Found+READ: Comments by Thor Muller

Thor Muller — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 05:35:35 GMT

Like it or not, business is personal.

Whenever possible, I try to find advisors with whom I have a meaningful personal connection of some sort. For instance, our corporate counsel is a fellow parent at my kid’s school who I see all the time. While I don’t expect special favors per se, I do hope it helps make the difference to take my call on a busy day. And it can’t help but offset the long-term commercial bonds he has with investors, big companies or institutions we may be dealing with.

Thor Muller — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 16:47:29 GMT

Great piece, Toni. Last year we started a little side project, Valleyschwag, which was never more than a gag (a schwag-of-the-month club—talk about Web2.0 bubble!). But we wanted it to be a really good gag, so we had a ton of fun with it. We gave the project an inexplicable cowboy theme, corralled the best promo gear in the ‘hood, and lovingly wrapped each package in cattle-branded burlap. Despite the craftsmanlike attention to detail, the product was completely silly. Still, we’d managed to connect with our audience, which turned out to be a lot bigger than expected. Within two months, thanks to word of mouth and a few well trafficked blogs, we had thousands of paying subscribers.

It all came down to forging a genuine connection with an audience that really cared about what we were doing.

Too bad it was such a ridiculous business in every other way.

Thor Muller — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 16:20:48 GMT

This is a great idea, particularly if there’s some discussion of a framework for a whole marketing plan.

I was going to suggest a particular lens for this article, but I decided to post it as a separate article suggestion: Marketing via chaos.

Thor Muller — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 13:58:41 GMT

Actually, nowadays every company has to contend with chaos whether they like it or not. Chaos exists outside of the organization, when any blog post, forum discussion or Google search result about your company or product may have a larger net impact than any managed campaign that you produce.

The “embrace chaos” approach doesn’t mean that we should abandon all traditional marketing, nor that we should try to “build communities” per se. Rather, it suggests that all of our activities will be re-interpreted and (potentially) magnified in unpredictable ways on the Internet. Our job, if we choose to accept it, is to embrace this loss of control rather than fight it.

But it’s counter-intuitive for many, as this company showed:
http://blog.getsatisfaction.com/2007/04/12/new-rule-dont-…