The times they are a-changin’…

The Great Bob Dylan saw it coming way back in 1963…

If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Granted, Bob was probably thinking a little bit deeper than future marketing trends, but that message still resonates across all these decades. Nobody is immune to the changes time brings as it makes its unyielding march toward eternity. We are ultimately judged at how we adapt to that change, and the ones amongst us that adapt the best are the ones that float while the rest “sink like a stone…”

In 1985, getting a fax was incredible. This was the highest of the high tech, and the fax marketer was king.

Then personal computers came about, and the average person had the world (wide web) at their fingertips and with it truly instant communication was made available to the world. I’m fairly certain the first email was from a Nigerian Prince who just needed a bit of help and, of course, would pay you millions in return. The fax went from being on top of the business mountain to plummeting toward obsolete. The last man trying to sell a fax machine was sinking like a stone because he didn’t change.

I signed up for Facebook in the summer of 2005. When I signed up, Facebook was less than 18 months old and was accessible only by college students. My grandmother wasn’t there. Neither was my mom or my little brother or the weird uncle that takes politics a little bit too far. It was a college-kids-only online utopia that was GREAT! If I was Mark Zuckerberg, I would have kept things just the way they were. Exclusive, cool and fun. I would have been the stone sinking to the bottom. Facebook is not a stone. They embraced change. First allowing high schools to join. And then their first generation of users began leaving college and making adult friends that might like this Facebook thing, so it was opened to the world… And then the ads hit, and before we could blink, Facebook pivoted from being this online social club to an ad selling, information gathering behemoth that people could not get enough of.

Now Mark Zuckerberg has a net worth in the $75 billion-dollar range. He wasn’t afraid to change, and he now gets to reap the rewards.

Marketing changes at a pace that is sometimes blinding, and we see our contractors trying to keep moving with the change. Sometimes those moves are wrong, and they must pivot again, but they keep their head above the marketing waters, even if it is treading water at first until they find their marketing stroke and then they look like Phelps in his prime. Others decide early on that marketing is a waste or its too confusing or the new things won’t work so why change, and they stop evolving and they become stale. They sink like that proverbial stone that Bob Dylan sings of.

If you are reading this, you care about your marketing. Don’t be afraid to pivot. Find a marketing partner you trust, hopefully us, and allow them to be your guide through this sometimes-confusing world of marketing.

The times they are a-changin’. Change with them and take your business to the levels you want to go.