Mitch Albom, Detroit native and author of “Tuesdays With Morrie”, recently made the point that the situation in Detroit is just the first wave of what will inevitably happen to other cities as true globalism kicks in. His question of whether we will resort to protectionism or whether we will find an extra gear with which to work is especially poignant in light of many of the marches protesting Arizona in the past few days.

The fact is, there is much “conventional wisdom” that is in need of retooling, and this post is a fantastic place to start, especially with the myriad links to fantastic support material.

As Jeff Jarvis has said, “Do what you do best and link to the rest…”

“So you’re saying that all subscription media and news sites will all need to be more mobile based? What about service sites like our own for informational purposes? What about winery sites? All need mobile applications?”
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My response was rambly enough to be relevant here:

I am not sure that’s the point….

1) the people in the know with the web based info basically say that whatever you consider the web, and what it looks like today will not be recognizable in the next 5-7 years.

2) mobile is a point of sale in that people will be using every sort of site… yelp, tripadvisor, google local to make decisions. Eventually we will need to have functional booking engines on all these sites….. or at least lead to a flat/boring mobile page to facilitate that. We definitely don’t want the power of these networks help lose our booking engine relevancy by having them automatically end up at Expedia, etc. The way google maps is mashing up aggregated prices into their search results suggests that it will be some sort of online OTA inventory listed…. and we will want to help get our industry away from ota’s any way we can and save on that 25% markup.

3) I don’t sub and news services will be “mobile based” so much as that the whole direction is going to an “APP” market…. whether you are at home on a flatscreen tablet, a laptop hybrid, or on the go… it will all be app based cloud computing.

4) but in the end… with winery sites, or brands to consumers or business to business…. you will need to be aware of the important of mobile. For example, I rather catch up on your words and website while in between lunch and a new appointment, while on public transportation, or waiting in line somewhere…. rather than have to be at work or home to view that info and cut into my work or private life? I note the way I use mobile is to catch up and filter a lot of the reading or clutter I need to clear out to do real work.

These are all so new… and just thoughts. It’s all really exciting in a frightening way, to be sure. But the main point is that everyone expects one thing to take over and wipe out the old thing, and that just isn’t the case…. fact is all these styles of communication and marketing are going to have to find synch or a happy place sometime soon.