September 2011
Using Technology to Forward Republic County
By Jenny Russell
It seems that technology has changed the way we do so many things. How we interact with friends. How we navigate places that we have never been before. How we find a new job and more.
This month we thought that we would address three advances in technology that directly impact businesses right here in Republic County. One of these technological advances is Global Positioning Systems (GPS). Back in the “old” days we would get out our paper map or Atlas to find our way to a friends new house in a new city. Sometimes we might even look the address up on the Internet before leaving our house, ask for directions from a stranger, or get exact directions from our friend to find their new property. Now directions and maps are at the touch of a finger, right in the car with us as we drive. GPS is available through affordable “boxes” that you can mount to your car windshield and now even through cell phones with a GPS feature built right in.
With two major highways, especially U.S. 81 running right through Republic County, making sure that your business can be found on GPS is very important. What if someone just came out of Nebraska, has never been to Kansas, and is looking for a good meal? What if they type sandwich into the GPS and the closest sandwich shop comes up in Concordia? You guessed it, they are probably driving on to Concordia, maybe not even aware of the awesome restaurants that we have right here.
Many GPS-makers get their location information from three main sources, InfoUSA, TeleAtlas, and NAVTEQ. All three are information companies in which your business needs to be listed with. Once listed with these companies a business’ GPS visibility should increase substantially.
The next technology advancement that businesses need to be aware of is on-line job listings. I believe this is one of the biggest disconnects that our rural area has with people who do not live in our immediate area. Traditional ways to list jobs have included newspapers, radio, trade applications, magazines, and word-of-mouth. All of these ways of advertising jobs are still valid to some point, but until recently not many of these job advertising avenues overlapped with the new way of searching for jobs – on the Internet. To draw new prospects for employment from outside our immediate area, Internet job posting is one key. A way to do this is listing positions on job search programs like Indeed.com, Monster.com, and others. One of our favorites is Indeed.com. Employers can post jobs, people all over Kansas can find these jobs, jobs can be searched by people looking to move to Republic County, and the employer only pays when jobs are clicked on by potential employees. If a potential employee does not have direct ties to Republic County, but maybe is a good fit for the company or is from a similar locale, this could be a great way to reach them. The Belleville Telescope has also taken a step in the right direction recently by making the paper available on-line. This makes jobs listed in Telescope more immediately accessible to people whom no longer live here.
Another big technological trend is coupon and deal websites. This is all the rage right now on the Internet. Groupon is one of the most popular websites, which offers significant deals if a required number of people all want the same deal. This makes the deal more lucrative for the business that is offering the Groupon because they get a large often-new client base with economy of scale. Groupon has traditionally targeted those who live in major metropolitan areas, but now this trend is starting to trickle down to rural areas too. Salinadailydeals.com started recently and has been offering deals from businesses around the North Central Kansas region. Is there something that your business could offer on a daily deal format that could possibly draw more Salina-area customers our way.
If you have questions or need more assistance on the above technology, Republic County Economic Development is here to serve you. Please contact Jenny Russell or Luke Mahin at rcedc@nckcn.com or 785-527-2310 if we can be of any assistance. Also, join our Facebook initiative by searching Republic County Economic Development, now at 508 people strong.