Other stuff I worry about a bit

This is a short blog post, really.  Doing some figures tonight, I ran a report on all of my company’s clients’ streaming data since we launched the service last year.

There seemed to be some aberration in the figures in early December, so I ran off individual reports for the server’s clients.  One stood out.

If you have ever had any doubt, though I’m sure you have not, of the power of commercial local radio in times of collective crisis, this graph will dispel it immediately. The graph is anonymised and the Y scale removed but the relativity has been maintained – that is to say, on day 65 when the snow first fell, the server delivered 21 times as many listening sessions as the average of the previous 64 days.  A second peak 9 days later delivered 30 times that average.

I’m pretty sure I don’t need to spell out the lessons that this example provides.  Take note, take stock and be – very – prepared.  And advertisers – this is the power that only this media can deliver for you.

Filed under: digital, media, radio, technology

We all know that using social media as a tool to get our audience to engage with our brand is a “good thing to do”.  It’s very simple, in some respects and you really don’t need “social media experts” to make it happen.

Take it a stage further, though.  Maybe your radio station runs a “no repeat guarantee” during the workday.  It’s a popular method to demonstrate to your audience that you don’t play the same songs over and over again even if, actually, you do – just day after day.  Take that truth – and subvert it.  Start a Twitter hashtag – not corporately, but using grassroots listeners to take on the cause for you.  When you play, for example, Elbow’s ‘One Day Like This’ for the fifth time this week during the no-repeat workday – have listeners spot this & create a buzz around the fact that it keeps cropping up.  Use the corporate Twitter account to retweet stuff ironically once there’s a little momentum behind it at grassroots level.  Is it #elbowtime yet?

For this to work, you’ll already need a fairly hefty awareness of Twitter amongst your audience and strong buy-in of that as a method of communication with the station.  But with a little work, this kind of approach – where you are effectively engineering a campaign against yourself, in a tongue-in-cheek way – will further strengthen the brand and association with the benefit that you’re providing – whether that the “no repeat workday” or another equivalent hook upon which you market the station in a positive way.

Filed under: digital, media, radio, technology