The Infinite Dial

As consolidated radio runs more and more from remote hard drives, it's worth noting that today's social web is running in exactly the opposite direction. Take Twitter, for instance. If you have a positive or negative experience on Southwest Air, let @southwestair know on Twitter. You will get a response, and that response will be human. In fact, @southwest air is a real, bona-fide person with a vibrant personality whose "job" is not to endlessly tweet ads for Southwest, but to continue providing that Southwest Luv to their passengers online and off.

Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang noted today that humans don't scale. If you read Owyang's blog, or follow his prodigious output on Twitter, you might wonder how he keeps up with it. The answer, according to Owyang himself, is that he doesn't--"the wheels are falling off!" I don't think they've fallen off for Owyang yet, but his message is clear. Keeping up with social media is work, just like maintaining your network of personal and business relationships is work. Social media doesn't 'automate' interaction. Instead, it provides tools to help you maintain your relationships and make your interactions richer, but it doesn't scale. It isn't supposed to, really, if you keep to the spirit of social media.

Everyone has their own Dunbar's Number, and social media may help you to augment that, but make no mistake--you can't just sign up for Twitter and blast out promotional messages all day long and call that "social networking." People connect with people, and people want to know there is a real person behind that avatar.

How this ties into radio should be obvious. If your programming is automated and piped in from servers unknown, don't expect to do the same with your social media outreach. Won't work. If you can't put a thinking, feeling, real human being behind your social media efforts, don't bother--you'll get found out pretty quickly. Your social media presence can be an outstanding conduit of local information, music information, viral videos, etc.--but it must be a two-way conduit, or your efforts will absolutely fail. I wish I could tell you there was a magic social networking button, but there isn't. You, your air talent, your marketing team and even your sales team have to work, listen and learn. You can't automate that.