NOW is the time to prepare for digital audience and revenue success in 2011. The best place to start your journey to a new media breakthrough is a review of the basics. So this week, a review of the A-B-Cs, with valuable input from some of the industry’s greatest thought leaders.

A - Audit your assets. Understanding what each of your digital brands does well (and what they do not do well) will help you to plan accordingly in 2011. Get your team into the boardroom for a thirty-minute “white board assessment” of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Success starts with clear vision.

B - Build your team. The right people make all the difference. Look for ability, but keep in mind that passion will help you achieve your goals faster. Keep your standards high. Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft says, “The key for us, number one, has always been hiring very smart people.”

C – Compensation. Reward the behavior you want with a compensation plan that motivates people to hit their goals. Put your money where your goals are.

D – Database. Build a database of your audience. "Broadcasters tend to shy away from drilling down and mining deeper data from their audience. Think about how much info YOU give up to sign up for a free website? Don't be afraid. Ask away and start gathering real intelligence on your audience,” says McVay New Media VP/Digital Strategy Jon Erdahl.

E - E-Mail is still one of the most effective digital marketing tools. Don’t act like it’s dead, because it’s not. Just because social media sites like Facebook are hot, do not forget the value of simple e-mail marketing. We have heard from a number of political fundraisers and strategists that e-mail is the strongest (and most “profitable”) marketing tool for keeping in touch with donors.

F – Facebook. Your listeners are there. You should be too, but be smart about it. Don’t just put a link on your site to Facebook. That just creates an exit door. You need to give your audience a way to use Facebook that drives traffic and interest back to your brands. Use sharing and collaboration tools, like the Facebook Connect API, which enables your audience to seamlessly integrate your site into their Facebook experience.

G – Goals. Set realistic goals for audience growth and revenue growth. Then, set compensation against them. I suggest to my clients that the average radio station should earn 3-5% of its broadcast billing in interactive billing by the end of a first-year interactive strategy. By the end of year two, a station should be earning 5-8% of its revenue in digital. It’s also smart to set goals for website visitors, app downloads, and page views. Set up a group of key indicators that you track and share them with your team. In Arbitron PPM, the most important metrics are cume, TSL, and tune-ins. On the web, the most important metrics are unique visitors, page views, time spent on site, and repeat visitors. All of these indicators tell you a story about your audience. Tom Davis, President of Davis Media, says TSC (Time Spent Connected) is more important to him than TSL (Time Spent Listening). He says that the most important metric in his organization is how much time the audience has spent connected with their properties through the day—rather than how much time they spent listening to the station.

H – Have Fun. When your team is having fun, they’ll work smarter and produce better results. Laughter releases endorphins—feel-good chemicals that are 10 times more powerful than the pain-relieving drug morphine—into the body with the same exhilarating effect as doing strenuous exercise. Get your team to feel the buzz of fun every day, and they’ll keep coming back for more. Bonus weight loss tip: Every time you have a good laugh, you burn up 3.5 calories. Laugh often!

I – Innovation means discovering and introducing new ideas into your business. Apple and Pixar CEO Steve Jobs says, “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” He also says, “Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly and get on with improving your other innovations.”

J – January is the time to “work hard to drive early budget success. Your competitors are making excuses while you deliver dollars,” says McVay New Media’s VP/Innovation, Dan Halyburton. “Get a jump start on building your Q1 revenue. Don’t tolerate sleepers.”

K – Keywords are the currency of search engines. It’s what people type into Google (or other search engines) when searching for a particular topic. What keywords do your sites “own?” Which keywords will result in a visit to your site and do those keywords match your brand? The right keywords help you to boost your search engine rankings, increase the number of visitors to your sites, and convert visitors into listeners or buyers.

L - Long Term thinking builds consistency and improves short term results. As widely respected CEO and investor Warren Buffett says, “Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.” Don’t be a manager of short-term gimmicks. Be a manager of long-term success.

M – Mobile. In a study released this Spring by Piper Jaffray, 31% of U.S. teens said they want iPhones in the next six months, up from 22% last fall, and almost twice the 16% who wanted an iPhone twelve months ago. Actual iPhone ownership among US teens is also up. Fourteen percent of US teens own an iPhone, up from 8% one year ago. Mobile is the “new” Walkman! Does your station have a mobile strategy? Are you streaming with mobile apps? Does your site load well on mobile phones?

N – New Customers are accessible to your station with innovation of your ad business. Offering new (and effective) digital ad products to new customers will drive long-term growth for your business. Thankfully, technology has opened new doors for prospecting that can help any account executive discover information on local companies and generate new business. Use sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Jigsaw, and HooVers to prospect for new buyers.

O - Online isn’t just a desktop browser. “Online is mobile, text messages, mobile e-mail and mobile streaming. Your website should be mobile friendly; flash will disappoint Apple device fans and BlackBerry users,” says Halyburton. Kevin Gossett, Clear Channel Phoenix’s Digital Program Director says, “Leading edge websites are already doing subtle redesigns to look really good on the iPad, and with dozens of new tablets coming out in the next year, there's going to be a rush to make sure your site looks good on that form factor.”

P - Page views. Website layout and unique content are important drivers of page views. Be sure you give users good reasons to go deep. The average number of page views for any website is THREE. That means that the average visitor goes to three pages before exiting a site.

Q – Qualitative. Identify your audience with more than numbers. Tell a story about who they are, what they care about, and why local businesses should care. Also, post your digital “menu of products” on your website so that potential clients can see your vision (and opportunities). Delmarva Broadcasting’s WXCY/Havre de Grace believes that “more is better” when it comes to educating local buyers on their product. General Manager Bob Bloom and Account Executive Jaime Solis collaborated to create a website with information on WXCY’s marketing capabilities and its benefits for local buyers. Solis says, “I’ve had prospects admit to me that our site has helped satisfy their curiosities about advertising on our station without making them feel like they were being sold. I like that; We’re certainly in the business of selling, but we’re also in the business of providing great content and improving people's lives so that kind of feedback feels good.”

R - Restructure. In our new reality, the roles of General Manager, Program Director, News Director, Sales Manager, Promotions/Marketing Director, On-Air Personalities, even the engineering staff, are all changing. Job descriptions need to be updated for 2011. It’s time to renovate our approach to sales, along with more meaningful interaction with our two most important constituents, our audience and our advertisers. “It is not necessary to change,” said 1950’s Business Consultant W. Edwards Deming, “Survival is not mandatory.”

S - Show after the Show. If your personalities are “doing four and hitting the door,” they are far behind the times. Get a green room and encourage your personalities to do a “show after the show” for digital audiences. It is an opportunity for your listeners to knock down that third wall as your talent shares behind the scenes video and audio of stuff they cannot get on the air. This is SHOW biz after all.

T – Talent. Get your on air talent to deliver digitally. Blogs, tweets, photos, flip video, and Facebook updates are all part of a talent’s deliverables in 2011. It does NOT mean that they need to be in front of a computer all day. It means managing time and interaction smartly. There are a number of websites like socialoomph.com that allow you to manage multiple social media profiles in one place. Your talent’s investment of time in social media can directly affect ratings. If one of your goals is to raise the amount of "at work" audience on your station stream, Twitter could offer significant leverage. Consider that nearly three out of five Twitter users check for updates during work hours (Crowd Science, 2009), and at-work listening is the highest contributor to streaming ratings.

U – Ubiquitous. Be inescapable! In the digital world, the more places you appear the better your search rankings. Blogs, Twitter, videos, photos, posts on other sites. The same works in the radio world. When you are seen everywhere, you are more top-of-mind for Arbitron diary keepers and more likely to be accessed in a PPM world.

V – Value. What is the value (in real numbers) of the people in your company? Do you know how much revenue is generated at your company per employee? At Google, each employee is worth approximately $336,000 per quarter or $1.34 million per year. That’s the total company revenue divided by number of employees. Yahoo earns approximately $130,303 for every employee per quarter. That’s $512,212 annualized.

W - WOW, big ideas and out of the box thinking will WOW your customers/listeners. Take advantage of technology to make your big ideas possible. Researcher Jeff Vidler says, “The key to taking advantage of the new technologies is to understand and exploit their ability to deliver what traditional radio can’t—a customized, personalized service that operates on the listeners’ schedule rather than a linear sequence of events that operates on the broadcasters’ schedule. That requires a huge re-orientation of thinking for a lot of folks.”

X - The X-Factor. What is unique about your digital approach? Erdahl says, "Get your team out of the office and do a top to bottom on your digital strategy. NO sacred cows allowed. Identify the features that perform and those that don't. You will end up with a clear path to success and your efforts will be better focused."

Y - YouTube videos of in-studio guests and station events build page views, return visits, and customer interaction. By the time you're done reading this article, 4.8 million people will view videos on YouTube. That's 11,574 views per second. And, they may be taking TSL away from YOU! Nielsen recently reported that over 65% of online videos are viewed between 9am-5pm, with the majority happening between 12pm-2pm. "We try to do videos about things that people are talking about," says Ben Relles, the founder of popular YouTube channel Barely Political. His strategy has worked too - attracting over 255 million views in the last three years. Relles and a team of five people work together to produce one or two videos per week with each video taking about two days to produce. One of their most popular videos was the "Obama Girl" music video (remember "I got a crush on Obama?"). Barely Political is just one of many YouTube channels attracting millions of viewers annually and YouTube pays them to make more!

Z - ZAP clutter from your website. Too many banners and tiles and no content drives down visits and page views.