountability.
“I was in 42 countries with P&G in two years and that #besomebody message/feeling/mantra connects people all over the world,” Shaikh says. “If I say ‘be somebody’ to a room of 1,000 people, every one of those people will be thinking something different, but it’s the same positive passion and energy.”
He says the simple hashtag "be somebody" has become the “fastest growing motivational movement in the world;” and one visit to the
blog attests to the community of believers who subscribe to being their personal best.
Despite shilling simple motivational #besomebody T-shirts on the website, the most interesting thing about the movement is that there is no actual product associated with the inspirational hashtag. There is no step-by-step guide for HOW to #besomebody, no nutritional supplements, no crazy Ponzi scheme. For Shaikh, it’s simply a “concept”—one that everyone owns.
“If you’re talking in marketing terms, it’s really the world’s first crowd-sourced brand," he says. "People talk about crowd-sourced content or crowd-sourced ideas, but this is whatever you want.” Although he doesn’t like using the term “brand,” it
is “the word society uses to define it.” If anything, the young and charismatic leader believes that it’s “the people’s brand.”
What’s oddly perplexing about the movement (but likely a key to its success) is that most of the people Shaikh comes into contact with have difficulty articulating
why #besomebody appeals to them or even
what it is.
“It’s kind of like asking someone to define love, or asking a field-goal kicker after he’s just made the game-winning shot what he feels like…it’s whatever you want it to be, and that’s what’s cool about it,” Shaikh says. “It’s for all of us.”
Shaikh definitely surrounds himself with positive people, which helps propel his inspirational goals. Heuser, is the “logistics guy” for the #besomebody world tour and has experience rolling with the punches and staying open-minded.
Despite a reputation that took five years to build, Heuser was forced to change the name of his marketing collective last year due to its similarity with a local trademarked business.
Heuser rebranded his business “AGAR,” which is a term for the substance that when agitated in a petri dish, grows culture.
He knows from experience that “once you create something, no matter what, you can always go back and recreate what you’ve done and develop it further.”
He’ll be leaving a busy office with plenty of new clients to go on the #besomebody world tour. “But I gotta go,” Heuser says. “Just like the mantra we’ll be sharing on our travels, the door is open and I’m going to walk through it. I don’t know what’s going to happen afterward, but I’ve already started this, and I want to see it through.”
Babcock—an artist who Shaikh says not only understands what #besomebody means, he “lives his life that way”—grew up writing graffiti and working in scenic arts (painting sets, stages and interiors). Babcock, like Shaikh and Heuser, is equally hard-working and optimistic about the opportunity.
He co-founded Higher Level Art in 2007 with artist Matthew Dayler, a Canadian transplant. He has partnered with AGAR for several projects already. #Besomebody was a natural next step.
“I’ve worked with Josh [in some capacity] for over a decade now,” Babcock says. “Kash needed one person with a wide range of skills, who could work under high-variable scenarios. We’re going to be going from first to third world sometimes overnight, and not everybody can perform in those situations.”
The artist will create much of the visual content—literally “tagging” the world with the inspirational message—and if the reaction to Babcock’s wall on their first stop at the University of Texas is any indication, the #besomebody movement will continue to grow.
Shaikh peppers his conversation with “passion” and “positivity” a lot, but still comes off as genuine. “Nobody’s making money on #besomebody,” he says—if money were the issue, he’d still be working for GoPro.
He is the only full-time employee, with his brother as the web/graphic designer. Clearly, the movement is a labor of love. “There’s a big future of what we can do to help the world,” he says. “We have good goals and aspirations.”
The team’s loftiest goal may be to “redefine the educational model to create passion-centric curriculum for people…so it’s more about finding what you love and how we can enable you to go do that,” Shaikh says.
When people talk about cultural change and exchange, they often think in terms of small details: language, religion, ethnicity—characteristics that often differentiate us from each other.
Through #besomebody, Shaikh might just be the right kind of “big picture” guy to help us uncover qualities that instead
connect us to our fellow humans.
“I’m a firm believer in the hidden heroes in our lives,” says Shaikh about the people with whom he surrounds himself and who have helped him get to where he’s “supposed to be.”
“If [through the #besomebody world tour] we can break off this feeling of being just a tiny part of the universe, and share it, then the worst thing that can happen from all this is that we’re going to help a lot of people feel good.”
And that sounds like a pretty empowering thing.
The #besomebody world tour stops through Cincinnati this weekend. If you're headed Downtown via I-71, keep your eyes peeled for one of their inspirational messages, similar to this one, popping up on a highly-visible building just off of the highway by Saturday evening.