The Infinite Dial

Listening to Facebook, blogs, message boards and Twitter for mentions of your station is easy. There is certainly the tactical aspect--responding to individual complaints, thanking people for listening, etc. But that only scratches the surface.

For example, I took a look at the last 300 mentions of WHTZ in New York (Z100) across all platforms of the social web, using some of the listening tools we use for clients here. Why Z100? Because people talk about Z100. If your social media listening "ears" don't pick up any conversations about your station, you don't exactly have a social media problem--you have a more sinister issue. Let's set that aside, however, and look at these 300 Tweets, posts and comments.

Of those 300 messages, I noticed the following:

25 Mentioned Elvis Duran (connect with him on Twitter!)

23 Mentioned Taylor Swift
28 Mentioned Adam Lambert
48(!) Mentioned Justin Bieber

The most commonly used phrase was "Jingle Ball"
Also discussed with Z100: WKTU, WBLI, WFAN

Can you make any grand strategic pronouncements from this data? Maybe.

Can you come up with some ideas to engage with fans and followers on social media platforms? Definitely. Can you get a sense of what kinds of promotions Z100 should be targeting exclusively to the social web? Most assuredly.

There's even more information buried in there--sentiment, music styles, even what these listeners are doing when they aren't listening to Z100, and why that matters.

Never forget the powerful message of one of the best books ever written about the social web (The Cluetrain Manifesto). The conversations about your brand are happening all over the Internet, and thanks to our increasingly always-on, always-connected mobile media lifestyle, they are always happening quite literally under your nose. What are these conversations telling you? "You want us to pay? We want you to pay attention." So, here's a friendly kick in the keyster from yer pal Tom--listen, engage, learn and iterate.

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The WunderRadio iPhone app has, for the last 10 weeks, been the nerve center of most of my radio listening. And one of the things it does is show you not just your "recently played" stations, but the number of times you've listened to them.

One of my client stations is far ahead in the lead. I've listened to them more than 400 times since late December. Another client is around 350 listens and their closest competitor is around 300. As you can imagine from that later example, a lot of what I was doing in those cases was using those three stations as punch buttons--checking what was going on for a song or two or even a few seconds, but not staying.

After that, there's a precipitous drop. There are 23 plays for one of my deep Oldies favorites, CKWW (AM580) Detroit. But almost everybody else is under 10 spins, and that includes some other faves that you're used to hearing about, such as Top 40 WDJQ (Q92) Canton, Ohio, and Urban AC KFXZ (Z105.9) Lafayette, La.

In other words, at a time when programmers are being encouraged to stop worrying about tuneout and boost a greater number of listening occasions, there are very few stations that have brought me back more than once a week. And that is a result of the Infinite Dial's worth of choice that other listeners are having made available to them right about now.

Okay, only another radio geek is going to have quite as many "buttons" as I do--in the hundreds and counting. But even for somebody outside the business, the number of available occasions is going to be split many more ways. And then it comes back to the things that we've been talking about here for years -- trying to be famous for something when your competition is a whole nation of similarly named music utilities and controlling your station's place in the directory of available choices.

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Among the many challenges HD Radio has faced, the idea that to hear country music in New York you would go to WKTU and then somehow switch to their HD2 channel was high on the list. Not exactly an obvious match (and not really any more obvious now that Clear Channel moved country to WLTW's HD2 location).

So kudos to CBS and WJFK in Washington for making all of WJFK's HD options re-broadcasts of sister sports talk stations in Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York. (And as an aside, did we know there even was an HD4 before this?)

At least this creates a congruent cluster of stations built around the mothership of WJFK. And perhaps, for some Washingtonians, a true reason to buy an HD Radio.

Of course, at the same time, all of these stations are and have been available on their streams. And if one really were that big an Eagles or Yankees fan or whatever, they were probably already streaming these stations, especially in a market like DC which is among the most high-tech areas of the country.

One item not covered in the press release -- will the play-by-play broadcasts of local sports teams be available? I have to believe Major League Baseball will not allow the Mets games to be broadcast in DC. Does anyone out there know?

All that said, congratulations to CBS for a creative use of HD real estate. It sure beats an untended music jukebox. We've already seen that that compels almost no one.

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I was chatting with a friend in UK radio recently, discussing their efforts on developing digital radio (now in more than 25% of their households, if I remember the number correctly).

So of course I mentioned to him how much trouble Digital Radio has had here in America, and that the most optimistic estimates of HD Radio uptake are about 3% of households.

He nearly blew my mind when he said: "That's not right. Digital Radio is much more developed than that -- you have to include Satellite Radio."

Well, that sent my mind spinning like one of those scenes in a Hitchcock movie. Of course he is right. Satellite Radio is digital radio. Sirius XM claims 18 million or so subscriptions, and our own annual "Internet and Multimedia Study" pegs them as being in about 12% of households.

I have to say, I had never really considered digital radio this way before. And yet, we all know that HD Radio was rolled out as a response to Satellite, and to this day the HD spots used on the radio tout the lack of a subscription.

It is just recently that many in 'radio' were thrilling over Sirius XM's near-bankruptcy -- the schadenfreude was flying.

But with Sirius XM's newfound footing, the question is worth asking...is this battle over, and did Sirius XM win it? Anyone out there want to argue for HD's eventual triumph?

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Just wanted to give you a First Listen to what our friends at Entercom launched in Sacramento, Calif., earlier this week--a market that had been without Alternative since KWOD flipped to all-'90s last spring. "It's great to have a choice again," says one liner. "Why pay for your music? Let our music sponsors pay for it," says another. Radio 94.7, which replaced Smooth Jazz, is low-key in the spirit of sister KNRK Portland, Ore., or Clear Channel's WRFF (Radio 104.5) Philadelphia. Here's the station at 2 p.m. yesterday (March 6).

Tonic, "If You Could Only See"
Bush, "Come Down"
Death Cab For Cutie, "I Will Possess Your Heart"
Red Hot Chili Peppers, "Scar Tissue"
Muse, "Starlight"
Beck, "Devil's Haircut"
MGMT, "Kids"
Incubus, "I Wish You Were Here"
Sublime, "What I Got"
Live, "Selling The Drama"
Kings Of Leon, "Sex On Fire"

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Netscape founder Marc Andreesen recently reminded me of the legend of Cortes, who upon arriving in Mexico, ordered his men to burn the boats so they would be forced to embrace the New World. With no possible way home (and having "escape" removed as an option) his men would be forced to find a way to live off the land and commit to the mission wholeheartedly.

Andreesen's advice (given here as part of an interview in Techcrunch) was more intended towards print media, but the lessons absolutely apply to radio. His point was that as long as old media continues to look for ways to lock audience in to apps, or behind paywalls, they will never fully embrace the New World and will be swamped by those who will. New World explorers aren't building subscriptions, they are focused on the bigger market--the open Web. As Andreesen puts it, ”All the new companies are not spending a nanosecond on the iPad or thinking of ways to charge for content. The older companies, that is all they are thinking about.” If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will be glad to do it.

His "burning boats" analogy suggests an interesting thought experiment (and Larry loves my thought experiments) that I'd like you to try. And don't just try this alone--bring it to your team and get the whole staff involved. Make a day of it. It might be the most powerful advice I could ever give you. Really. Do this.

Your "boat" is your tower--the terrestrial stick that blasts your signal into cars and homes in your coverage area. For the sake of this exercise, burn it. Imagine it was irrevocably destroyed.

Do you have a business?

If the answer is no, lock everyone in that room until you come up with a way to make the answer yes. But make no mistake--the boats are burning. If you are a local repeater of nationally syndicated content, your boat is burning. If you are the 2nd AC station in a market, your boat is burning. If your a non-personalized jukebox (and blaming PPM for the reasons why you have become a non-personalized jukebox) your boat is burning. Almost all of you reading this, in fact, should smell the smoke right now.

When the boats stop burning, there will be remarkably fewer terrestrial radio stations in each market than there are today. If you can genuinely answer yes to the question I posed above, you'll be one of them.

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Five weeks ago, Edison's Larry Rosin reasonably suggested that the real lesson of PPM might not be "heritage morning shows mean nothing, people would rather hear music," but instead "heritage morning shows might not fit on stations that are music utilities." Larry wrote, "Maybe the industry should be re-deploying its fired shows into stacks on one station, instead of the history of them being spread around on each, all competing with one another."

Since then, the number of heritage morning shows in play has only grown. Donnie Simpson leaves. Dick Purtan retires, and even doing so of his own volition can't help commenting on how PPM has made it more difficult to be a personality. So why hasn't somebody come up with the FM Talk superstation with a brand-name morning show in every daypart?

Because broadcasters have already decided that only certain types of FM talk work. In a PPM world, many are deciding the preferred FM choice for spoken-word programming is Sports Talk. The second choice is the Rush Limbaugh-driven conservative talk format that already prospers on AM and might benefit from a second signal. The younger skewed, entertainment-driven Talk station has usually stymied the industry, even in the diary era. But one reason was that all the logical talent was tied up elsewhere in the market, usually playing three songs an hour under duress in mornings on a music station.

Most markets finally have five heritage air talent that could power an FM talk station--San Diego being the best recent example of a market where it would be easy to have a "morning show" in every daypart. But even if owners could get past the belief that "FM talk doesn't work," they would still have to pay for them all. And in many cases, it's being unable or unwilling to pay for one talk show--much less a whole day's worth--that is really driving the personality exodus.

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Over the last few weeks, I've been discussing the radio stations that have, thus far, gotten a "button" on the iPhone that I've been using over the past month or two as the world's most sophisticated transistor radio. This week, in time for Country Radio Seminar, it's Country radio's turn.

The same caveats apply here as to my Top 40 and Urban buttons. The choices reflect the ease with which I found stations through various streaming apps. If you're here, it doesn't mean I've had a chance to listen yet. If you're not here, it doesn't mean I don't like your station. It's more of a reflection on how easy your station is to set as a "favorite" in some cases. At least one station that would be on the list, KKGO (Go Country 105) Los Angeles doesn't have a working link in my stream aggregator app of preference; (the app's issue, not the station's fault).

Here are my Mainstream and Classic Country bookmarks, so far:

CFQX (QX104) Winnipeg
CHNK (Hank FM) Winnipeg
CISN Edmonton, Alb.
CIWM (NCI-FM) Winnipeg--the native Canadian/Country hybrid
CJJR (JR93.7) Vancouver, B.C.
CJXL (XL96) Moncton, N.B.
CKNX Wingham, Ont., (one of the few terrestrial Country outlets included in the Tun3R app, but oddly enough also a station that can occasionally be heard in Northern N.J.)
CKRY (Country 105) Calgary, Alb.
GotRadio.com Classic Country
KBEQ (Q104) Kansas City
KBWF (the Wolf) San Francisco
KEEY (K102) Minneapolis
KKNG Oklahoma City
KKUS (104.1 The Ranch) Tyler, Texas
KKWF (the Wolf) Seattle
KMPS Seattle
KMPS-HD-2 Seattle (Classic Country)
KNCI Sacramento, Calif.
KOLZ Cheyenne, Wyo.
KPLX (The Wolf) Dallas
KSCS Dallas
KSOP-FM Salt Lake City (but disappointed that the Classic Country AM doesn't stream)
KSUX Sioux City, Iowa
KTST (Twister Country) Oklahoma City
KUPL Portland, Ore.
KVET Austin, Texas
KWYY Casper, Wyo.
KXXY Oklahoma City
Pandora Contemporary Country (their own channel, as well as Mainstream and Attitude Country channels of my own creation)
RadioIO Classic Country
WBCT (B93) Grand Rapids, Mich.
WDRM Huntsville, Ala.
WIHY (I64) Milton, W Va.--syndicated Classic Country
WIRK West Palm Beach, Fla.
WKHX Atlanta
WKIS Miami
WLHK (Hank FM) Indianapolis
WOGI (Froggy 94.9) Pittsburgh
WOKO Burlington, Vt.
WQIK Jacksonville, Fla.
WQYK Tampa, Fla.
WUSN (US99) Chicago
WUUQ (Q97.3) Chattanooga, Tenn.
WWLG (the Legend) Atlanta
WWQM (Q106) Madison, Wis.
WXTU Philadelphia
WYNK Baton Rouge, La.

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Opinion Research Corporation just came out with a study of the sources consumers trust for buying information. At the top of the list, chosen by 59% of respondents, was personal advice from friends and family (NOT social network "friends," who appear well down the list). TV News or other broadcasts were chosen by 40%, search engines at 39% (and growing) and radio came in at 20%, just behind direct mail. Messages or posts on social media sites were near the bottom, chosen by 18 percent (but significantly higher on the younger end, as you might imagine.)

Thinking in silos leads you to believe that this is yet another study diminishing the importance of radio. But, as this blog has made the case for many times in the past, you aren't in a silo. You may not have a TV station, but you have every right to search traffic, online ads, message boards and many other channels. What the connected digital economy of 2010 is teaching us that the right answer to what to try, is "everything." I see very little, if any, content marketing done online by radio stations--but an article about a local business or service is a clear opportunity to upsell a client, and another line in the water to attract a prospective customer to your client's door via search.

There simply isn't enough content on the majority of radio station websites to be interesting enough for humans--let alone search engine spiders--and the key to almost all of these potential fishing lines in the water is text content--whether that content is distributed on social networking sites, your station's blog, article marketing or in metadata wrapped around your online audio and video offerings. Without putting the creation of text content at the forefront of your digital strategy, you're needlessly playing in one silo--when you could be playing in the whole barnyard.

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The other day Inside Radio ran the following two blurbs in the same email:

IBiquity reduces HD licensing fee. The company says 2010 pricing for licensing HD Radio technology includes reduced license fees and expanded payment options "which will simplify radio broadcasters' migration to digital."

Chrysler adds in-car Wi-Fi. Terrestrial radio may still be the king of the road, but the in-car list of options continues to grow. Chrysler announces the 2010 Connected Dodge Caravan will offer internet, live television and online gaming join radio as in-car "infotainment" options. The system will be showcased at the 2010 Chicago Auto Show from February 12-21.

The battle for the car is on. And if this year's Consumer Electronics Show is any indication, WiFi/WiMax solutions are positioned to make the car a rolling Internet node. Of course, this also makes the car a rolling streaming device, prepared to allow your car to listen to any live radio stream in the world. Prefer BBC Radio 1 to your local Top 40? There it is.

And yet -- don't count good old over-the-air radio out yet. According the Arbitron's PPM data, Z100 New York (as an example) has a cume of over two million people per week. I don't know what the highest cume is at any given time, but let's say for the sake of argument that it peaks at 400,000 simultaneous listeners. Well let's face facts -- if that many people attempted to tune into a single stream at once, it would likely not just crash the streamer's site -- it could well crash the entire Internet.

Blogger James Cridland, whom I promoted last week, has long been saying that the listening should come from the airwaves, but all the rest of the enhanced data should or could come from the Internet. Well...that's kind of what HD Radio is theoretically trying to deliver.

So...who would you bet on? Who would you invest in? While HD Radio continues to be, at best, a slow and almost painful roll-out (what are we now -- about five years and a billion dollars of advertising into this thing?), it might not really be the loser. Or is its failure inevitable as the mobile Web rolls out?

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Even if the New Orleans Saints were upset winners on Super Bowl Sunday, there was never any question about which city was going to win the battle of the local sports novelties.

New Orleans is probably the market with the most robust history of local hits -- those songs that endure on the radio despite not having become hits elsewhere. It's a history less changed by MTV, syndicated programming, or the population shifts that have tamped down local hits elsewhere. And not only did the unique flavor of the market survive Hurricane Katrina, but one of the biggest local hits that you've never heard of is actually about being displaced by Katrina.

So it just followed that having the Saints in the Super Bowl would bring out the sports-related novelties. Indianapolis, which has had a few occasional local songs of its own over the years, did have a Colts-related song: the Mudkids' "Do It Again (Go Colts '10)," which got airplay on Top 40s WNOU and WZPL and Rock WRZX.

But New Orleans' WEZB (B97) alone had at least six different football-related novelties (or songs repurposed as football novelties) in rotation last week:

* Baby Boy Da Prince's "Saints Song 2009" (which also got other airplay in the region)
* U2 & Green Day's "The Saints Are Coming," which was pressed into action as a football song
* K. Gates' "Black & Gold"
* X-Man, Big Shot, Big Rec, and Kuniqua's "Heart Of The City (Who Dat)"
* Ying-Yang Twins' "Halftime"
* Will Smith's "Miami"--which got far more airplay on B97 and Hot AC rival WDVW than it did in Miami last week.

B97 has also given Queen's "We Are The Champions" at least four spins this week. And it has a whole page of Saints songs posted.

And there are other Saints records on other stations, such as Kellen Smith's "My Town (Saints Anthem) on Urban WQUE (Q93) and Williams Riley's "The Who Dat Roll," on WNOE and other Country stations around the state.

In other markets, sports-related novelties are one of the few times that programmers give themselves permission to go off the menu. It's one of the few times a group PD can look at the playlist and understand what exactly those "different" records are doing there. But listeners don't make that distinction. Those with continuing ties to the radio expect it to reflect their lives all year long.

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Most of you have email databases, and you regularly touch those databases with messaging about events, contests and promotions. How do you measure success with those efforts? In the early days of email marketing, we'd look at gross opens, clicks, bounces and unsubscribes. Social media has changed all of that, and as a result email marketing is far from dead-it is actually a potent activator for your own personal networks and the networks of your listeners.

One of the keys, as the smart folks at Blue Sky Factory have learned, is that the throwaway "Forward to a Friend" at the bottom of your email needs a subtle tweak. By changing that to "Share with your Network," and hooking it up with API's to share content from your email across social networks, your email database can suddenly develop exponentially more power. After all, you may forward something to a couple of people, but if you share something with your Facebook friends, or Twitter followers, then you've added a real force multiplier.

So you could potentially reach several times as many potential listeners (or site visitors) by activating your listeners' personal networks and encouraging them to share your content. With great power, however, comes great responsibility. That responsibility is to create shareworthy content, and that content is almost never about you or your station--it's about your listeners.

So what constitutes shareworthy content? Marketing Pilgrim's Andy Beal alerts us to this University of Pennsylvania study on the most-shared content at the New York Times. Turns out it wasn't the funny stuff, the entertainment news, or your Rock 105 Buzz Babe. No, it was content that created awe. The transmission of emotions, feelings that result in palpable changes in how people feel or perceive the universe, was the single most important factor in instigating content sharing.

Pretty tall order. It turns out that the best way to get this sort of content is to create it--and by that I mean literally create those awe-inspiring moments. Leaving deeper footprints. That means using your marketing and promotions budgets to help people, to create lasting change in your communities. Do that, and tell those stories, and your content will transcend your email database.

And you'll do some good in the process.

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While we try to cover the blending worlds of radio and the Internet here at The Infinite Dial, no one has more insight into where radio is going than our friend James Cridland, blogging from the UK.

James was a long-time technology director at Virgin Radio, and now travels the world as a "Radio Futurologist", consulting stations on applications of Internet and technology.

James is finishing an around-the-world tour where he has been both sight-seeing and visiting stations. The insights and information have been fantastic -- check them out by clicking here.

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I'm sharing the stations that I've bookmarked now that I'm finally streaming mobile audio. Here's the R&B/Hip-Hop list. Ground rules are the same as Friday's Top 40 list -- no New York stations (they're on my car presets), and who I've chosen isn't necessarily a reflection of my favorites as much as the stations that were easiest to grab from the various aggregators, and stations that filled a need that wasn't necessarily satisfied by a local.

KBFM (Wild 104) McAllen/Brownsville, Texas
KFZX (Z105.9) Lafayette, La.
KHHT (Hot 92.3) Los Angeles
KHYL (V101.5) Sacramento, Calif.
KKDA-FM (K104) Dallas (and wish that KKDA-AM was available)
KMEL San Francisco
KRJO (OI' Skool 1680) Monroe, La.
Radio IO Classic R&B
Skyrock 96.0 Paris
WBHJ (95.7 Jamz) Birmingham, Ala.
WBTP (95.7 The Beat) Tampa, Fla.
WDAS-FM Philadelphia
WDIA Memphis
WDKX Rochester, N.Y.
WERQ (92Q) Baltimore
WGCI Chicago
WGVN (Groovin' 1580) Lexington, Ky.
WHHL (Hot 104.1) St. Louis
WIKS (Kiss 102) Greenville, N.C.
WJBT (93.3 The Beat) Jacksonville, Fla.
WJLB Detroit
WJHM (102 Jamz) Orlando, Fla.
WJMH (102 Jamz) Greensboro, N.C.
WKKV (V100) Milwaukee
WPEG (Power 98) Charlotte, N.C.
WPGC Washington, D.C.
WPWX (Power 92) Chicago
WQUE (Q93) New Orleans
WRBO (Soul Classics 103.5) Memphis
WUSL (Power 99) Philadelphia
WVEE (V103) Atlanta
WWHT (Hot 107.9) Syracuse, N.Y., (Top 40 but effectively the market's R&B/Hip-Hop station)
WZMX (Hot 93.7) Hartford, Conn.

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I know I spend a lot of time extolling the latest advancement in digital radio initiatives from the UK's Absolute Radio, but at the same time, they keep doing things that I haven't seen from anyone else.

Watch the video, and see how they have quickly responded to the opening up of the Kindle platform to make their podcasts available. The Kindle is a lot newer in the UK than in the US, and I'm not aware of an American station that has gone this way, even with the longer lead time.

Absolute is showing a commitment to being available to anyone on any platform. Of course the podcasts are sponsored - Absolute is not giving away their content; they are finding new ways to make money off of it.

If you are interested in learning how Absolute is putting their podcasts on the Kindle, or how it is going for them, shoot me an email.

Absolute Radio Kindle Podcasts from Tom Webster on Vimeo.

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