In the past couple of days, South Africa has been gripped by the most recent load shedding crisis. It is playing havoc with business owners who aren’t lucky enough to have generators to take over when the municipal supply goes down and whose smooth operations rely on the presence of electricity.
As digital marketers, we rely heavily on electricity to do our jobs. We need power to fuel the Internet routers that allow us to do our daily jobs. In addition, we need electricity to keep our laptop batteries topped up.
However, what happens when the power goes down frequently as is the case at the moment? How can digital marketers do to make sure that there is no interruption to their work despite the lack of power?
Load shedding tips
Know which block you’re in
As you’re probably aware, the power utilities divide the city up into grids. For the purposes of loadshedding, each of these grids is allocated to a specific block. They turn off each block, for a specific number of hours, on a rotational basis. So, in order to make sure that you are in an area that has electricity when yours is off at the office, make sure that you know which block you’re in.
Plan for the unexpected
Sometimes, the electricity doesn’t come up when the power utility says that it will. This means that should you be relying on power coming up at a specific time and, if it doesn’t, your timelines are thrown off totally and – as such – so are your deliverables.
To counteract this happening, make sure that you have organised as much as you can in advance so should the unforeseen happen, you’re covered.
In previous articles, we’ve spoken about social media automation tools to help you ensure that your presence on social media happens seamlessly without you having to put in extra effort to make this happen. With tools such as Hootsuite, you’re able to schedule a number of posts to go off at a time that you require. So when you have a gap where there is electricity you’re able to make sure that your bank of social media posts is up to date.
