- Dann, S. and Dann, S (2004), Strategic Internet Marketing 2nd edition, Brisbane: Wiley [Amazon | PDF]
Strategic Internet Marketing (v1 and v2) were the first major game changer books we wrote – Susan and I had been online since 1993, and although we pitched for a different marketing text originally, the Wiley came back with a counteroffer for “an Internet book”. Expectations for eMarketing texts were low, and the competitors were largely screenshots with annotations, and newspaper clippings. We stepped up to the plate, and proceeded to rewrite the sector’s expectation on textbooks by bringing a lot of peer reviewed research to the table. SIM1.0 was met with critical acclaim in peer reviews around the world for the mix of pragmatism, geekery, humour and sheer academic firepower (199 cited refereed journal articles, 400 cited websites). This book changed the academic emarketing textbooks from screencaps and warstories about ‘the cyberspace’ into a credible data and research driven domain.
We submitted our book as a research text, with one uni (and the federal government) saying yes, and one uni saying no, it wasn’t research, then getting salty that they didn’t get research funding for it, and the other uni did. Honestly, this was the first point where it was clear that the textbook writing game was not going to be a long haul in the sector.
We had been involved in the internet for a long time, with Susan first teaching internet marketing in 1994, requiring her undergraduate students to get e-mail addresses, answer class exercises online, and generally force an actively hostile crowd of commerce students to take the medium seriously. Stephen had been online in late 1993 through a dodgy 14.4k modem in the office of Semper Floreat, and could see that this thing had potential (and was totally addictive). When the opportunity arose to take hardcore marketing science, and established marketing theory into the e-marketing field, the Dann proved that internet marketing didn’t require the baby and bathwater to be thrown out.
Once again, we also played with expectations around supplemental materials – as a newish educator in SIM1.0, I designed with what I found useful in the classroom in mind – the instruction manual cross references to specific slides and textbook pages/chapters, which was to be a forerunner of our hyperlinked writing style in later works.
We included two course outlines for the use of fellow instructors – one in ‘flexible delivery mode’ showcasing that as far back as 2004, I was all about online-by-design.
Instruction Manual (Part 1)
We clustered the IM by book section – a notably historical footnote of our texts is the emphasis on 14 week course structures – something that has slowly become 12 week structures for most of the Australian client universities. Any text for the modern market really needs to be 10 chapters, assuming one week lost to review at the end of semester, and another lost to in-semester assessment events. Another research to walk away from trying to produce competitive texts in an increasingly difficult market place.