I don’t expect diversity in the New York supermarket business.  Rightly or wrongly, I have long associated chains like D’Agostino and Gristede’s as places managed by brawny Italian-American men.

In the public relations professions, the spotlight has been shining on the lack of adequate representation by non-male, non-white personnel for quite some time.  Similar criticism — and in some cases, litigation — has been lodged against the advertising and financial services industries.

But the world has changed since Don Draper types ruled on Madison Avenue, right?  Surely, the next generation of technology-driven marketing services would be led by people who more closely resemble those who live in our global communities where our clients sell their wares.

If the speakers and attendees at last week’s Inbound Marketing Summit in suburban Boston were an accurate sampling of who’s guiding us through the transformation from command-and-control “push” marketing to online and offline consumer “engagement” by brands, the answer is no.  The vast majority of those behind the books, speeches, opinions, videos and business models showcased at #IMS09 were  white males, mainly in their 30s and 40s.

One exception was Candace Fleming, CEO of the social media analytics platform Crimson Hexagon.  Another was Tina Hoang, whose Palo Alto, Calif., venture capital firm was trolling the event for companies to back.

While at PR Newswire,  where I worked from 1989 until recently, one of our overarching goals was building a healthy corporate culture and products that represented the needs of our communities.  Key to our success was attracting and retaining talent of all shapes, sizes, colors, orientations, religions and ethnicities.  The many postage stamp-sized images of my former PRN colleagues I see on Facebook each day confirms that we made plenty of progress.

Why is this important?

Census data from 2008 shows 54% of the U.S. population will be 54 percent minority groups — that is “everyone except non-Hispanic, single-race whites” — by the mid-21st century.  Professions that continue to rely on pale, male and stale people, practices and ideas are much more likely to be irrelevant.

One recent research paper on the topic, Elizabeth L. Toth’s  “Diversity and Public Relations Practice,” outlined the challenge for our profession.  Organizations like the Public Relations Society of America and the Institute for Public Relations have dedicated resources to address the issue.  But traditional PR agencies and corporate communications functions are morphing into new entities so quickly, it’s questionable how much impact the longtime industry standard bearers will have influencing the fledgling inbound marketing field.

There is  plenty of wildly successful marketing work being done in Africa, Asia, Europe and in the Americas using digital tools and creative  ideas from people who have never written a book or proclaimed themselves social media experts.  Events like the the trends-and-technologies Pop!Tech conference, in Camden, Maine, Oct. 21-24, have a broad roster of philanthropic doers who are glad to share their successes and failures with PR and marketing pros who want to learn new skills.

For people without thousands of dollars to spend on conferences like Pop!Tech and TED, last week’s Inbound Marketing Summit was well worth the time and investment.  I’d love to see next year’s event held in Indonesia, Argentina or Tunisia.  If not there, at least invite some of their digital marketing superstars to visit Boston.

The world is full of creative and interesting people.

Some of them will be on stage in the next 24 hours in Long Beach, California, at the annual TED conference:

• The creator of the first African online ad network and the African equivalent of The Huffington Post

• A New Zealand physicist who discovered the hidden mathematical patterns of warfare

• The founder of an international women’s inventor network

• An Indian design researcher dedicated to improving the lives of children

• A Korean-American actress whose one-woman show tells the story of a North Korean spy”

Even though it’s virtually impossible for ordinary people, and even for some CEOs and dignitaries, to score tickets to TED, organizers of the event have worked extra hard to show their commitment to the Open community.  Today, I spotted a list of movie theaters across the United States that would be beaming in a live broadcast of the Ted Prize, for the admission price of $20:

When: Thursday, February 5
Start time: 5pm Pacific / 7pm Central / 8pm Eastern
Tickets: $20
Theaters include:
Laemmle Music Hall, Beverly Hills, CA, 310-274-6869
Laemmle’s Playhouse, Pasadena, CA, 626-844-6500
Michigan Theatre, Jackson, MI, 517-783-0962
Bryn Mawr Film Institute, Bryn Mawr, PA, 610-527-9898
Jane Pickens Theater, Newport, RI, 401-846-5252

There’s also a webcast, which is free.

Of course there are many Twitter users and bloggers at TED, so we’ll get the back story alongside the more polished content on the web and in theaters.

My friend Michael Smolens, founder of the translation and subtitling community dotSUB is there.  Through Michael, I have met a number of remarkable individuals who are committed to shaping their careers around open access, globally, to quality media content that can lower communications barriers and maybe even make the world a better place.

Before last week, I only knew Jesse Dylan as Bob’s son.  Now I have deep respect for his documentary filmmaking and activism around the topic of medical information.  After all,  “Yes We Can” helped get Barack Obama elected.

Rob Hof also uses the art of filmmaking to tell his stories, captured aboard railroad trains in foreign lands ranging from Turkey to Cambodia.  I can’t wait for his Future Express series to debut this spring.

Today, I started looking over the work of Neil Sieling, who shared an amazing story about the cable TV industry grousing to the FCC that it wanted to be freed from having to allocate precious channels for community access.  DirecTV and Dish Networks don’t have a similar public service requirement, the cable guys argued.  The unintended result was that Wayne’s World and local PTA meetings stayed on cable and the satellite TV industry was forced to add public service programming for the first time.  LinkTV was born.

The common thread with these individuals is that they like to share.  They welcome newcomers to their network and don’t throw an NDA in front of you before ordering lunch.  It’s a refreshing way to do business, and to learn.