Marketing in the Participation Age: A Guide to Motivating People to Join, Share, Take Part, Connect, and Engage

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My very first recollection of wanting to write a book came when I was just eight years old. At the time, I imagined it would be a historical fiction novel that involved a girl and at least one horse. I still keep a number of stories I began back then in the hopes that I might someday complete them. I never thought I would write a book about marketing until 2007, when I became passionate about discovering new methods for a new age and began using the phrase participant marketing to describe a new approach. I first acquired the “participant marketing” URL in 2007, and I am a bit self-conscious to admit that it has taken me five years to complete this project. Beyond the research required to discover the science behind motivating participation, and the historian exercise of learning about our industry, the process was largely transforming conversations from Power Point documents into the written word. Then, there was the journey of reacquainting myself with the writer in me, who is never satisfied with the end product of a subject in which the world is continually changing beneath our feet. I finally became comfortable with the fact that books are thought starters, more than perfect masterpieces, and getting the idea out there is more important than perfectly completing the idea. In the Age of Participation, the idea will continue on not just with my own evolution of the idea, but also with yours, as we all contribute to evolve the idea.

Many people contributed to ...