"Listen Live AND Chat"
Written Sep. 17, 2007 by Sean Ross in Internet Radio with 1 Comment
WHTZ (Z100) New York has given a lot of on-air real estate to the Z-Zone, one of a number of new social networking sites built around its radio stations, but it recently turned gave the Z-Zone another interesting piece of real-estate: space on the station's Webstream player.
On Z100's website, as well as those of sisters WIHT (Hot 99.5) Washington, D.C., and WKQI (Channel 95-5) Detroit, the "listen live" link now instead reads "listen live and chat." Hot 99.5's player is actually branded to its "Hot Spot" social networking site--making it essentially a chat tool that just happens to stream a radio station.
Bundling the chat and streaming features does a couple of interesting things. 1) It makes signing up easier and puts the Z-Zone, Hot Spot, and WKQI's "The Unit" in front of even those listeners who might not have had any use for MySpace, Facebook or other social networking sites; 2) It pushes anybody who's using the chat tool to actually listen to the radio station. Podcasting, social networking and other non-traditional applications are often thought of radio as following its listeners to their other media choices. So it's nice to think that the social network sites might be used for something as old-fashioned as driving listening.
Reader Comments
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Our client Meebo is the Internet leader in these kind of chat services and radio should definitely look at them. They can integrate a robust branded chat room with any radio stream, along with provide multimedia chat room functionality for things like big station events. And the chat console can be sold to sponsors with an interactive ad skin, too.
Like much of web functionality, the solutions are there, you just need to find them.