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.

Earlier today, Norway-based Opera released a preview version of Opera Unite, which incorporates innovative new technology into the latest version of their eponymous web browser software. After playing around with it a bit today I've come away quite impressed--especially by its potential as a interface to media.

Opera Unite basically connects browsers to browsers without using client-server technology. In other words, if I want to access media on one computer from another, as long as they are both running Opera Unite they are connected without any intermediary or third-party server. While these sorts of connections have been possible before, they haven't been built into the browser, and haven't been very easy to use. The promise of Opera Unite is that, one day very soon, my parents could fire up their browser and look at new pictures of their grandson on my machine without needing IT support or using yet another login at yet another third-party file/photo sharing site.

For the purposes of this space, the real paradigm shift lies with Opera Unite's media technology, which lets me play music from my home computer on my Macbook Pro using only a web browser--and also lets my friends do the same. OK, that's not revolutionary--but that isn't the end of the vision. Imagine, as Opera's Lawrence Eng has, that I could play a song on my browser, and all my friends could hear it at the same time while browsing the web. Then imagine that Opera Unite Jukebox, as Eng paints it, allows me to put 10 songs into a "queue," and 9 of my friends to do the same. What we've just created is a true, participatory radio station--the ultimate manifestation of bringing your CDs over to a friend's house and having a listening party. Throw in the ability to vote for/rank songs and comment, and you have the radio station of tomorrow.

The trick here for broadcasters of today is not to "beat" this--you can't beat personalized radio--it's to join this. The best way to join is to be one of those 9 friends. As I've written in this space before, social networking connects people with other people, not stations or brands. If you are a music station, the time is now to brand or re-brand your air talent as credible arbiters of musical taste. The fleeting, short-term rewards of the PPM jukebox aside, you cannot out-jukebox the Internet. It's time to find the voices in your community that are knowledgeable and influential on music and give them a platform--regardless of their "jock skills"--and reclaim radio's place as an important platform for music discovery. These voices don't necessarily have to be local--my first "arbiter of taste" was Rock Over London's Graham Dene--but they have to be real people with the freedom to take chances and open the mic again.

Today, when I want to learn about new electronic music, I ask my friend Mike. When I want to learn about new Indie rock, I connect with my friend Chris MacDonald at IndieFeed. These two have earned their place on my Opera Unite Jukebox because I trust them to steer me to the good stuff. Music broadcasters need to stop worrying about the short-term vagaries of PPM and start finding the folks like Mike and Chris in their market who can speak authoritatively about a genre and make informed recommendations to an audience the likes of which no algorithm or database has yet to touch. For music broadcasting to survive, it can't continue to "install formats." Radio has to fundamentally rethink how it connects with listeners, and how it can serve as the intermediary between listeners and advertisers. People will never connect with jukeboxes.

Chris Brogan wrote a wonderful piece today entitled Audience or Community that I'd strongly recommend to our readers in the radio industry (and if you are trying to sort out best practices for using social media for external and internal communication, I highly recommend subscribing to Chris's blog and email newsletter.)

Broadcast radio is in the business of building audience, but "audience" just doesn't cut it online. As I recently presented at the Inbound Marketing Summit in San Francisco, more than one in three Americans (and a majority of Americans 12-34) have a profile on at least one social networking site. These stats, coupled with the enormous growth in 35-54 adoption of services like Facebook, are clear indicators that your "audience" is looking for something completely different online: community.

What's the difference? Brogan offers a simple, yet powerful distinction:

The only difference between an audience and a community is which direction the chairs are pointing.

Here is one simple, yet powerful idea: open your weekly music meeting to your listeners. You don't need anything fancy for this--no web integration, no fancy-shmancy chat application, no consultant required. You don't need to spend a dime. Just hold your music meeting live, each week, on Twitter: append a hashtag (like #WXYZMusic) to your tweets, and talk about the songs you are considering adding or dropping and why. Use a Twitter client like Tweetdeck or Twhirl (or simply go to search.twitter.com) to search for that hashtag, and start conversations with the listeners that reply. Be sure to promote your Twitter account and the weekly music meeting time on the air, and--here's the easy part--listen. If you get a body of passionate Tweeters fighting for a song or artist they believe in, reward that passion. If the song fits the format, why not give it a few spins? Don't forget to Tweet when you are playing it to let your listeners know that their feedback really counts.

Taking chances on songs and artists that your listeners on Twitter are passionate about will go a long way towards translating that passion to your online--and on air--efforts, and help to turn your audience into a community. You have nothing to lose here--either you are doing music research and can quickly verify whether or not that chance was rewarded, or you aren't doing music research--so who are you to argue with your listeners anyway? Sure, holding public music meetings on Twitter will be good for PR and give your station a temporary buzz, but that buzz will only be self-sustaining if you actually transform your station into a listening entity, and not just a broadcasting entity.

Spin those chairs around.

At the very least, the Twitter top 99 chart now appearing on We Are Hunted is diverse. It's a chart where not only do Blink-182's "What's My Age Again" and Black Eyed Peas' "Hey Mama" show up, many years after their last airplay, but so do Jeff Buckley's "Hallelujah" and Smiths' "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out," despite never having really been radio records.

What else? Eminem's "We Made You" at No. 1; lots of teen pop (both Miley and Hannah, Jonas Brothers, Taylor Swift), some classic Alternative and a lot of Classic Rock.

We Are Hunted's Nick Crocker tells Read Write Web that the chart is calculated by "sampling Twitter throughout the day looking for tweets that indicate someone is listening to or playing music and analyzing these tweets in our semantic engine." RWW takes that to includes tweets of Blip.fm and Last.fm activity.

There are a few obvious limitations here. One is what people are going to announce they listen to in public. If I had to Tweet something from my iPod right now, it would be "Head On" by Jesus & Mary Chain, but it took six songs before I found one I was willing to admit to in a public place. You also have to wonder if "What's My Age Again" is a potential bringback for radio or merely a title that makes for funny Tweets. And how many mentions did it take to put Simon & Garfunkel's "Cecelia" on the chart at No. 83? That could shake your confidence in the data daily.

There is also no age (or other demo) data of course. So the only evidence, anecdotal, you have that this represents the younger audience that radio's research often excludes, is in the eclecticism that you often hear attributed to younger listeners. But it's fascinating to see "Stairway to Heaven" and "Poker Face" living on the same chart somewhere.

...is not enough. Certainly, many broadcasters should already know this, but one of the slides we presented in yesterday's Infinite Dial presentation underlines this observation pretty clearly:

What this slide shows us is the percentage of Americans who own/use each listed device or platform who say that this device/platform has had a "big impact" on their lives (4 or 5 on a 1 to 5 scale, with 1 being "no impact.") The big, obvious takeaway here is the 47% of mobile phone owners who say that these devices have had a big impact on their lives--more than twice as high as the similar measurement for AM/FM radio users, iPod users or satellite radio users. It is worth focusing on the bottom of this chart, though, and there is a lesson here for terrestrial broadcasters streaming their content AND for pure-play internet broadcasters--make content that matters.

Today, flexibility, control, and personalization are just part of the cost of doing business. Merely having an engine that plays "one great song after another" does not erect a strategic moat around your business plan, nor does it protect you from being one bad song away from losing audience. True, there are some online contenders out there that have a strategic advantage by dint of a markedly superior interface, or a noticeably superior personalization or discovery engine, but most online radio of the music variety consists of stream after stream of jukeboxes--if one goes away tomorrow, there are a thousand to replace it.

Content producers online need to make media that matters in order to nudge this score up--and it is important to nudge this score up, because it will be in the recognition of online radio's importance to the lives of consumers that will lead to successful monetization strategies and effective brands. If there is anything that social media has shown us, it's that people connect with people. And if you are producing online radio of any kind, you cannot forget that. One of my favorite focus group questions to ask in a media project is the "epitaph question" -- if (station/brand) went away tomorrow, what would you miss most about it? It's personality and passion that provide the easy answers for respondents here--if they struggle to answer, then you won't be missed when you go.

I've had it on my to-do list for a while to write a primer on how radio stations can incorporate Facebook as a listener touchpoint, but now I don't need to--Jerry Del Colliano has written a great article on Facebook strategies for radio, and I highly recommend it.

The key with Facebook (and where I have seen some notable stations go horribly wrong) is that the core units of Facebook are people, not brands or stations. I connect with people, and I am interested in people. I am not interested in your station, per se, but in a personality that represents your station. This means having digitally literate managers, like Mark Edwards, from CBS in St. Louis) or passionate, connected air talent like Helen Little at WLTW in New York.

If you represent your station in ANY capacity, either in programming, marketing or on the air, it is no longer acceptable in 2009 to be digitally illiterate, or pass off online interactions to others. "I don't use the computer" or "the intern does that" will not help your personal brand (and in times like these, that and your job are your biggest assets!) The key is to just be yourself. You don't need to (nor should you) use Facebook as a 'promotional' tool. Just log on and be yourself. Find your passion, and communicate it effectively. Friends will follow.

Want to learn more? My friend Jim Tobin (who runs a social media agency down where I live in NC) wrote a great book on using social media called "Social Media is a Cocktail Party: Why You Already Know the Rules of Social Media Marketing. I highly recommend the book--in essence, if you know how to behave at a cocktail party, then you already know what to do on Facebook. Just be human, relatable and authentic. And don't drink too much.

Want to connect? Meet me on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn--I saved you a seat!

-Tom

When news breaks, today's net-savvy consumers instantly turn to their own trusted sources--traditional news outlets, blogs, message boards--and become their own 'editors,' discarding what is not credible (or doesn't fit their synthesized model) and incorporating the rest into what they deem is 'true.' In all cases, they require grist for the mill, and that grist has to be immediate. This is why Matt Drudge has so many page views--not so much from the sheer numbers of unique users (though he has those) but from those users constantly hitting 'refresh' to find out what is happening right now.

They do this, because Drudge has successfully created the expectation that he won't miss anything, so neither will you. Radio used to have that expectation, and for many stations still does--on the air. But what does your website look like after a few (hundred) browser refreshes? When something big is happening in your town, when does it make it onto your website? That night? Tomorrow? Later in the week?

You don't need a 'news department' to fulfull the immediacy expectation, and you shouldn't have to wait for the 'webmaster' either. What you should have is a website with a modern, user-friendly content management system, and judicious integration with social bookmarking, tagging and 'immediacy' tools like Twitter. You can do this--a WHOLE lot cheaper than you think--and you must do this. The web has a whole different set of expectations, and while more may be asked, much more is given. I'm glad to help.

This is pretty cool: Twisten.FM. If you have used Twitter for any length of time, you know that while the constant river of 'tweets' can be entertaining (and distracting), the real power of Twitter comes from unlocking its search capabilities (search.twitter.com). The ability to search for keywords and phrases important to you, your station and your listeners--and then to subscribe to those search results--is a fantastically powerful way to tap into the zeitgeist of the ever-growing community of Twitter users and to stay on top of trends that haven't even happened yet.

Twisten.FM leverages the power of Twitter search by honing search results only to what people are listening to. By aggregating results from some of the many services that post what you are listening to on Twitter, Twisten provides a real-time dashboard of what your friends and followers are listening to. The service allows you to play the songs being 'tweeted,' tag them as 'favorites' and even send them to someone else.

For now, Twisten is simply a very-well executed scrolling playlist of what your friends are listening to. However, Twisten was developed by Grooveshark, a social music community with a number of compelling features for sharing and listening to music, and I think Twisten's real future lies in its potential to create "friend radio" networks--just as Pandora or Slacker allow you to create custom stations by adding your favorite artists, I can see a day when Twisten allows users to create streaming radio stations by adding their favorite Twitterers--the folks on Twitter who have earned their place with a given tribe as an arbiter of musical taste--and creating a little more space between those little white earbuds for shared experience.

Are you on Twitter yet? You should be! Follow me at webby2001, and tell us what you are listening to. I'll be listening, and so will others...

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.

If you are in the business of New Media, you really should be at the New Media Expo next week in Las Vegas. This event has really grown into a fantastic conference (this is its first year in Vegas) and I will be speaking on the topic of the efficacy of podcast advertising--who is listening, who is buying, and what podcast content creators can do to get more of both. My talk is at the end of the day on Friday, of course, so once again my big bucket o' data will be the last barrier to cocktail progress for most of the attendees. With that in mind, I'll be concise!

Look me up there, or pop me a note on Twitter if you'd like to meet. With speakers ranging from Gary Vaynerchuk of the enormously popular Wine Library TV to the marketing VP behind Blendtec's "Will It Blend" (which prompted me to buy one!) it will be a fantastic conference with loads of ideas, networking and maybe a little of that Edison statistical magic at the craps table.

I'll also be speaking in September on the topic of podcasting at the NAB Radio show. I get lots of questions from broadcasters about podcasting, specifically who is making it work and how they are getting paid. Between now and then I'll be interviewing some of the industry leaders here in this space so you can read and see for yourself the power of downloadable media and how you can make it work for your station. More soon!

-Tom

When wireless broadband finally brings The Infinite Dial to my car, the stations that get a button will be a lot different. I'll have a regular choice for obscure classic rock (Suburban Phoenix's KCDX), my Country station will be KEEY (K102) Minneapolis, and my replacement for New York's Jack-FM will be one of the original ones from Canada (although I still have to decide between Vancouver and Calgary).

But my first button for Top 40 will be still be my local Top 40, WHTZ (Z100). Covering the radio business from New York--a market that doesn't always have the best-in-category of any given genre--has been frustrating over the years. But I've generally been happy with Z100 over the last decade. Z100 emerged as the market leader in New York's last diary Arbitron ratings yesterday. And they deserved to.

Here are some of the things that Z100 does right:

* Even in market No. 1, where they would certainly be entitled to be conservative, they find their own hit records. And while it doesn't happen as often as some industry folks might wish, they will occasionally play songs that are not on any other reporting Top 40 station.

* They pay a lot of attention to pop culture. Z100 is usually the first stop (and always among the first stops) for Radio Disney artists on their way to the mainstream, from Hilary Duff to Vanessa Hudgens to the Jonas Brothers to Miley Cyrus, whose "See You Again" is in rotation only at Z100 and XM-20.

* It makes good use of library material. During its late '90s success, Z100 was a Top 40 station that did several music tests a year. It reportedly has returned to library testing recently and has been filtering in a lot of unusual titles. And somehow it gets away with "Iris" by the Goo Goo Dolls and "Ayo Technology" by 50 Cent on the same radio station.

* In fact, Z100 uses both current and library testing the way most of us would like to see them used--to intelligently take more shots on music, not fewer.

* They do a good job of associating themselves with new platforms (a lot of the on-air real-estate now is going to the station's social networking site, the Z-Zone).

* Z100 makes good use of benchmarking during the day. There are as many regular features between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. (the hours when I tend to hear the station most) as most morning shows.

* They have made better use than most of Clear Channel's new presentational austerity without sounding sterilized by it. (It usually feels like some thought went into the cold segue between the first and second record of the hour, for instance.)

Here is a great example of 'leaving deeper footprints,' a phrase I first heard from Scott Shannon 15 years ago. If you have never ordered shoes from Zappos, you are missing out on the best customer service on the web, and this blog post from a Zappos customer epitomizes why.

Leaving deeper footprints is something great stations do on a regular basis. One of the best places to find them in Country radio is on Jaye Albright's blog--she makes a regular point of celebrating the great things that Country radio stations do everyday for their communities. What are some of your favorite radio examples? Post them here--I bet this thread could crash our servers, and I hope it does.

Radiohead's new album comes out next week, and it won't be in stores. It might be on radio, but it needn't be, really. They are giving the whole thing away as 'donationware' on their web site--pay whatever you think its worth. If you want it for free--done.

The best band in the world just hit three birds with one stone:

* I don't need to go into detail on what this means to the labels.

* It challenges iTunes and their monolithic pricing model, which the labels have long railed against to little effect. This move, combined with the NBC situation, may provide enough disruption to allow other software vendors with more flexible pricing models to cut into iTunes.

* It also affects the radio business. We have already seen in at least one recent study that radio now finishes second to the Internet as the place to discover new music (and in the recent studies where this is not the case with the total, it is for persons under 30.) With no 'scarcity' in the Radiohead model, there will be no need to go to radio to hear it first--or hear it at all.

Most significantly, on Oct 10th, I have no doubt that Radiohead's web site will be the most visited music site on earth. You can't fight Radiohead (or the Master Chief). The process of music discovery is now a social mechanism--where the solitary listener used to rely on radio's "tastemakers," they now rely on like-minded individuals (either known or unknown), with these interactions facilitated by the Internet. The "Event" is also more important: just as Prince's recent giveaway of his CD in London spurred a series of sold-out concert dates (where the purple one presumably made back the money from his "loss leader") so too will the upcoming Radiohead tour be one of the biggest "events" of the coming year. Music is discovered and now increasingly transacted at 'events,' whether they are online or out-of-home or both. When I am at a party being "curated" by a DJ, and can get the song he just played beamed to my MP3 player or phone, that is the new model of music discovery.

While Apple will be damaged by this disruption to the iTunes Music Store model, they also know the importance of the "social", as evidenced by their deal with the biggest music retailer on earth, Starbucks. The new wifi functionality of the iPhone and Touch iPod will make Starbucks the curator and transactional facilitator of new music (whether it really is 'new' or just 'new to you.') and Apple will continue to get a piece of that.

And what does all of this mean to you? Here are three things you can do today:

* Build social networking into your web properties--but social networking that makes sense, not just a replica of Facebook. Social Networking around music already lives elsewhere for 12-24, but in formats like Country and Smooth Jazz, where new music is incredibly important for older adults, opportunities abound. Even in formats like Classic Rock, there are loads of opportunities to socialize around the best opening riffs, or the 10 All-Time Worst Song Lyrics.

* Find the arbiters of music taste online--and hire them. Let them talk a little, even. Let them ADD VALUE to your product.

* Become the podcast home for local, unsigned bands. Give them studio space and production facilities and send their fans to you to download podcasts of their shows, demos and singles.

Radio at the local level has little room in its budget to drive wholesale change until the group heads drastically change the model from the top down. But there is no need to wait when all of the things I just listed can be done for practically nothing today. You may not have the money to bring your website completely to 2007 standards today, but wikis are free and half-built by your listeners anyway, so why not build one this week? Or call our friends at Libsyn and start getting your podcasts online today, like WMMR's Preston and Steve have been doing for ages.

No matter what is happening to your budgets, remember that the tools to compete are all out there, and are generally either free or pretty darn close. I'm happy to pitch in, or use your own web staff. In either case, there is no need to wait, and no time like today.