My friend Andrew and I had an interesting conversation about collective thinking. So you can understand our different points of view, he is a medical student, and I am an international business student.

We began realizing that our business world and even our non-business (medical, law, philosophy, history, any subject really) has been following both a telescoping and an exponential growth rate.

Telescoping Exponential

In the history of sciences and new knowledge, we can take some of the greatest minds in history: Galileo, Pythagoras, Newton, any great mind from the renaissance or before the 20th Century. All of these men were experts in not just one field, but many. Galileo is remembered as a premier astronomer, but was also a physicist and mathematician, amongst others. Pythagoras was a philosopher and a mathematician. These men were the best in more than just one thing leading to the basis of so much science in today’s ever-evolving world. This is the telescoping point of view, few people with a vast amount of knowledge on many different concepts.

Today though, this is being reversed. We have many people with very intricate and specific niche topics. You can go out today and look for a marketing agency and find a marketing agency dealing with just publicity or just advertising, they are a specific set of people with a small focus and they’re damn good at it. Same goes for science, you will find a neurologist, radiologist, podiatrist, the list is almost infinite, hell there’s probably even a doctor for just your femur (yes I am exaggerating). You see where I’m going with this.

Graphically it would look like this:

This general overview of specific concepts that used to be held by so few people who knew many things, is now backwards. More people know fewer things, but they’re better at them! That is the defining factor.

In the end what this ends up happening, is that the individual knowledge becomes so high, that the level of growth become a sky rocket. If you take a look at any economical graph or a world economics graph over the past centuries, the growth is exponential.

Image source: dinocrat.com

What does it all mean?

The more we grow, the more specific we get. The more specific we get the more we can dedicate research to individual topics and get to new heights in research, levels of income, and best of all for your business, more revenue!

Take this YouTube video for example, part of the inspiration for this post:

Stick around next week for the followup on this post: Collective Thinking – Cloud Minds

Apologies

I’d like to make my apologies for not realizing that I haven’t posted in close to a month. I have gotten caught up with classes, and the many new people I am meeting every day here at the residency in Alicante.

On the up-side it has given me a lot of time to look into the new wave of economics, marketing, and the whole entourage of business coming into view for me.

Market the hell out of it

If you’re not reading Seth Godin and you’re a marketer, even a professional with an amazing track record I highly recommend just taking a peek even if once a week.

His posts are never too lenghty and my favorite is that they are never strictly to-the-point. He makes you think! Take the example of The unclicking 84%; Seth’s genius in marketing takes you from concrete data, to making you think of what the next step should be for you, your venture/business/etc., and most importantly for your market.  My ideas and questions for you:

• New ideas. Even if they’re recycled ideas with a new twist, or a new focus, that makes it become new.
• Can you change or increase your market focus without losing the original base?
• How can you take your brand to a level of incredible trust and promotion?

Social Media Economics

Yes; not marketing, media nor optimization…but Economics.

Many have put themselves in roles of Personal Branding consultants, Social Media Marketers and Optimizers, but you may be asking what does any of this have to do with economics?!

Actually, quite a lot. This new age of entrepreneurs has unleashed the venture capitalists, the big businesses and the small businesses to look into a new realm of enterprises. From an economical point of view, unemployment (9.8% Wolfram|Alpha) in America is still worsening, but with many more entrepreneurs emerging daily and new ideas coming fresh from those unemployed new businesses are starting up daily with the goal of giving a good or service to the people.

Now, here’s where social media comes in. The main social media hotspots are, San Fancisco, NYC, Boston, Washington DC, and the Raleigh-Durham (RDU/Triangle) area of North Carolina.

I point you to the NY Times Unemployment map (interactive) here. Accounting for the size difference of population between these metropolitan areas and other rural areas, the unemployment rate in the social media hotspots is relatively less than the other main areas due to their success with entrepreneurship.

Just some thoughs, what do you think? Leave comments.

Image by billadler

Posted via web from Greg’s posterous

We’ve been hearing a lot that we’re in recession, and that the proverbial shit has been hitting the fan. However, a while back my Macro-Economics professor, Claudia Williamson,made the interesting suggestion that rather than receding or being in a depression, the economy is in turn, “going back to normal”.

To elaborate, that the economy was over heating, we were simply growing too fast for our own good. If you haven’t seen the slideshow “Shift Happens” check it out. I would have to agree with her and say that yes, the world was growing and way too fast. We needed to cool down for a bit or we would screw ourselves over. Producers produced much quicker than we could buy. We kept using credit to buy more than we could to keep up with them.

They should have turned the tides and producers kept up with demand rather than blowing up and worsening the credit crisis.

Credit is America’s Downfall

We believed that we could have purchased whatever we wanted without a worry. Now, we have credit debts we can’t pay (Even I am to blame for that) and it’s biting us in the ass with extreme rates.

So what needs to happen… Reduce loan rates, and increase return rates. Simple but deadly and damn near impossible to accomplish right now. We don’t need to spend to increase the economy, but with rates sky high we cannot spend on small wants to get small and corporate business back into action. It all boils down to watch what we spend and spend wisely with limited credit. Doable yes, but cautiously on parts of individuals and corporations.
Stop sending the small jobs that can be done here in America to increase the income of our own country to increase our spending. Then the key is do have supply follow demand, not have supply dictate our demand.

What do you think of this, leave your comments.
Image by Andres Rueda