Foreword
It’s time to leave some of the old wisdom behind and develop some new wisdom.
—Mike Grehan being interviewed by Lee Odden in 2007
I keep bumping into Lee Odden. All over the world, in fact. For the past four or five years, at conferences from New York to San Francisco, London to Barcelona, and Hong Kong to Singapore, we’ve discussed the subject of Internet marketing. These are deeply engaging conversations for one very important reason. When it comes to marketing, Lee Odden gets it.
As a classically trained marketer, Lee cuts through the clutter of the pipes-and-tubes element of Internet marketing to focus on content and customers. Already, he has a huge following on social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. This is largely due to his steady transition from popular blogger and industry commentator to recognized thought leader.
Inspired by a “lightbulb moment” in conversation with a Google engineer, he was prompted into thinking about Internet marketing and business in new and different ways. It’s a new kind of wisdom, partly based on practical experience and partly based on training his mind to see around corners.
We’ve had an era of search marketing being front and center. But as we move into a new era of the constantly connected consumer with the prediction that, in a few years there’ll be 50 billion connected devices on the planet, it really is time to change the way we think about marketing. And this is not being driven purely by technology, ...
