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.

Note that I said “originates.” This doesn’t mean you don’t involve your station in social media, whether it is Facebook, Myspace, or Twitter. What it means is that you should not send listeners to Facebook to look at contest pictures, take part in a poll, upload a video, or start a discussion with your morning show.

When discussing Facebook, we often hear the phrase, “Fish where the fish are.” The trouble is that analogy only holds if you are also willing to send your listeners to a music festival put on by a competing station and treat it as the cool place to be. Many stations deal with this scenario by showing up and then doing something fun like paying for parking or doing ticket upgrades or something else that steals the thunder of the opposing station, all in an effort to show that the cool place to be is with your station. That is exactly what you should do with Facebook.

Facebook is obviously different than a competing station, but not that much different. It’s more open, obviously, so you have the ability to stake out some ground there. You can assume that a huge number of your listeners are active participants, so it is worthwhile to both market to them and reply to them there. But, in the end, it is a competitor for your own station’s mindshare, so you need to approach it with a whole new thoroughly modern strategy: Actively participate and “push” at the listener level, but market and “pull” at the station level.

By “push” I mean that you need to monitor the discussions and associated content about your station, your local market, and the interests of your listeners on Facebook and then actively participate, pushing into their consciousness with your willingness to engage them at their level. But you don’t start those discussions. Content needs to be originated on your site. Actively participating on Facebook for a radio station means providing information, not content. The only content you present on Facebook should be as a sample or tease for better and more comprehensive content from your brand, pulling listeners to your broadcast, your site, or both.

In basic terms, that’s the strategy for Facebook and social media. Here’s the tragedy: For a lot of radio stations, they couldn’t embrace this strategy even if they wanted to.

I realized this at a panel I moderated at the Midwest Conclave. I was shocked at the number of personnel at stations that discussed morning show bits or contests with listeners on Facebook or that utilized Youtube for their video. All of these lively discussions and interactions, and they were all happening in someone else’s home.

I asked why this was happening, and the response was uniform: “We use Facebook or Youtube because we can’t do that on our website.” We can’t do that on our website.

Is there a worse indictment of the state of radio in the digital world than that? Radio station programmers can’t take the content that they broadcast and bring it together with their own website in any kind of dynamic way, so they send their listeners off to be monetized and their content to be branded by Facebook or Google or News Corp.

What kinds of things can’t these websites handle? Well, they are basic things, things that every radio station site should be able to handle and which, quite frankly, there is no excuse for them not to handle: Personality blogs, an activity stream, photo and video management, and the ability for listeners to interact with that content. If you have a “cutest dog” promotion, and your site can’t handle real time voting and commenting then there is something badly wrong, but with radio it is all too often the reality.

The saddest part of this? The solutions are there all around you. The reality is that all of those powerless programmers who proclaim “Our website can’t do this” are simply not being given the tools that are available. The result undermines the one media category showing growth: digital. For radio, digital all too often means “let’s send our listeners elsewhere.” It’s no different than them advertising their broadcast competitors on their own airwaves.

But, ultimately, I can’t blame them. In this scenario, Facebook is the strategy and the tool.

Personalities and webmasters have been put into the position of doing nothing or doing it with Facebook, and in today’s digitally connected world, doing nothing is absolutely worse than utilizing Facebook or Youtube. Still, that’s not an excuse. While the personalities may be doing their best, they’re doing it wrong, and the only solution is for radio to provide them the proper tools.