Radio has been a resilient medium for many years. Attacks have come from TV, eight track tape players, CB radio, cassette tapes, CD's, and now iPods and the Internet. In the past, the medium has always bounced back by re-inventing itself. Will the industry do it this time?
I maintain that re-invention is critical in two completely different areas: 1) Financial and 2) Defining the business that we are really in. We will deal with the Financial side in a separate blog post soon. Today, I want to talk about the business that we are in.
Radio broadcasters need to embrace the idea of operating as digital businesses that just happen to own radio stations. The stations can drive traffic (quite effectively) to the digital offerings. Those include streaming (including streaming to smart phones), web sites, blogs, social networking sites (like Facebook), and podcasts. The problem for most of us is that we just don't "get" all of the digital offerings. But it is time to start thinking about not our audiences, but our communities. And to recognize the fact that our communities are best reached online.
So where do you start. As someone on the very upper end of the 25-54 demo, embracing these new opportunities did not come naturally. But let me share some resources for you as a starting point. If you read these books and follow the related websites, you will be off to a very good start:
- What Would Google Do?
Jeff Jarvis
Related website:
- The Long Tail
Chris Anderson
Related website:
- Grown Up Digital
- groundswell
Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff
Related website:
- Making Waves: Radio on the Verge
Mark Ramsey
Related website:
And the last of your homework, but certainly not the least, is to join Facebook, sign up for Twitter, and check out a few blogs. If we are going to re-invent, we have to understand why and how.
Those are my thoughts. What are yours?
George
In agreement completely with what you're saying, but maybe going a step further to where the transmitter is viewed as the loud-speaker for the station's own social network. Putting the station in a position of being completely entwined and inter-connected within the community it serves. A social network that of course would involve the station's website as well as some of the existing giants like Twitter & Facebook - with everything working together as an interactive link for people, on a one on one basis.
ReplyDeleteAs such, shouldn't it then follow that numerous station staffers would not only have access to these sites, but would be EXPECTED to contibute? In real twitter-like time! Based on what we see in the world of social networks where information and opinions are shared from all corners of a given universe, it would stand to reason that a sales rep's comment on an issue or a new song, along with perhaps additional comments from his or her's circle of friends, could have just as much social value and interest as that of the morning show star.
Seems to me that if I, as one lone listener sitting at a laptop or even just using my iphone, can become involved and heard dynamically and interactively with a station via the social network way, then I might quickly evolve into that ever desired entity referred to as the "customer evangelist." Think of the power of a station's brand and cache when it starts to create many of these evangelists by virtue of the social network of followers. And how efficiently that can be accomplished by virtue of having that big stick to promote it. All the benefits of broadcasting used in order to shift all the focus to one-on-one narrow-casting. Making radio even MORE of the personal one-on-one communicator then it is already, because at that point it truly becomes a two-way conversation.
And subsequently opening many new monetizing doors to boot!