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Remember in middle school when all the good-looking, athletic, charismatic rich kids would sit together at a gold-plated lunch table where they could talk about big game hunting, or Being Awesome, or whatever fancy people talk about? And they wouldn’t let you sit with them because you had seasonal allergies and were uncoordinated and your mom still picked out your clothes?

Remember?

As the only PC-user in an office of Mac-addled crazies, this same type of alienation has been mine for over two years. But no more. Yesterday, Uncle Trabian, via Matt and Kelly, surprised me with a brand new 15-inch MacBook Pro.

It is amazing.

The moment I received it was so emotional that Charlie cried like David Hasslehoff at an American Idol finale.

Photoshop no longer locks up and gives me The White “Screw You” Screen. With Quicksilver I can find anything I’m looking for in 3 seconds or less. iSite caters to my narcissistic side. With Parallels I can run Windows, and therefore every single program I had on my PC, only now those programs don’t randomly keel over.

On top of everything else, it is just a beautifully designed piece of machinery that I can tell wants to be my friend.

I’m excited to hang with the cool kids.

On Monday JetBlue used YouTube to release a response to last week’s runway debacle. In the video, their founder and CEO David Neeleman openly admits their mistakes and explains what steps they’ve put in place to make sure that nothing like this will ever happen again.

What an amazing and common-sensical (might not be a word) response. Watch the video – What other company, especially at the CEO level, has ever been this open, up-front and vulnerable about a mistake like this?

I say vulnerable, for one, because they chose to release it on YouTube where they would be at the mercy of commentors, instead of opting for a “safer” release.

To (almost) quote Paul McEnany from Beyond Madison Avenue:

“You can tell their CEO actually gives a [crap], and the company turned circles to make sure we all knew that.”

As a part of the solution, they’ve also created a Customer Bill of Rights.

Sidenote: This is such a better use of YouTube than using it as a mindless catch-all for “going viral.”

At the start of the year, we promised big things. Here comes thing one.

We’re moving Trabian World Headquarters to Indianapolis. Well actually Fishers, Indiana. In less than three weeks.

We’ll be occupying some fancy office space at the FORUM Credit Union campus.

Why are we moving? First, we’re working with FORUM Solutions on some exciting projects. They’re a great company with a great culture, and there’s a ton of synergy when we’re in the same room.

Second, our lack of ties to Dallas: it’s where we happen to live. And starting March 1, that won’t be entirely true. Back in the day, our tagline was “Work anywhere” (creative code talk for “we work out of an apartment and that’s ok”). Our new VP of Business Development Doug Williams lives (and will continue to live) in NYC. Brent and Charlie will continue to call Dallas their home but will be staying for extended periods of time in Indy with the rest of the crew.

We’ve already been fielding questions like, “Are you going to start wearing khakis all the time?” and “Are you becoming a CUSO?” The answers are “no” (ok, well maybe some of us on occasion) and “no” respectively.

Picking up from Part 1 of my and Trey’s Seattle experience…

Thursday: Social Media with the KCCCU

On Thursday Trey and I spoke for the King County Chapter of Credit Unions at the beautiful Bell Harbor Conference Center. The KCCCU has even more enthusiasm than their name has C’s.

Trey and I gave two talks. The first was a half hour on the importance of knowing what people are saying about your business on the social web.

We opened up with several credit union member quotes from the blogosphere. Here are a few favorites (I’m not going to link to the actual posts, because I’d rather not deal with the drama. If you really want to know where they’re from, email me.):

“Dear XXXXXXXX (formerly known as XXXXXX XXXXXX Credit Union), I hate you.”
- Rebecca

“If you can get into First Tech Credit Union – do it.They are wonderful.”
- Greg

“XXXXXXX XXXXX Credit Union sucks. Their website is riddled with blank/error pages.”
-Becky

“I have been a member of BECU since 1970’s..it is the absolute best place to bank…they have great service are so much cheaper than a bank.”
- Linda S.

Our main point was that although business blogging is not for everybody, listening is.

The second talk was really a room-wide conversation. The whole lot of us sat around and chatted about:

• Peer-to-peer lending
• MySpace, and when it’s appropriate for a credit union (rarely, if ever)
• Using consumer generated media for ethnographic research
• Wikis
• Social sites like YouTube, Flickr, and LinkedIn
• Pretty much anything else they wanted to ask about. If we didn’t know the answer, we Googled it.

Afterwards we put on a bib and stuffed ourselves with seafood.

Friday: The Blogging Workshop

We spent Friday doing a blogging workshop for the Verity Credit Union bloggers. It was in this workshop that Verity’s Tina Hall gave us a seriously sweet “What Would a Unicorn Do?” folder.

Here are a few blogging best-practice highlights from the discussion:

• Keep your content scannable with short paragraphs and section subheadings
• When responding to negative comments, never make it personal
• Increase comments by asking open-ended questions and commenting on other like-minded blogs
• If you have writer’s block -
  • Do an interview (let the interviewee do the writing)
  • Don’t be afraid to pass ideas along from other blogs (attribution is key)
  • And when all else fails…use the Trey Formula.

For our last night in Seattle, the Verity kids took us out on the town. I met a food scientist. We were introduced to the Stout Float, which is a delicious stout beer mixed with ice cream. Every single person at our table was highly entertaining.

Like I said – the time of our lives.

I decided to pull a snippet from our blog this time last year, because it’s more relevant than ever:

Just wanted to take a minute to spread a little love out to all of our friends, clients, friends who are clients, and anyone else who might be dropping by to see what’s going on. We really appreciate all that you’ve done for us, and realize that without you we wouldn’t get to have jobs that we love.

Without you, we’d just be a bunch of rapscallions with no rhyme or reason. Thanks for the rhyme and thanks for the reason.

Schmoopiness complete.