The Infinite Dial

Steve Rubel posted some handy rules for corporate blogging recently at Wired's How To Wiki that are worth expanding on here for your purposes. I'd love to see more radio stations blogging--and not just the morning show, either. Opening the curtain a bit more into your music meetings, for example, would be a great way for the programming team to build trust and invite listeners into what is, to their perspective, a black box process. In the world of blogging, your readers don't trust your voice unless they see it as truly authentic, and not marketing speak. So when you don't add that record that you struggled with despite the phones lighting up, you might as well join the conversation in a transparent, human manner--because the conversation is happening anyway, with or without you. Playing off of Rubel's helpful advice, here are my five tips for a music department blog:

1. Be Passionate. We talk a lot at conventions about "product." Never let that word within 100 yards of your music blog! When you hear a great record and start playing the crap out of it, let your listeners know that you think it is a F(#*&king great record! Passion=Respect--for the music, and for your listeners.

2. Stay Focused. One of the reasons why some blogs fail (and fail to attract an audience) is that they roam all over the place, and can't be counted on to illuminate any specific topic. If your station is the home for Today's Best Music, make Today's Best Music the LASER focus of your blog.

3. Build your blog with a solid blogging platform, integrating something like Movable Type (as we do) or Wordpress into your site. I see too many radio station blogs that are just one long scrolling page, without separate pages for each entry and easily searchable archives. Listeners don't like scrolling, but even worse, search engines don't like pages that are about 1,000 different things, like some of the vertically-infinite "blogs" I have seen some morning shows keep. Even if you have a page that aggregates a bunch of recent topics on one landing page, have a separate page for each post, with proper semantic markup, a great headline and clean code. The platforms I mentioned do this automatically.

4. Blog Internally First. Either use a password-protected hosted account at TypePad or have your IT staff install something behind your firewall. Get in the habit first to be sure that your team can be committed and not commit the unpardonable sin of "blogfading."

5. Moderate comments, but accept criticism. Do take comments, and do post everything short of abusive language or ad hominem attacks on staffers or other readers. Again, transparency is key--explain your positions, invite (and learn from) criticism, and be out in front--your blog will be a magnet to both active and passive participants alike.

Got any great radio blogs to tell me about? Post them in the comments here!