5 Steps To Make Your New Media Strategy Work

In his book “Now Is Gone,” Buzz Bin blogger Geoff Livingston outlines five steps that your station must embrace to ensure that your new media/social media initiative will work.

Step 1: Give up control of that message
Step 2: Participate with your community
Step 3: Is your community social media savvy?
Step 4: Committing the resources
Step 5: Understanding transparency and ethics

If you can check off these five benchmarks, then it is likely that the right new media strategy will be highly successful.

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How To Make Your Station Stand Out

Want to get listeners talking about you? Innovative marketing ideas like this will help your station stand out...

[from Chris Anderson's Long Tail blog]

10 Things You Need to Know About Consumers (Your Listeners)

Key consumer insights from MediaPost’s Susan Kuchinskas. Here are ten things you need to know about your listeners:

1. They're mouthy.The polite way to say it is "unmediated discourse." It means that online, anyone can and will call you a dog. They also may write you love letters. Those who are passionate about your company will make it their mission to spread the word. So, thrill them.

2. They'd rather listen to each other than to you. When it comes to buying, the opinions of their peers carry enormous weight. According to Deloitte's Consumer Products group, 62 percent read online reviews written by their peers, and of those who do, more than eight in 10 said they were directly influenced by these reviews.

3. They're moving targets - literally. There are now 243 million mobile phone users in the United States, sending nearly 1 billion text messages a day. They're increasingly watching video and listening to music via their phones. These little machines are their best friends - and they could be yours, too.

4. They're snackers, constantly scarfing down tiny chunks of media. They scan the headlines in their RSS reader, tap into video shorts at work, speed-read online news, watch TV shows in fragments on the phone as they navigate the day. Content wolfed down this fast needs to be easily digestible.

5. They need to be free. There's so much free media online, it's tough to get someone to register for your walled garden. Nor do they want to pay for content, with the exception of highly desirable movies and music. As The New York Times discovered, ads can support content better than subscription fees.

6. They love gadgets, even the digital kind. Widgets - those mini-apps that display content on a Web site, blog or desktop screen - are the fastest-growing online application, reaching 40.3 percent of U.S. Internet users, according to comScore. Google's Open Social initiative could quickly double that. Marketers will pile on.

7. They've gotten over the whole privacy thing. After you've posted photos of your water birth right alongside your water bong and videos of drunken shenanigans next to the story of your appendectomy on your blog, do you really care that Google is keeping track of your search queries?

8. They've got game.Over 40 percent of U.S. households have a video game console system, while over 120 million people play video or computer games, according to DFCIntelligence. Increasingly, those games contain product placements and ads.

9. They're video maniacs. Every age group is tuning in online, according to advertising.com, with an equal breakdown between men and women. The most-watched content is not music or movie trailers, surprisingly, but news (though this is tricky because Perez Hilton counts as news). While online viewers would rather not have ads at all, they'd rather watch them than pay for content.

10. They still haven't found what they're looking for. An iProspect survey found that 57 percent of consumers agree with "search is becoming more important to me." At the same time, offline media is increasingly driving their searches, so cross-media integration is more key than ever.

I.G.N.I.T.E Sales Tip:15 Ways To Be A Better Seller

To be a better and more successful seller:

1. You must convey excitement about what you do.
2. You must know when to be quiet.
3. You must Keep It Simple, Stupid (KISS).
4. You must have an open mind at each step of the sales process. (No perconceptions!)
5. You must have a defensive sales strategy and anticipate what could go wrong. (Think one step ahead.)
6. You must temper zeal with pragmatism.
7. You must never minimize the role of the administrative staff at the target company, particularly executive assistants.
8. You must avoid keeping the wrong prospect in play for too long. In other words, you must know your own time cycle, and you must learn when to recognize that you are spending too much time, energy, and attention on an opportunity that is not moving forward during that average selling cycle. There is an average period of time that it takes a current customer to move from the “initial discussions” phase to a decision to do more work with you. Your job is to find out what that average period of time is—and honor it. If you consistently invest significantly longer periods of time than that in your selling, there’s a problem, and you need to take a close look at your time choices.
9. You must learn to develop a realistic sense of what the target company wants to do with you. (Don’t overvalue!)
10. You must maintain control of the meeting and the sales process as a whole.
11. You must monitor how much time you spend developing outlines and proposals.
12. You must learn to charge what you’re worth. (Don’t undervalue yourself; don’t sell yourself short when determining the value you bring to the organization.)
13. You must remember that each relationship you build will stay with you over the long term.
14. You must think positively—and think big!
15. You must be an effective interviewer.

[from Stephan Schiffman’s “Sales Essentials”]

Listener Experience Resolutions

Bruce Tempkin of Forrester and the Customer Experience Matters blog offers ten "Customer Experience Resolutions" for 2008. To put a radio spin on the resolutions, I've subsituted the word "listener" for "customer" to envolve them into "Listener Experience Resolutions" for your station/cluster.

1. We shall focus more on our listeners and less on ourselves
2. We shall get to know more about what our listeners really need AND want
3. We shall formalize a voice-of-the-listener program
4. We shall incorporate personas in our experience design processess
5. We shall clearly define our brand in terms of promises to listeners
6. We shall judge every interaction on how well it fulfills our brand promises
7. We shall engage front-line employees (from air personalities to interns) in improving listener experiences
8. We shall get the executive (management) team to collectively own the listener experience
9. We shall establish a multi-year journey towards listener-centric DNA
10. We shall give listener experience the attention that it deserves

The bottomline: Put listener experience (on-air, online and in-person) on the top of your 2008 agenda!

Drake’s Take On Radio

As 2007 drew to a close, R&R Publisher Erica Farber concluded her Publisher’s Profile series for the year with an insightful interview with legendary programmer and consultant Bill Drake.

Here’s Drake’s take on…

The State of RADIO:

Competition is such that today people are excited about a 3 share. There are so many wasted signals. Our policy was, we didn’t go into a market without the intent of being No. 1, period, boom! No niche this or that. And we made it 90% of the time.

What We Can Learn From Yesterday’s Successes:

Whoever puts the best on the radio wins. Obviously today you’ve got iPods, satellite and all kinds of goodies. There are some good programmers, but some lousy-sounding stations—and some of them have incredible signals. There doesn’t seem to be that fever anymore. I know when we were doing it we were like a brotherhood. We went in to win and did whatever it took. We were totally, absolutely dedicated. It doesn’t come across on many radio stations now. A lot of people just don’t know what they’re doing. Of course, that’s always been true.

Advice for Broadcasters:

I’d sure like to see something a little more innovative and maybe a different concept. Or maybe somebody doing basics well. There’s a lot that can be done.

Wishing You A Happy, Healthy & Prosperous 2008!

You can be great in 2008! Here's an inspiring quote to kick off the new year.

"Listen, here's what I think. I think we can't go around measuring our goodness by what we don't do. By what we deny ourselves. What we resist, and who we exclude. I think we've got to measure goodness by what we embrace, what we create, and who we include."

From the movie - Chocolat

Why Promotions Fail

There are a myriad of reasons promotions can fail. Here are just six of them.

1. The promotion doesn’t fit the station
2. The promotion doesn’t have concrete goals
3. The listener doesn’t hear enough about it
4. The listener doesn’t understand it
5. The listener isn’t excited about it
6. The listener has to work too hard to be a part of it

With proper planning and excellent execution, you can avoid these and other promotional pitfalls.

The Ten Best Markets For Radio Listeners

What are the ten best markets for radio listeners? Larry, Sean and the entire team at Edison Media Research put their heads together and came up with their list of leading cities. Let’s see if you agree.

1 - Chicago: A huge, eclectic variety and still the best morning-show slate anywhere;
2 - Philadelphia: It's made a surprise recent comeback in the "best Rock radio market" sweepstakes, but we're proud to have all of its radio in our backyard, including at least two "best-in-class" stations;
3 - San Francisco: Only Boston rivals it as a News and Talk market. There's local character and a lot of choice, particularly when you add in the South Bay and Santa Rosa;
4 - Miami/Fort Lauderdale: Like radio nowhere else;
5 - New Orleans: Like radio nowhere else, an even more remarkable achievement post-Katrina;
6 - Los Angeles: A lot of undeniable stations and talent. Not quite the bench strength you would want in a market with so much radio;
7 - Washington, D.C.: Pushed into contention by the fiercest Urban competition anywhere, a monster News outlet on FM, and some surprising market entrants in recent years;
8 - Austin, Texas: Radio that matches the city's own eclecticism and appeal;
9 - Salt Lake City: Long the most crowded medium-market: frustrating perhaps for programmers and owners, but great for listeners;
10 - Louisville: A longtime great radio market where the past is still present ... in a good way.

Read more here.

Brand Building And Marketing As Investments

From the Brand Insider:

(1) Brand building is an investment that results in a significant leverageable asset.
(2) Other shorter-term marketing actions exist for the sole purpose of increasing sales.
(3) You can measure the asset value of brands.
(4) You can also measure the non-financial aspects of brands that drive positive financial consequences in the long term – awareness, relevant differentiation, loyalty, etc.
(5) You can and should measure ROI for other shorter-term marketing programs.
(6) Brands are a primary source of value creation for organizations.
(7) While some business people (typically finance and operations types) may view marketing as an expense without significant corresponding benefits, this is untrue. Marketing is one of the most important investments a company can make.

Implication: Don't look first to marketing (and employee training, for that matter) when expenses need to be trimmed to achieve short-term goals. This will only hamper value creation [ratings] and revenue growth in the long term. Read more

I.G.N.I.T.E Sales Tip: 10 Commandments for Using PowerPoint

From Nick Souter’s Persuasive Presentations:

Here are the ten commandments for using PowerPoint. Write them in stone.

1. Only one idea on each page.
2. Give each page a title.
3. Abbreviate.
4. Be ruthlessly relevant.
5. Use full sentences for quotes and statements.
6. Build, don’t reveal.
7. Aesthetic consistency.
8. Use icons and images.
9. Avoid dynamic typography.
10. Have a Plan B.

I.G.N.I.T.E. Sales Tip: 4 Essential Tips For Developing Excellent Client Relationships

What does it take to deepen and build client relationships? Scott Weibrod at Experience Matters offers four simple yet often overlooked ideas. They are:

1. Get out of your office (and into theirs)
2. Make yourself available
3. Go deep, go really deep (by building long-term relationships and learning the language of your client’s world)
4. Entertain them (by creating relationship building opportunities and environments outside of the office)