Being There on Christmas

Offering Hope

Back before automation, back when we were actually spinning the disks, I had an experience that helped me understand the value of the personal interaction radio offers.

I often worked holiday shifts, filling in for staff who wanted time with their families. On one particular shift on Christmas Eve or Christmas Night, I got a call from somebody who was having difficulties. The holidays can easily amplify loneliness among individuals going through tough emotional times.

We spoke on the phone for about 20 minutes. I listened mostly. Finally, he said he was doing a little better, but asked if he could call back later that night. I assured him he could. 

After I got off the phone with him, I called my pastor. I asked him if he thought he might call back. He said, "probably not." Listening was going to be the best thing I could offer. I was a voice in the night. He was able to reach out and connect when he needed it.

 I’m not sure what happened to him.

Because we were not automated, we were there when he needed us to be. In a way the live presence eliminated a barrier between the listener and the station. I like to think that connection was valuable for both of us.

The song I was playing just before he called, "I'll Never Be the Same."

Please, don't say that again!

 

Recently heard on my radio 

(What not to say)

Best practices for radio announcers eliminates barriers between the audience and the person behind the mic. There should also be a sincere effort to promote an increase in time listening. Seems basic, yet I still hear:

"We'll be right back after this"  

First: You're not going anywhere.

Second: This is really lame forward promotion. Promote to something specific coming up in less than 20 minutes.

                                                                -0-

"More on that story at 5:44." 

You don't need a specific time. Say something like this, "Senators react to the resignation of Ted Cruz, in 15 minutes on Baltic Public Media's  All Things Considered." Don't expect me to make an appointment for listening, but if it's only 15 minutes away, I'll probably stick around. The goal is to increase Time Spent Listening.

                                                                -0-

"Wow, it's really cold out there! Windchills are expected to be minus 32 outside tonight."

You don't need to say 'out there' or 'outside.' We'll get it. Instead say, "Stay safe and bundle up. Windchills are expected be 32 below tonight." Saying 'out there' puts up an unconscious barrier between you and your listener.

                                                                -0-

"All of you out there." (Often heard during fundraisers.) "We need all of you out there to step up to the plate and make a donation so we can raise 20 thousand dollars." 

Where do I even begin with this? Radio is a personal medium. Most listening is done alone. Throwing up the barrier of "all of you out there" is so wrong on so many levels. Most importantly you've destroyed the intimate relationship you're trying to build with the listener.

What is special about radio?

Based on the human voice, radio is a uniquely personal medium, invoking a listener's imagination to fill in mental images around the broadcast sounds. Radio also can employ a boundless plethora of sound and music effects to entertain and enthrall listeners. -britannica

Why do people love listening to radio?

People love listening to radio according to a recent survey by Edison research - It's ability to connect listeners with new music, both local and global news, and the added benefit of going mobile are the main driving factors why audiences keep coming back for more.  -radio.com

Please, don't say that! (1.0)

 

Avoid saying:

Good bye!

I heard it this weekend on a commercial radio station. A weekend announcer told his listeners this was it for him today. And next weekend tune in at another time and day for his new shift. 

• First, nobody cares! except for his grandmother. Then, maybe she doesn't care either.
• Second, you told anybody listening to tune out or turn off the radio. Why would you do that?
• Third, there was no forward promotion. Remember that? Increasing time spent listening? It raises the station share, making it more appealing to advertisers, contributors and underwriters.
• Fourth, it's a total misunderstanding about how radio works. The listeners chose the station because of the content, not you. Loyalty depends on consistent appeal from the station's programming.

Listening barriers

There are plenty of examples in public radio of personalities saying goodbye. That's because content people always thought in terms of 'their' show. Garrison Keillor always said goodbye twice over the last three minutes. For the longest time, the producers and editors at All Things Considered as being a show with a beginning, middle and end, while the listeners actually tuned in when they could.  That's the problem with most weekend programming, churning the audience with hello's and goodbyes. 

You better make the most of your breaks. It's your only opportunity to create tune in, recurrence and increased occasions.

Good luck, and goodbye. Oh dang, I just did it to myself!

Radio Anxiety

That Radio Dream

I had that radio DJ dream again last night. This time it was a jazz format with a poorly maintained LP collection. I spent lots of time looking for the right tracks while the needle drew ever closer to the label. I ended up blowing off all sorts of stop sets.

I've had variations on the dream with rock formats, classical music and public radio fundraising, even news.

There's not enough preparation and too little time to set things up.

There are several types of anxiety dreams. I found ten categories explained on Bustle.com. My radio announcer dreams seem to be a mashup of two types on Bustle. 

Being Late

If you take pride in showing up early for commitments, traffic delays are pretty much your mortal enemy. Dreaming about being late is just as stressful. Dream Stop said on its site, " It signifies the anxieties and pressures you have in real life. You may be afraid of missing an important opportunity. It can also mean there are big changes coming you should embrace rather than fear." Release yourself from the shackles of self induced pressure and relax, confident in your ability to wake up on time and be prompt for events.

Forgetting Something Important

You're on stage, at a Broadway performance, and you totally forgot you were part of the show, and you now have no idea what your lines are or what stage directions mean. If you were ever in a high school musical, you've probably experienced this dream once or ten times. But you don't have to be a performer to have anxiety dreams about forgetting something important. You could be dreaming about a "high pressure event," Habash tells Bustle. This could "indicate too much stress and pressure in your life." To avoid recurring anxiety dreams about planning a wedding or work event where everything goes wrong? You might "benefit from setting some boundaries or delegating" in your waking life, Habash suggests.

What can be done? 

In real life, this didn't happen very often. I always did a lot of show prep. Even in instances where I was thrown into a situation, I had experience to draw on. But that doesn't stop the anxiety dreams. According to Healthline "these dreams don’t signify anything deeper than perhaps some subconscious (or conscious) worries about these things happening." Face it, 2020 was a very stressful time and that stress has spilled over into 2021.

Wake Up - Hit the Reset

Healthline has several suggestions to help you hit the reset.

Try something relaxing

A relaxing activity can help put your brain back into sleep mode. It doesn’t have to be dull or boring, exactly, but it shouldn’t wake you back up. Try:

• a warm drink
• quiet music
• a soothing podcast
• a favorite book, or one with slow pacing
• breathing or meditative exercises

Just keep your lights dim and try to avoid watching TV or scrolling through your phone, since that can wake you up even more.

Then repeat, It's only a dream. 

Radio still connects content with audiences

 Reach Out and Engage

Even in the early days, radio was an extension of what I liked to do best, share what I've found, and then listen to the response. As an announcer, I went at it as somebody who was making discoveries, a curator in the hope of finding a common bond. At first I did that with music. Later I was sharing stories.

Radio does this very well, especially public radio. I craved the feedback, Content that resonated well with the audience became the benchmark. In the beginning it was the phone calls. Later it became actual research. Unfortunately, phone response represented the caller and nobody else. 

It worked. It worked really well. 

Radio is a personal medium. It's been said that everything that comes out of your radio speakers is local, because the listener is able to interact. Listeners would talk in terms of the the stations they listened to as their stations. 

Radio is a personal medium and, unlike other media, it can accompany you throughout the day. This fact makes radio the ultimate local community and loyal friend. Radio is highly personalized because it requires the listener to fill in the blanks … and they are entirely in charge of what they “see”. The Media Online

Radio has changed. Instead of lamenting being displaced by Social Media, look at it as a way of making your discoveries available on multiple platforms.

Check out Zane Derbyshire's article at The Media Online. Derbyshire is currently the head of all things content at East Coast Radio. In it he says, "Technology will take radio forward and allow for even more meaningful ways to connect the audience to the presenter.  Radio needs to make it easy for listeners to interact, be it through calls, WhatsApps, video sharing, or text messages. Sharing of great content also needs to become easier. If that happens, your audience will become the promoters of your content.

• Be proactive
• Reach out
• Use research
• Listen and engage

Please understand you're going to need to bring people in your own house on-board. I've had to persuade people who think only in terms of my show, my story, my music. That won't work for radio. Loyalty for the listener is primarily to the radio station. That has not changed. Don't believe me? Run a crossover analysis of Morning Edition to the rest of your broadcast day. You are likely to find 80% of your audience filters through morning drive.

Think of it this way, you're starting to understand the power of the shared experience. I share stuff on Social Media all the time, but now I'm appealing to a core audience that never exceeds 50 people. In my radio days it was about 100,000 core listeners. Pretty heady stuff. If you can bring that audience to your content, then you've succeeded.

COVID-19 and Public Radio

COVID-19 means we must rethink your marketing strategy in radio. (Public radio too)

-Live and local needs to be more than a slogan. It’s the lifeblood of the industry. Radio needs to recapture its hometown zeitgeist – not just during the pandemic but 24/7/365. And it starts with developing, embracing, and empowering its talent.

-Radio sounds better with fewer commercials. Let’s keep it that way. For public radio this means less clutter.

-Stop selling just the terrestrial audience. The audience is spending less time in the car. Think apps, smart speakers and laptops.

-Digital shouldn't be devalued. Think total reach.

For more on this, click the link below to read a blog from Jacobs Media on rethinking your marketing strategy. Think of COVID-19 as an opportunity

#publicradio #publicmedia #localradio

Turning Lemons into Lemonade

Podcasts: How Long is Long Enough

What's the Sweet Spot?

Attention spans are falling. It's not that this problem is new. As a journalist I was taught to put the compelling information on top. Most readers would drop off before the tenth paragraph. (subheadings helped). In radio, stopset content over a minute causes tune out. Writers of long blogs are doomed. Maybe 5 percent might stick around for the conclusion. The sweet spot for YouTube is about four minutes. Since the inception of the smartphone, attention spans have dropped dramatically. Millennials have an attention span of eight seconds, but they aren't the only ones. 

Length A Barrier?

When it comes to podcast, length is for me. I'll often read the description, look at the length of the podcast, and find myself wishing I could read the text. I would rather skim the article to look for the pertinent information, then, if intrigued, I'll fill in the details by reading other parts of the article. If there is no text, I look at the length and usually decide not to bother. 45, 35 even 25  minutes seems daunting. I'm looking for the CliffsNotes version.

Podcast Sweet Spot

AudacitytoPodcast.com suggests the sweet spot is 30 to 45 minutes, about the length of a commute. That's really generous.

Cision.com claims the average length of a podcast is about 30 minutes with users actually listening 22 minutes. They cite the average commute at 20 minutes. Users prefer podcasts that are 16 minutes.

7 Podcasting Best Practice

Cision's Recommendations

1. Respect People's Time 
2. Plan Your Content 
3. Augment the Audio with Text (the complete text) 
4. Don't Use Listens to Measure Success 
5. Distribute - Promote - Embed 
6. Benchmark 
7. Master the Audio 

Longer isn't always better. In fact, longer doesn't seem to work for readers on the web. Slate found in 2013 that readers can't stay focused. About 5 percent of people who land on Slate pages and are engaged with the page in some way. Attention span is way down. A survey of Canadian media consumption by Microsoft concluded that the average attention span had fallen to eight seconds, down from 12 in the year 2000. We now have a shorter attention span than goldfish.

Focus Your Break

I was listening to the final day of a fund drive a couple of weeks ago. There were so many incentives, challenges, drawings and giveaways going on all at once, I had a hard time focusing. All this unfocused chatter made the pitch hard to listen to. Good radio is all about focus and preparation. The message should be direct. One thing at a time...please. 

Strong Stopsets

One idea per break

Eliminate the clutter

Forward promote to one thing

Promote to something within the next 20 minutes to increase time spent listening

Keep it short/succinct

Prep!!!

Always give your best

Use your best material

Eliminate seams and barriers to listening

This applies to fundraisers too

Billboard Wars

The Battle for Market Share

Radio stations in highly competitive markets used to battle for attention with billboard wars. Along the Tri-State Tollway around Chicago there used to be several touting various formats as stations vied for another ratings point in a lucrative market.

The billboards increased awareness and were also meant to develop branding identity. Effective campaigns could do that with simple, uncluttered messages. It wasn't as effective at creating ratings share. In markets that were measured quarterly, there would often be a new crop of billboards for the Fall and Spring books in the hopes of building an audience.

On our most recent trip around Chicago, I didn't see any.

What's Changed?

I don't have the answers, but I can surmise.

Social Media - 

Social media is much more cost effective and with the right strategy can engage listeners directly.

Audience Measurement

The advent of PPM give Content Directors almost instant gratification on an hour-by-hour basis.

All things being equal, the data can give the station a pretty good idea if the billboard campaign is moving the needle at all. PPM also reinforces the idea that the most effective thing you can do is create great content and make effective use of forward promotion. Solid radio practices go a long way. Meeting listener expectations on a consistent basis generates loyalty and increases share.

Forward Promotion (You can't do that!)

At least that's what I was told. It's too commercial! 
(Heaven forbid we generate increased time spent listening.)

Reliving An Old Argument

I heard some forward promotion this evening on a commercial station. Most of the announcers on this station say goodbye with our any thought about what comes next. It's an invitation to tune out. Not this time. I was impressed. She mentioned the artist coming up after what promised to be a lengthy break. She even tied in the tidbit that the artist would be touring and stop in area this Summer. The break was, indeed, lengthy. I got out of my car after five minutes and the spots were still rolling out of my speakers as I turned off the radio. But still, the effort was there. I also learned something I might not have otherwise known which added value to my time.

So What's The Big Deal?

For the commercial station the increase in Time Spent Listening (TSL) promotes increased share. Something that can be taken back to the advertisers. Increased share for public radio can be taken to the underwriters, but it also promotes loyalty, increases the size of the core audience and helps generate member dollars. Now that there is a lot more competition for listener ears, and we're more dependent than ever on contributions from non-government sources, increasing TSL doesn't seem so bad.

Barriers

The length of the break led to my tune-out. The tune-out wasn't only about the commercial interruption, it was more about my listening habits. If I had been in the car longer, I might have stayed wit the station longer to hear the music of the artist and the consistency of format.

What happens when that consistency of format is no longer there? In the case of public radio, what happens to the audience when we switch programs or programming. For example, what happens when Morning Edition ends and another program starts. Audience figures suggest a large port of the audience tunes away. Then an hour later another program starts. The seams created by this continuous shift in focus creates more opportunities for tune out. The only tool immediately at the programmers disposal is promotion.

There's a public radio network in the Midwest that runs a daily line-up of locally produced talk shows. It was assumed that since they were all talk shows on the same network that the appeal of each program would be similar. Unfortunately, they were not. At each program shift, the audience would depart. As the two hours of the next program unfolded, n news audience would grow. Then at the next seam (program shift), that audience would depart. The the process would start again. The roller coaster effect was made worse by shifts in content within the programs.

Meeting Expectations

Forward promotion can help offset some of these. It does not offset inconsistency in appeal. If the content is not appealing to the target or core audience, The expectancy set up by the forward promotion has not been met. Content providers and show producers should always be prepared to present their best to meet audience expectations. If they do not, listeners will go elsewhere. That's not a happy thought in a highly competitive market. Nobody said this was going to be easy.

Dashboards Driving Distraction

Dashboards and Distractions

People are beginning to complain about the clutter presented by the newly connected cars. All sorts of distractions are built into the dashboards of the newer model cars. We may be able to access the web with WiFi...but the clutter is causing a distraction. Some consumers are complaining.

• Could the future mean more accidents? 
• Isn't it a lot simpler to just have a few presets with your favorites?
• Do we really need to be connected all the time?

Honda is trying to simplify as complaints mount.   

Designing Dashboards With Fewer Distractions

According to the article in the NY Time, the Honda system will operate with a series of hand gestures, but won't that still involve taking you eyes off the road for just a moment? Hands -free systems are just as dangerous according to a study by the AAA and the University of Utah.

Earlier testing in 2013 by the same university found that even when drivers were watching the road, they could still be sufficiently distracted by hands-free systems to miss a pedestrian walking out in front of their vehicle.

Try Something Old

Radio may still have life in our cars, and they offer a lot of information and entertainment at a really low cost. At any rate, a lot less than the cost of running WiFi in your car, and a lot safer.

Christmas Music Bonanza

All Christmas All the Time

You've heard those stations that play Christmas Music non-stop, right? Does it seem like they start earlier every year? I avoid them. I would rather take my commercial Christmas music in small doses. It is true that the music can make me nostalgic. I guess it's all about a longing for home. Perhaps, a longing for safer and more secure days in my childhood.  But, I can't go there non-stop.

Apparently others can and do. It's a ratings bonanza for the radio stations that play all Christmas Music, and that translates into revenue.

Marketplace has a report...

That all-Christmas music station makes money. Lots of it

If you're like me and find the commercialism disconcerting, fear not.  Charles Schultz got it right.

The symbolism of the evergreen is the hope it represents that we will emerge from the bleak midwinter and be renewed like the earth with the coming of spring.

Is video the new radio star?

Inside Radio posted an article today about the importance of Video on a radio station's website. The article focuses on data gathered by comScore.

A new report from comScore shows that’s a smart strategy. The U.S. online video market attracts an average of 75 million viewers every day.  And content providers are doing a better job of monetizing those views. The gap between the number of video ad views and content views is narrowing, comScore data shows. The percentage of videos accompanied by a video ad jumped from just 14% in 2011 to nearly 23% in 2012.

Some public radio stations are on-board with this. Back in 2006 we did some early dabbling in video for radio at WNPR. We recorded and posted  the Steve Davis Quintet at Sweet Jane's in Hartford. It now has over 7000 views. WNPR's offerings are much more robust. WNPRVideo's Channel has 32 videos. The most watched is Kate Callahan and Two Doors with over 12,000 views.

WUMB919 (I had a cup of coffee with this station.) has 37 videos. Most of the views are in the 100's. The most recent video was posted about nine months ago.

WNYC has over 1500 videos. WNYC's Street Shots: Bruce Gilden, was posted about four years ago. It's a good example of the long tail of appealing on-line postings with over 600,000 views.

There are many more videos cross linked to each of these stations. An example of that cross linkage are videos posted by Colin McEnroe and the Real Life Survival Guide.

Still not convinced? YouTube is the second most utilized search engine behind Google. The platform is a must for your content.  A robust video strategy is going to bring more visitors to your station's website and will make more users aware of your content and your station.

And finally...According to the article from Inside Radio, advertisers (underwriters) are willing to pay higher cost per thousand rates for on-line video content and ads.