The Infinite Dial

I was very pleased to see the inclusion of a wiki in Bonneville's new website for The Sound in Los Angeles. To find it, roll over "Be It" in the menu, and select Sound Wiki (or heck, just click here). The wiki runs on the MediaWiki platform, which is the same engine behind Wikipedia, so there is plenty of power under the hood. I love the idea of having a wiki on a radio station website, but before you commit to throwing one up on yours, you need to figure out what kinds of content your listeners will be motivated to create, and whether or not your listeners will perceive your wiki as the most logical place to do that.

If you are asking your listeners to build profiles and engage in the same sorts of social networking behaviors that they are already participating in on Facebook or MySpace--good luck. Those sites do this better than your station possibly can. But if you are looking to build listener-created content based upon your music or your local community, then you have a play. The key is to do it in a way that does not force listeners to replicate an existing behavior, but plays upon everyone's natural urge to tell stories.

Let's examine this in the context of The Sound. Most of the pages in their wiki are about the artists that are played on the station. However, the station has taken the liberty of "pre-populating" the artist wiki pages with content from Wikipedia. Let's set aside the appropriateness of simply recopying Wikipedia content aside for a moment. What a fully-fleshed out page of content like this says to the reader/listener is this: "read me." The art, heart and soul of a wiki, however, is a page that says "write me." "Write Me" is engaging and asks for a commitment from your audience that is instantly rewarded. Changing those pages and telling their stories is the "pro quo" they get for the "quid" of signing up to your station database to gain the privilege of making those edits.

In the case of a fully-formed page about David Bowie, the average listener is going to see this page and be intimidated by it--what more could they possibly add? The "super-fan" might be motivated to comment, but are just as likely to do so on Wikipedia, where these sorts of artist biography pages belong, and to write you nasty letters for ripping Wikipedia off in the first place. Encouraging content contribution on a wiki is as much about structure as it is subject matter. In the case of the former, the key is to provide enough boilerplate content in the form of a template to encourage your audience to easily change it (no one likes to tackle a blank page) but not so much as to be a deterrent to contribution.

Subject matter, however, is even more important. Your station cannot possibly "own" David Bowie on the Internet--you probably don't even "own" him in your market, in the grand scheme of things. The entries on Los Angeles music venues are perhaps more promising, but the average listener doesn't know or care about the history of its construction. They do, however, have stories to tell--seeing Black Sabbath for the first time, getting laid in the parking lot, getting arrested at the Night Ranger show (presumably for attending it), etc. Sharing those stories is a logical purpose for a radio station wiki, and a nobler cause than simply as repository for venue history. You don't need to replicate Wikipedia (or even remotely resemble it). Start modestly, as an online cork board for sticky notes about great concerts your listeners have seen or other truly personal remembrances of the various venues in your market. Eventually, your listeners will engage with you, with each other, and even with some well chosen, carefully placed sponsors that make sense and are relevant to the page or topic.

Having said that, a big BRAVO to Bonneville for designing a website that doesn't look like Yahoo, circa 1999. Good, clean designs are not "decorations," they are conduits to your content.