Читать книгу The New Rules of Marketing and PR - David Meerman Scott, Kevin Nalty, Steve Garfield - Страница 30

I’d like to step way back and look at the big picture. This is not a view, to use the cliché, from 30,000 feet. It’s more like the view from the moon. The new rules of marketing and public relations are part of the much bigger and more important communications revolution we’re currently living through—the most important communications revolution in human history.

Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of printing with mechanical movable type (circa 1439) was the second most important communications breakthrough in history. It meant books could be mass-produced, rather than painstakingly copied by hand. It meant ordinary people could refer to things in books, like laws. These used to have to be committed to memory.

The printing press created the first important communications revolution by freeing people’s minds from memorization and allowing them to use that extra brainpower to be creative. At the same time, this first communications revolution (which took many decades) helped large numbers of people become literate and raised living standards along the way. It brought humanity out of the medieval period and into the Renaissance.

Some 556 years later, in 1995, an even more important communications revolution began. I choose 1995 because it was the year that Netscape went public on the success of Netscape Navigator, the first popular product to allow easy web browsing.

We’re fortunate to be living in this time in history, the time of another important communications revolution. I figure we’re about halfway through it. The first 25 years or so were fast-paced, and things changed very quickly. Usage went from a few million people online to billions. But many organizations still aren’t communicating in real time on the web.

The next few decades will bring a continuation of the revolution. The pace of that change means that I need to update this book every few years. Soon, this seventh edition will be replaced by the eighth. And then the ninth. We need to be constantly learning and updating our skills to reach buyers as they’re looking for the products and services we sell.

Are you one of the revolutionaries? Or do you support the old regime? Are you marketing your product or service like Hotel & Igloo Village Kakslauttanen? Or are you failing to produce content that will do well in the search engines and social networks? For your sake, I hope it’s the former—or soon will be with the help of this book.