My friends from DadLabs have written and published a book called DadLabs: Pregnancy and Year One, which I found to be a good mix of useful and hilarious. Tim Bete has a winner with Guide to Pirate Parenting: Why You Should Raise Your Kids As Pirates, and 101 Tips on How to Do It.

Both books were funny. DadLabs would be the kind of book you get a guy who’s about to become a dad. The Guide to Pirate Parenting is perfect for a parent at any stage. I laughed loads during the reading of these books.

Glynne Soaps That soap in the picture came from Glynne Soaps, who evidently knew that I stunk. This one was a soap made partially from the biproduct of beer, and yet, it was very clean and wonderful. They also gave me a bar of Bug Off soap, which supposedly keeps the bugs away. (I didn’t really test it well, but it smelled nice, and I wasn’t bothered too badly by bugs, given all things.)

But you know this site, and I’m not going to review soaps. What I am going to point out is their web presence.

twitter presence Glynne Soaps has built a @glynnesoaps Twitter account with many thousands of followers. They have a Facebook Fan Page, and they also have a blog. All this comes on top of their mainstream Glynne Soaps website, too.

Is it working? I’m not sure, but I sure had lots of ways to connect with the company and the products. That’s a win to me. If I wanted to know about that soap, I had a way to find a bar and get it shipped to me.

My one comment about this is that I’d like to see the human behind the soap, but whether that changes things? That’s another question. I guess they could test a little of both and see what that does to the business overall.

I liked the products just fine, but I really appreciate their approach to connecting to people via the various online channels, and that’s the story I want to tell. What do you say?

I Believe Mark Cuban is Right

July 1, 2009 Comments

The whole “Free” debate is alive and well, thanks to Chris Anderson. Seth Godin and Malcolm Gladwell have weighed in, and right behind them, Mark Cuban put out this piece. I want to skip down to the part where my head started nodding like a bobble-head:

Newspapers are also catching flack for saying they dont [...]

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The Value of Wonder

July 1, 2009 Comments

Sometimes, just sometimes, we should step back from what we’re doing (marketing, writing, selling, customer service, whatever!) and think about wonder. And by wonder, let’s think about those moments when we see or experience something that makes us breathe in deeply, and then causes us to pause and just be there. In life, there [...]

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Strategic Blogging and Some Tactics to Nail It

June 30, 2009 Comments

Once you get past the “should my company be blogging” hurdle and into the “okay, so now what?” part of the race, the next question you might find yourself facing is, “What should I be doing to marry my blogging to my business goals?” If you’re in charge of making blogs deliver a business [...]

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19 Presence Management Chores You COULD Do Every Day

June 29, 2009 Comments

If you’re looking to establish your online presence, and build relationships, it’s not the kind of project where you show up, build your profiles, friend a few people, and call it good. It’s a lot like tending the farm. Here are seven particular “chores” you could do every day that should prove beneficial to your [...]

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Two Really Useful Thesis Documents

June 28, 2009 Comments

I was just looking online to see if I could find a tutorial document for a WordPress theme install, specifically for Thesis for WordPress (note: I’m an affiliate seller of this theme). I ended up finding not one, but two decent docs to help you get Thesis up and running.
The first, How to Build [...]

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Testing- Audio from My iPhone

June 27, 2009 Comments

If this works, I’ll be submitting audio posts from the road. No idea what this looks like in your RSS or elsewhere. This post is about being a dad on the eve of his first vacation.

  Download now or listen on posterous
Podcast.m4a (2754 KB) [...]

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On Vacation

June 27, 2009 Comments

I’m going on vacation for the next few weeks, but the blog won’t get that luxury. I’ve already written a bunch of posts (it’s 3:17AM as I’m writing this one, but hey, at least I’ve got some great content for you over the next several days), and so don’t worry about a thing with [...]

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Cultivate an Active Network

June 26, 2009 Comments

It’s never the number. It’s what you can do with it. This applies to lots of things. It doesn’t matter if you drive 3000 people to your store, if no one rings the cash register. Who cares how many people follow you on Twitter if you can’t motivate them to participate with you on [...]

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