Although the blogging community outed us a little early last week, I’m incredibly proud to formally announce the publishing of eMarketing: The essential guide to online marketing. It’s our contribution to Open Education.

Really bad photo of the textbook.

eMarketing is a 300 page textbook aimed at tertiary education students, business owners and marketers who want to get ahead in online marketing. It has everything from the facts to case studies and study questions around each eMarketing tactic. We had a huge amount of help from the awesome chaps at UCT who helped us make sure that it was academically suitable - not a straight forward achievement.

To support the book, we have put up a website at www.quirk.biz/emarketingtextbook. The site contains a host of resources for both lecturers and students. In fact we don’t just want this to be a book, we want it to be a complete open source course from the lecture presentations to the exam questions. If you are an educator, please sign up on the site and start sharing!

Whilst putting together a 300 page book is quite something, I think the real achievement for the Quirk team here is the fact that the book is licensed under Creative Commons. This means that not only is the book available for FREE online, people are also able to share and alter it as their needs require. It is my belief that education is the most important factor if we want to deliver a better way of life for all. The Open Education Initiative, formed in September 2007, aims to make educational resources freely available to all. At Quirk we have been teaching at various universities and corporate events for years. This feels like a continuation of that, and we’re proud to share our eMarketing knowledge with the world.

I want to thank every single person at Quirk for the role they played in this book. It may have my name on the front cover, but the book started with our eMarketing 101 series and hundreds of articles, whitepapers and presentations. So, it truly is a product from “the minds of Quirk”. QuirkStars, you rock!

In my almost 10 years at Quirk, I think this is the coolest thing we have ever done. Putting together this book was so much harder than we ever expected so to get to this day feels incredible. Please download our book and let us know what you think of it and how we can improve it. This is a community effort which Quirk just happens to have started, it’s up to you to take it further…