Recently I was forced to go on a digital diet - and not by choice. My six-month-old cell phone decided to stop working. Not in a “please charge me” kind of way, but rather a “warranty replacement” kind of way.

As a working mom, my cell phone is my connection to nearly all my everyday communication needs  - work e-mails, personal e-mails to communicate with my children’s ( ages 7 and 8 ) teachers and arrange play dates, update my Facebook status and also check out what my friends are up to on Facebook. I also use my commute time to return personal and work phone calls all while coordinating my daily car pool routine and maybe some weekend details with friends.

Initially, I thought the sudden expiration of my cell phone would be a good thing. I thought it would allow me to get back in touch with the “old school” forms of communication (i.e., landlines, snail mail) and make me less reliant on my cell phone. Boy, was I wrong!

Over the course of one week, here are just a few of the hurdles I ran into:

• Missed a Facebook update from a friend that said her husband had an emergency appendectomy. (This was the only form of communication she used to tell everyone about her husband’s emergency surgery.)
• Hit bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Beltway and had no way to tell my husband to avoid the Beltway or contact my childrens’ after school provider to tell her I was running late.
• Missed the text message from a friend that my son needed me to bring an extra water bottle to his soccer game.
• Missed the text message from my sister-in-law telling me the details of my niece’s hospital stay.
• And basically had no clue what meeting I had coming up or in what room at work without mobile access to my work calendar.

While this very unfortunate situation definitely re-affirmed my complete dependence on my cell phone, I also came to grips with it. With all the criticism about how disconnected we are in our digital world, my forced digital diet taught me the exact opposite. In today’s digital world where life moves at the speed of light, digital and mobile technology gives us more touch points with friends and families than we’ve ever had access to before.

So the question now remains, what digital touch points are you missing in your marketing plan?