Mary Schmidt Marketing Troubleshooter

I’ve been reading/thinking/talking (obsessing?) a lot with friends and colleagues about how dramatically our world is changing. Everybody from attornies to life coaches to caterers are building businesses in the virtual marketplace. Personally, I believe the days of economic allocation/domination by geographically defined nations are rapidly drawing to a close. We’re moving from the old economic power bases of natural resources such as oil, coal and iron and manufacturing capabilities to brain power…and brains are very mobile…and can be very connected to other brains, regardless of where their operators choose to live. “Have Brain, Will Travel.” (A potential BIG spanner in the works to all this is water sources. Some predict the next world war will be fought over water, not oil.)

From today’s post over at the Long Tail blog…“Here’s my take on what the Long Tail is doing to pop culture. Rather than the scary fragmentation of our society into a nation of disconnected people doing their own thing, I think we’re reforming into thousands of cultural tribes, connected less by geographic proximity and workplace chatter than by shared interests. Whether we think of it this way or not, each of us belongs to many different tribes simultaneously, often overlapping (geek culture and Lego), often not (tennis and punk-funk).”

Hmmm….