Media Rules!: Mastering Today's Technology to Connect With and Keep Your Audience

Chapter 13. Be Geographically Relevant

Geography guides choice. Geography is what aligns certain customers to certain stores, determines what community will benefit most from the services an organization offers, and dictates how a marketing message is targeted.

Technology has made geography easier to access and understand—on the Web and through mobile devices, for everyone from corporations to average folks sitting in front of a computer at their home or library. How? Geography relates experience to the physical world, its inhabitants, and the interactions between them. It gives you a perspective on how big or small things are and how far we are from them.

Adding a geographic component to your analysis of a situation helps to provide clarity and context that might not exist from within a conference room or on a spreadsheet. In short, geography is about relevance. And you have to be geographically relevant to be relevant at all.

In today's flatter, leaner organizations, one of the ways that your organization can improve productivity is by making sure that your people collaborate and cooperate across every traditional boundary. Traditionally, geography has presented a challenge. But today, technology allows geographic information services and communities of users to develop, without borders or boundaries.

In the past two decades, geography has evolved from just the study of the earth and its features or just the political and economic landscape of our times into perhaps the most the important ...