When Marty McFly rocks his guitar solo in ‘Johnny B. Goode’ at his parents’ high school dance in Back to the Future, he leaves the shocked crowd slack-jawed at what they’ve just heard. The line he drops is something like, “I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet… but your kids are gonna love it.”

Welcome to my day job. I work in a 1.0 industry (construction). My main goal is managing my company’s relationship with the independent dealers who sell our product, and most of them are small business owners in their 50s who buy our products via distribution partners and resell/install to homeowners. These dealers are old school. Great, hardworking, dedicated businesspeople… but old school.

During a recent flight I read through Todd Defren’s excellent new (and free!) eBook on social media marketing called “Brink.” It’s filled with fantastic nuggets on how to “make an entrance” into social media, including tips on blogger relations, creating content using a variety of media channels, and reaching out using Facebook, Twitter and social bookmarking. Reading it made me excited and disheartened at the same time.

How do you implement social media tools and strategies if your audience isn’t ready for it yet? My audience – our network of dealers - can barely handle e-mail. I’ve had several phone conversations with dealers where I’ve had to explain to them how to open Internet Explorer. At length. A lot of them only want to send and receive information via mail or fax. (Apparently a fax machine is this thing from the early 1990s that you fed paper into and then that paper was magically transported to other fax machines).

Last year I created a secure extranet site for our dealers. It includes a blog where I post news items about our products and programs; forums for dealers to share information and best practices with each other; a media center where they can download .pdfs of our literature and view presentations from conferences; and lead management tools. Despite the fact that this group of dealers has hundreds of combined years of experience in their industry and could benefit greatly from more interaction, the utilization of this extranet community is near zero. No comments on blog posts, no posts or discussions in the forums, and rarely do people access files from the media center. It has the potential to be a great community for these dealers. But a community doesn’t exist if there’s no one there.

So what do I do? How much do you try to drag an audience along? How much should your communications strategy reflect where your audience currently is, versus where you’d like them to be? How do you keep from pulling a Marty McFly?