Need a great airport snack?
Keep an eye out for Peeled Snacks, dried fruit that’s literally JUST dried fruit. Damn tasty and sans-chemicals. Head to the site and fill out a 2 minute survey and they’ll hook you up with $10 e-credit to their online store.

Love WWII history?
I stop at every WWII museum, exhibit, or bookstore history section I can. So you can imagine my pleasure when a gas stop on my recent cross-country road trip turned into one of the most amazing museum stop I’ve experienced in years. If you find yourself in Lexington, Nebraska, plan on spending several hours at the Heartland Museum of Military Vehicles. It’s a HUGE collection of beautifully, perfectly, wonderfully restored WWII vehicles. I think 42 of them. They even let me take the dog in, since it was 100 degrees outside!

Feel like you’re flying in Chicago
If you’re not scared of heights, check this out. I’m not going to spoil the surprise… just check it out.

Here’s the first three on the list, just as a teaser. If you want to see all 10, head to Blogs.com.

Confessions of an Aca/Fan
One of the smartest brains around about fan culture. If you ever get a chance to see Henry speak, fight for a spot up front.

Customer Experience Matters
One of the best blogs on customer experience as a discipline around.

Customers Rock!
Hey, if don’t agree with the premise of the URL, then this list is moot anyway!

We are looking for a proven membership recruiter/salesperson to pursue and persuade Fortune 1000-type companies to join our communities. You can learn more about GasPedal by visiting http://www.gaspedal.com, http://blogcouncil.org, and http://www.damniwish.com.

This is a BtoB sale to companies in the social media business — but it’s also a relationship-building exercise, because our product is a long-term community membership. You need to be a community member and evangelist, too.  

For the full skinny on the job, as well as a way to apply, head over to the Job Board post for this job.

But one part had me thinking all weekend:

“We promote the right of free expression,” the chief US diplomat added.

“And it is the case that one of the means of expression, the use of Twitter is a very important one, not only to the Iranian people but now increasingly to people around the world, and most particularly to young people,” she said.

“I wouldn’t know a twitter from a tweeter, but apparently it is very important,” she said, sparking laughter.

Will there be a time when older people don’t think it’s cool to joke about their tech cluelessness? I know it’s a brave new world and all, but seriously, when you’re the Secretary of State and Twitter is a major part of the revolution in Iran, joking that you don’t know anything about it is just stupid.

UPDATE: Des follows up on this topic. Good stuff, Des.

—

The medical community might tell you that blended fruit and ice don’t actually contain any addictive qualities, but I’m not convinced. I’m physically unable to pass a new smoothie shop without stopping to sample the wares. I can’t see “smoothie” on a menu without feeling a longing.

Last week I downloaded the Yelp.com iPhone application and tested it by… you guessed it… looking for local smoothie shops. To my extreme pleasure, I discovered Icey (http://www.yelp.com/biz/icey-garland), a new shop that had just opened down the street. Within hours, I was inside ordering my first smoothie. (It was far and away the best I’d ever had)

As I walked out of the store, tasty smoothie in hand, I found myself wanting to do whatever I could to ensure their ongoing existence. Horror stories abound about the failure rate of small businesses, and this simply can’t happen to Icey. Where would I get my fix if they close the doors??

If they ask (I’ve already volunteered), here are 6 points I’d share with them about how they can build Word of Mouth for their incredible business.

Tell a story

Icey isn’t just a “smoothie shop”. They’ve created a menu that includes Bubble Teas, Sweet Ices, and a range of non-traditional items. Why this menu? What makes it unique? Give me something I can learn, then in turn share with others to show how smart I am. For instance: “Sure Icey doesn’t have the boost powders like Jamba Juice, but that’s because they offer such fresh ingredients, they don’t need to”. (I’m making that up, but you get the point.

Help me decide

When I see a new menu item that I don’t understand, I’m more inclined to revert to my old standby than I am to try something new. With pictures, descriptions, samples, and encouragement, help me branch out. When I have a teacher, the shop is my classroom. And a classroom inherently encourages frequency.

Drive repeat visits through awards

A friend of mine has been on a quest to achieve the coveted “Gold Plate” status at a local pub, the Flying Saucer (http://www.beerknurd.com/). You see, the pub has hundreds of beers available, and when you’ve tried all of them, you are immortalized by having your name put on a gold plate, hung on the wall. Not only has this program given my buddy a reason to come back regularly, it’s also given him an incredible knowledge of beer. The more Icey introduces their customers to the full menu, the more likely they are to come back. And the more knowledge these customers have, the more likely they are to bring a friend with them that they can show off their in-depth knowledge to.

Do something to stand out

When the Icey staff hands over your hand crafted drink, it comes in a plastic cup with a sealed sheet of plastic on top. So sealed, in fact, you can turn the cup upside down without the slightest risk of spilling. The way you actually consume this drink is to punch a hole in the top with an oversized straw. If the drink really is “unspillable”, why not hand over the drink upside down?

Brand everything

While I was walking around the shopping center, tasty drink in hand, I noticed that the cups didn’t have any sort of logo on them. How were people to know that this delicious looking concoction was created by Icey and not Starbucks?

Have a web site

This may be a bit obvious, but build a basic Web presence with your location info, a bit of your story, and an overview of what you serve. This doesn’t need to a complex, data heavy site, but it should look great. The primary goal is creating a destination that can be emailed, blogged, and generally shared. (You’ll notice I had to use the Yelp.com link to get you to them in the beginning of this post) The incredible cupcake bakery, Sprinkles (http://www.sprinklescupcakes.com/) launched with an incredibly lightweight site, which even helped them create an ambience of exclusivity.

—

UPDATE: One more point I’ll make that wasn’t part of the of the original post…

Listen to experienced professionals

Seriously, this seems basic but when you’re getting freebie consulting from high paid, highly experienced professionals you might want to considering following their advice. I’ve been talking to a number of small business owners locally since the original post went up about their marketing efforts. The one piece of advice I’ve consistently give each and every one of these small business owners is simple: Buy Word of Mouth Marketing , read it, and then we’ll sit down and talk about how to implement the principles of the book.

You know how many have both bought and read the book? None.

As a small business owner, I know how difficult it can be. I understand how many hours go into running the business. But if you’re not always, and I mean ALWAYS thinking about how to drive your business to the next level, you’re failing. There’s are plenty of reasons a vast majority of small businesses fail, and lack of forward planning is big one.

If you follow me on twitter (@jakemckee) you know that I’m in the midst of pretty big life change. That’s right, after 6 years in Dallas, our family is moving to Seattle!

When Sean and I created the new and improved Ant’s Eye View in January, we wondered if it made sense to have us geographically spread out so that we could more easily service regional clients. But almost immediately it became obvious that we needed to be in the same physical location. After all, the Wonder Twins can’t active their powers if they can’t fist bump their rings.

Not to say that I’m comparing Sean and I to alien Super Friends.

Ant’s Eye View World HQ (aka thinkspace) is located in Redmond, WA and we’ll be living right up the street. We’re pretty dang excited, both to be Seattle area residents and to get this damn moving stuff completed. Oh, and of course to be a member of Social Media Club Seattle and SEALUG!

Dallas has always been great to my career and my life. After a total of 12 years living in Dallas, I’ll miss it. But I’m also really excited about the move.

And for the record: yes, I know it rains a lot there. Thanks for the reminder.

There are three reasons partnerships fail: 1) they under perform and everyone gets upset 2) they don’t do anything and everyone gets bored 3) they over perform and everyone gets greedy.

Other than that, they typically work very well.

Time Magazine recently called YouTube one of the biggest tech failures of the past decade, which was hilarious. Hilarious in that the site is by far and away the most popular site for video on the web, and has revolutionized the way we view videos, period. Today brings another amazing stat about the site: Every single minute, over 20 hours of video are now uploaded to YouTube.

In the time it took me to create this blog entry, nearly 10 days worth of video were uploaded. The power this represents is absolutely stunning.

I’m not worried.

As with any hype cycle, there are two parallel paths taking place:

• The Hype Path: Combining the “It’s new, therefore it’s amazing!” news cycle with a very vocal and enabled celebrity crowd creates a standard bell curve of hype.
• The Implementation Reality: On a more random, yet mostly trending upward curve, people are learning growing, doing, and gaining. More people try, some fail, but the trend overall is more not less social stuff.

Think about how many social networking sites have come and gone, yet Facebook is still a massive audience. And this isn’t a new trend: I remember dead BBS, dead Geocities pages, and dead email lists. But online discussion, personal Web pages, and email all carry on more robust than ever. Perhaps robust because of these early experiments that failed.

While many are talking about the hype of the shiny new thing, there’s a group of people working largely behind the scenes to create, learn, improve and create again. In the corporate environment, dead communities come in no small part from the lack of investment in anything past the launch. We’ve seen examples of simple, ugly sites generating large audiences and revenue (hello, Craigslist!) while impressive tech fails to bring in much attention at all (new Friendster, I’m looking at you!).

If community is about building relationships, we can learn a lot about community building by considering how we find, build, and support our personal relationships.

• We date many more people than we marry. (i.e. There’s bound to be plenty of failures in our quest to create something grand)
• If we blow a month’s salary on the first date, there’s not chance we’ll be able to afford the second date (i.e. If you’re budget, time, and energy are solely focused on the launch, what happens after you launch when the real work begins?)
• The backbone of a quality relationship is intimacy, and intimacy takes time and is difficult to get right (i.e. Expecting overwhelming success withing days or weeks or even years after launch is ridiculous)
• Outsourcing intimacy is call prostitution. (i.e. Saying to your agency “we give you a check, you give us an effective community is an unhealthy approach)

Honestly, I’m not really worried about the stage of the game we’re at right now. We’ve gotten through the “so that’s what the kids are doing” reaction, and now we’re onto the “how can we use this in our business” reaction. Dead communities are a sign of experimentation and experimentation leads to learning. Sure, some execs might be turned off by social projects that don’t work and pull the budgets for future development. But we’ve also passed the tipping point where that type of reaction means much for the long term. Businesses are all having to deal with customer expectations built daily based on what other businesses, inside and outside our own industries are doing. When my cable company is responding to my rants on Twitter, I start asking why my favorite shoe company (Nike) isn’t doing the same.

We’re in a fantastic place and we’re moving into a fantastic path towards the future. Failure is all part of the process as long as we’re learning from our mistakes and paying attention to the context those mistakes are taking place in.

UPDATE: Sam weighs in on this topic!