Foreword
Isaac Asimov quite rightly said, “The only constant is change.”
For anyone who lived before the twentieth century, it might have taken an entire lifetime to realize the truth of that statement. Today, it is something every Internet-connected teenager simply knows.
One simply needs to understand that the pace of change is different for different things.
While human beings as a species are also evolving and changing, the pace of that change is glacially slow. So slow that we can make meaningful observations about human nature that will remain valid until some point in the future where evolution makes them obsolete.
At the heart of it, the body of knowledge about marketing is nothing more than a collection of observations about human nature.
So, is all information about the discipline of marketing perpetually relevant?
The good stuff can then be divided into two categories: knowledge that is specific to humans (like Joe Sugarman's genius collection of “Triggers”) and knowledge that is specific to a medium or industry (like Chris Brogan's social media strategies).
The specific-to-humans stuff is obviously quite perennial, but what about the stuff that is specific-to-medium?
Well, we all know that web sites and ideas that were relevant and even hot two years ago (MySpace, Friendster, etc.) are now all but completely irrelevant as I write this.
Should you then dismiss all of the chapters about online marketing in this book?
Most certainly not. And here's why . . .
There are ...
