NO SERVICE... WAIT What am I going to do....

What happens to society when your ever so Smartphone has NO SERVICE! I am currently in the full swing of training for an Ironman Triathlon in August of this year. While out on a 70 mile bike ride of the rural roads of Licking County Ohio. I stopped at about 36 miles in a small town in Knox County. Pulled out my ever so handy iPhone while munching on a snickers to check my Facebook profile, and NO SERVICE!!  Wait how am I supposed to check in with my friends and family? How can I find out who is doing what? How do I not have service! That feeling of panic and sense of urgency to get home came over me.

So while riding back home battling the hills and the head winds I thought to myself. What happens to social media when there is no service? How do we as social media marketers reach those in the rural areas of Ohio? Do they even have Facebook? This makes us rethink our approach to how we deliver our campaigns and who our target audiences really are. Because in all reality similar to designing a website and taking into consideration the audience that is still on DIAL-UP (Yes I said Dial-up).We have to remember that we do have an audience that still has no or limited connection to Social media. Limited… The beauty of Colleges, Universities and High Schools are they all have fast internet connections. Which opens up our market and our audience base bringing the limited connectivity into our pockets and allowing us to connect with them.

Although this is great we as marketers need to understand that we need to save portions of our campaign to still target the audiences that do not have access to internet daily or have slower connections. We need to be sure that as we sit down and hash out our campaigns with our clients that we make sure we ask what is your demographic. If our clients are target rural areas we need to focus our resources less on technology and maybe more on print media and advertising.

So next time you are out in rural Ohio and you grab for your trusty sidekick, and once the panic sits in take a deep breath and relax. You will get through this and you will get service once you hit the city limits. Take this time to reflect on the times when you didn’t have Google at your fingertips 24/7, take this time to reflect on when Facebook was merely a website for Harvard. Think about when you had to carry a 20 pound bag for a phone. We are moving so fast all day every day we forget we never had this 10 years ago and we survived.
 
I love technology and I love what it has to offer me, but being out on the open road with the sun shining and wind blowing made me realize the above. I need to step back and breathe.