The Infinite Dial

Last week I wrote about what to listen for on the social web and how to use social media monitoring to go beyond brand mentions for your station and gain deeper insights into your product and how it is perceived. If you have some method for listening to the social web, you might have run into another sort of problem--no one is talking about you.

Don't panic. Certainly, conversational velocity is an important social media metric--the more people are talking about your station online, the more your station matters online. You can't, however, assume that people will just start talking about your station. First, your station has to matter, somehow, to a body of listeners. That in itself is no easy feat. But let's assume your station does, indeed, matter. The next step is to ask for the order.

In previous years, the impulse was to try and "host" these conversations--to drive people to your website and comment on your message board or blog posts. The web is a bit more complicated--and wonderful--today. Those conversations are distributed, atomized and spread across the social web--there is no "hub and spoke," there are only spokes. You can't change this behavior, but you can change your strategy.

The advent of more robust, capable social media listening tools means that you can monitor and respond to these conversations everywhere and anywhere, so you should encourage them everywhere and anywhere. Reward the behavior! The next time you run your "Top 9 @ 9," ask your listeners to review the songs or rate the whole show on their site, on your site, or wherever they share content--your job is to find them, not make them come to you. Tell them you are listening, and reward these conversations through contests, prizes or other means of recognizing and celebrating these online discussions. Pick some conversations at random--positive or negative--and surprise your listeners by rewarding their passion. Encouraging online discussions about your brand (again, negative or positive) and responding to them is the new "tell a friend" mechanic. The great thing is, encouraging and rewarding these conversations scales far greater than asking a listener to "tell a friend." Inspire their passion, and they'll literally tell everybody.

Still, you'll need to be brave--you may not like some of what you hear. But having passionate, heated conversations about what your station needs to do to improve is a gazillion times better than deafening silence.