One of the real powerful aspects of social media is that it creates so many more touchpoints between a radio station and its listeners. In the old days, there were just a few—the live interaction at events, the telephone, postal mail, and the actual broadcast itself. Today, you can add Twitter feeds, blogs, email, RSS feeds, Facebook updates, text messaging, and even things like embedded video or other content around the web. While this ability to connect with the listener on so many new levels is powerful, it also requires a greater attention to things that we never would have considered a problem: Overdelivering a message or delivering via the wrong method.
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One year ago, the Pew Internet & American Life project released a study that outlined an entertainment category that has grown so large that it was approaching radio and television in terms of usage. Was it social media, that headline-generating wave of the past few years? No, it was video gaming, a category that is routinely ignored by the press but has gotten so big that the industry is now larger than Hollywood, as outlined in a recent Daily Observer column from the UK. And the gaming story crosses all boundaries—from hardware device to demographics. We are seeing nothing less than the video gaming of life, and it is an area where radio must pay attention and use to its advantage.
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This column is about Facebook, but it isn’t necessarily about social media. The concept of tying into your station’s social graph and leveraging sites and tools like Facebook and Twitter is important, but that is different than what I want to address here, which is the propensity of radio to use Facebook as a replacement for their own website.
We’ve all seen it: Radio stations utilizing Youtube as the video engine on their website or utilizing Facebook to deliver photos, videos, and commentary to their listeners. Let me be blunt: This is all wrong, and the reason is simple: Content and the associated social discussion that originates from the station belongs on your own site. It belongs there because it is your brand, not Facebook’s, and your site is where you can best control how it looks, is delivered, and is monetized. It is your content, and the audience expectation should be that your site is where to find it.
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Few things have gotten more press over the past twelve months than Facebook, Twitter, and all of social media. Media companies have been aggressive about staking out a position at all of these locations. This is smart because you can’t participate in social media if you’re brand isn’t willing to go out and be social. A problem I often see, however, is that while the strategy is sound and radio has the best intentions, execution leaves a lot to be desired. With social media that lack of execution generally manifests itself in a focus on the “media” and not the “social.”
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While the news that the iPhone and iPod FM chip might be activated, allowing FM radio integration with these mobile devices, is interesting, I’m not sure it achieves anything at the consumer level. For iPhone users, accessing radio has been something they’ve been doing for a long time. The only difference is that they access it via apps and streams. But, to them, they’re still listening to “radio.” Researcher Mark Ramsey has been particularly eloquent on this point recently.
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