Jobs By Twitter

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Alan Geere who heads up Editorial at Northcliffe South has just put out an interesting job ad.

Well, the job’s not particularly interesting, it’s a call for reporters on his titles. The way he’s asked for it though is. He only wants replies through Twitter as an @message.

He says:

I’m fed up wading through turgid ‘letters of application’ and monstrous CVs outlining an early career in retail handling and a flirtation with the upper slopes of the Andes.

I want reporters who can find stories that no-one else has got and write them quickly and accurately.

As someone who’s had to wade through a lot of applications recently I definitely agree that it’s a soul-destroying experience and you’re just crying out for someone to be different.

There are lots of people being sniffy about his idea, unfairly I believe. The purpose of a covering letter/CV is to get an interview. No one gets hired directly from their written application. So why not use a 140 characters method?

You can, of course, read the applications through Twitter Search.

p.s If you’re after radio jobs, I do a free email, details on the right.

Re-Orgs Are Good

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Usually my blog posts come from one central idea – often a statement, something like “radio uses Twitter wrong”. I then sit down and try and back it up with some evidence or just have a bit of a rant. For example, often the RAJAR ones start with a belief, that I quickly research, and then find out is completely wrong. They’re usually the RAJAR posts where I say “nothing much has happened”. The other posts that I don’t tend to write are the ones I think will get me into too much trouble – I’ve got to eat after all. Then there’s ones that will just get a load of grief for me ‘missing the point’. I’m sure this will be one of those.

At the moment there’s lots of talk about re-organisation in the radio business. Whether that’s the Myers report on how the pop networks should be structured, the impact of DQF or the way Global Radio’s changed how they deliver localness.

Normally the re-organisation never goes down well with staff, the notion of why it’s doing it is challenged and the end result questioned. ‘Change’ is often seen to be part of “all that management bollocks”.

Which is a shame. Because change is an opportunity. For everyone.

If you start anything new, you think about how to achieve a goal, design a plan and then you execute it. It then might go right or it may go wrong. Whilst you’re enacting it you alter things – it’s something that’s new and you need to be able to react.

An athlete, after reaching this point, usually makes continuous changes to refine their processes to make things more efficient to generate a better result. Quite often it’s about simplification – taking unnecessary things away and focusing on the goal.

Organisations often go in the other direction. After you’ve deployed a new way of doing things, the positions get fixed. Over time things evolve but the change usually is additive and comes when you need to react to something. Someone adds additional responsibilities to their job or you make some alterations to deal with new competition. It’s rare that we spend our time refining and getting better at achieving that first objectives.

Small companies do re-organisations all the time, but they’re much less noticeable. When there’s four of you working in an office, you have much greater visibility on your business. The result is roles and responsibilities shift to meet the company’s changing demands. If they don’t then it’s likely the business will disappear. There’s rarely a need to sit down and explain the bigger picture as you all live it.

Large-scale reorganisations are often about meeting a new (or adjusting an old) objective and then working out the best structure to deliver it. Sometimes, of course, that is about money. We have to do x and we only have y.

For me though, an opportunity to reset an organisation to be focused on the world today and building for today’s future is something that should be grasped with both hands. Are we doing the best for our customers? Is the system we run at the moment the best one? What do we already know we should change?

Of course there is a human cost to any change and I’ve seen, first hand, when that’s been handled in a good way and a bad way. Similarly as well as companies handling it well and less well, the same can be said of team members as well. None of us have an unalienable right to do the same jobs in the same way forever.

In radio I think we need to be focused on our consumers and customers. For the BBC they’re the same thing, for commercial radio it’s slightly different. But, we have to look after those customers/consumers in the best way we can within the budget we’re given.

Now you can argue that the commercial organisations pay their Directors too much, or want to deliver profit margins that are too high and at the BBC you can talk about the horrific waste there is ‘in other departments’, but they’re both things out of your control. You can only look at doing the best job for the money you have.

Structure is a means to and end. The end being delivering value for audiences. We are often merely caretakers of organisations that our listeners love. Our role isn’t to preserve the organisation it’s to make sure we do our best to continue to deliver the things that they love.

In an ideal world, we would all be like the athlete. Making iterative changes to do a better job at reaching our goal. In the absence of that, re-formulating what we do every so often is no bad thing.

Least Worst Options

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I was reading Mark Ramsay’s piece about Pandora. If you don’t know, Pandora is a (very popular) streaming radio service in the US. It’s something we don’t really have in the UK. I imagine that’s because of a combination of different things – music rights, early Spotify deployment and a strong existing radio product.

One of the Pandora hot topics is whether it’ll start hitting existing radio operators revenue and audience. It’s getting some audience traction and better yields on advertising – ie a thousand Pandora listeners generates more revenue than a thousand analogue radio listeners.

Personally, I think it’s getting these revenues because it’s ‘hot’ and there’s limited inventory. Longer term the thing that will make it truly successful is the ability to target really narrow demographic types. If you want a 21 year old in New York or a 50 year old in Santa Monica you’ll be able to drop your add into the platform and it will serve it to the right people. I imagine, at the moment, there isn’t enough demand (or understanding) from the ad agencies to be able to develop that much creative to really take advantage of it. However, should agencies want to go down that route, Pandora will be in a great position.

It’s something that Absolute Radio talked about with their new streaming options. They’re asking users to register so they can do similar things.

Quite often the discussion about platforms and new services is whether they’ll ‘kill off’ older ones – the analogue radio killer, the iphone killer, etc. I think often it’s the wrong kind of question though. Just because something new comes along, doesn’t mean what’s gone before it vanishes. If that was so, radio – around 100 years – would be long gone.

What actually gets replaced are things that serve consumers better than what went before. Often they’re things that highlight products or services that we’ve ‘put up with’ or, have up to now, been the ‘least worst option’.

The iPhone was revolutionary because it showed up old feature phones or existing smart phones to be a bit rubbish. Its introduction necessitated the entire industry to revise its mobile strategy and now all phones really take as their baseline iPhone-popularized features – touch, apps etc.

Often these changes take companies by surprise, when really it’s just a combination of outside innovation and inside complacency.

I sometimes worry about complacency and UK radio.

In the analogue world we have some excellent stations, some average stations and some poor stations. However, providing they are solvent businesses, market forces do not have the same impact as in other sectors.

This is primarily because analogue radio has massive barriers to entry for new entrants. A combination of lack of frequency availability and the heritage position of many stations means that new entrants rarely get a look in. So my question for existing stations – are they doing okay because they’re good, or because there’s no one else able to compete with them?

Generally, competitive radio markets have better radio stations. When you really have to compete for audience and revenue two things happen – you work harder at being good and you sort out your positioning. You have a better focus because you need to have a better focus. This competition means there’s less chance that people listen to you because you’re the least worst option.

The world is definitely changing and it’s digital availability that’s caused many sectors to change and quite happily dispose of their heriatge operators. Whether it’s job ads or buying music, consumers jumped when there was a better way to do something and they could junk their existing least worst option.

I don’t know whether it will be Pandora-type services that gives radio an iTunes vs CDs moment. What I do know is that analogue radio’s barriers to entry are living on borrowed time. A mandated digital switch-over or not, the concept for today’s consumers of a limited FM dial being the basis of their radio choice is laughable.

As I talked about in a previous post, listeners are already stopping being analogue pure-play consumers. DAB, DTV and Online is a growing part of their consumption habits. It is now much easiser for them to dispense of their least-worst option and pick something that better suits.

If I was an existing analogue operator I would be worried that, to quote someone else, I was standing on a burning platform. How do I develop my business that harnesses the power of consumer change – hello, Autotrader – or crumbles underneath it – hello, Borders or HMV.

State of Radio – Q2/11

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I’m a big believer in RAJAR. It’s a big survey that talks to  lots of people. When i’ve commissioned my own research, using a very different methodology the numbers are comparable. Also, i’m a big believer in trend being the best way to look at numbers. Of course, there may be oddities in any survey, but your trend line is the best indicator for how you’re doing.

This is why i’m not that bothered about the ups and down of the majority of well-established radio stations. There needs to have been a major change at a station or in a market before that’s interesting.

On the big changes front, for many of the new Capital stations this is the first book that’s all Capital, having jetisoned any residual numbers from their previous incarnations. If you look at the network as a whole it’s only a marginal change of hours up 1% and reach down 1%. Other than some hours declines, for the majority of the new Capital’s its been just about business as usual. Two though, stand out – South Wales and Birmingham.

South Wales has seen its reach drop 15% and its hours 20%. That’s quite a drop for the old Red Dragon and looking at (perhaps an unrepresentative quarter) could suggest that losing its Welsh position maybe hurting it. At the other end of the spectrum, Capital Birmingham has added 20% to its hours. Is this the benefit of ditching the legacy of being an urban station and being reborn as a pop one? Only time will tell.

The other big change – BBC 7 to 4Extra – has generated another 400k listeners to that service. Why? Cross-promotion and being part of a wider brand family. It’s now the UK’s biggest digital station.

I also think Jack in Bristol deserves significant kudos for dumping an under-performing format and replacing it with one that’s cut through. It’s been another record RAJAR result and it looks like there’s still some room for even more growth.

Big changes (like the Original to Jack flip) produce behavioural shifts, but then gradual change can have the same effect too.

Gradual change isn’t as fun or exciting though. The transition from the analogue to digital world for the radio industry is something that’s certainly taking its time. Our listeners have had thirty years of analogue commercial and BBC radio available in every device under the sun – kitchen radios, hi-fi’s, portables, car sets – and in every place they go – home, car, work or on the move. The ubiquity of radio in form and location means that 90% of the population use it and  they consume an eye (ear?) watering 24 hours a week of it. It’s the kind of media consumption that any other product or platform would kill for.

At the same time we’re offering listeners digital radio options too. Though, to be honest we’re making it quite difficult for them. For content we’ve gone from ubiquity – every station (in my area) available on every type of analogue radio – to one where we  put different stations on different platforms (just compare the line-ups on DAB and DTV), for cost we’ve gone from ‘free at the point of use’ to charging people based on usage for some devices (mobile data), for devices we’ve gone from every form factor being available cheaply (or often free) to one where you pay a premium and sometimes it’s hard to install (like in-car DAB).

We’ve also done all of this whilst continuing to provide radio that they’re used to, is still free and works on every device.

Looking at it, it’s amazing that anyone’s decided to listen to radio on DAB, Digital Television or the Internet.

But they have. They’ve decided that they want something more than what’s provided on analogue – be it choice, coverage, quality, ease of use. Now they haven’t decided to opt-out of analogue (even the most ferverent digi-phile still uses analogue in someway) but they’ve added a chunk of digital ‘to fix’ their radio listening.

Sometimes people who work at (predominantly) analogue radio stations dismiss the need for digital – they talk about it not affecting them – that their digital listening is small and not growing. They often forget that analogue and digital needn’t be mutually exclusive.

Our listeners are more than comfortable being multi-platform – listening to some stations on analogue devices and some others on digital ones. In probably most households the analogue device consumes the majority of listening, the digital the secondary.

I think all of these things hide quite fundamental changes. Though, as I started to dig through some of the data, you start to see how our listeners are building a new parallel structure of listening.

The availability concept can be demonstrated by NME Radio. Its been on and off a number of platforms in its short life. However, the reach over this time stays pretty static. Why? Well, listeners need to be aware of the service and then if it’s something they would like to listen to, they then seek it out – however they can get it. The circled area is when NME was nationwide on DAB. A small reach increase, but a massive hours jump. Why? The awareness doesn’t change, but suddenly a lot of these listeners can get in on a device they have more access to – their DAB digital radio – a device that’s much easier to listen for a decent length of time on (no fighting those in the house who want to watch Eastenders on the digital TV).

The dominance of analogue radios for primary listening points can be seen in the chart below. This shows platform consumption over a weekday. Breakfast and daytime is dominated by analogue radio, which then, like all radio drops away as we get into the evening. DAB (the red) and DTV (the green) grows – I’d wager these are  people opting out of traditional listening to consume non-analogue stations.

Availability of listening on digital devices is strong – over 40% of people listen to some type of digital radio each week. It’s interesting to see how Absolute have used their new stations to repair and then grow their total hours. At a time when there have obviously been issues for their main service, they’ve weathered the storm by bringing new products that are bringing significant hours to their business.

In fact the impact is such that they are transitioning into a predominantly digital business:

The thing that Absolute are actually benefiting from is wide digital radio reach but a low number of new mainstream choices for listeners.

This latent demand can be seen by the next chart – this is the Eagle TSA and analogue/digital reach. It’s not stacked, so the blue is analogue at just under 500k listeners, with digital at around 250k. Now this is a TSA where the local multiplex hasn’t switched on yet – so the Eagle only exists in an analogue (and internet) environment. For an ILR The Eagle’s doing quite well at the moment, but what I’d be worried about is that, at speed, the TSA are listening on devices that I don’t broadcast on. As these radio listeners transition from the devices being for secondary consumption to primary consumption the competition in the marker (even if we assume they’ll be on digital) will be severe.

If ever there was a need for evidence that there’s the ability for swift change is to look at the success of the transition of Radio 4 Extra from BBC7. Adding 440,000 listeners in one quarter isn’t about gradual development of new platform listening – its 440,000 digital listeners ready to switch into content that’s been promoted to them.

Last chart for today is one showing analogue vs digital hours for the BBC’s national stations:

To me this is the bell weather. The BBC’s national stations are available everywhere and the services have high awareness. There’s a mix of analogue favourites and new digital stations too. Taken as a whole a third of their output is now consumed digitally.

If unlike the BBC and Absolute, your output isn’t being consumed digitally at a similar pace then I think you have a problem. The audience is tooling up to consume more radio digitally – both to new and existing stations. Well over 40% listen digitally, the barrier isn’t the idea, its just a physical issue –  analogue sets are currently occupying the places that generate the most consumption.

If I owned or worked at an existing analogue station it’s not whether my reach was up 2% or that Capital nudged ahead in the market – it’s whether i’d built a brand that was going to be consumed by digital listeners – because that’s who my listeners have become and there’s far more competition on that dial.

What are you listening to?

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No, not a RAJAR post. Maybe one of those later.

This has been around a while – a guy, Ty Cullen, in New York stopped people in the street and asked what they were listening to on their iPods.

Here’s the video:

There’s also another one that’s been done, this time in London…

I think what’s lovely about these is that people are, generally, happy to tell the questioner what they’re listening to. It’s also really great to catch people in the moment of consumption and how they’re pretty much all smiling when they share their secret passion.

An Award for Shows or Podcasts

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An email from Suzie at the BT Digital Music Awards, reminding me about the Best Radio Show or Podcast category and that it’s nearly the closing date (15th July, now 19th July). It’s open to any music-related podcasts or radio shows created by a company with a UK presence and available via digital platforms to listeners in the UK in the past year.

One of the nice things about this award is that ranks radio shows and podcasts alongside each other, looking at content, expertise, creativity and effectiveness.

The details….

Entry requirements

The podcast or radio show must have been available to listeners at some point between 1st August 2010 and the present day. Entrants will be asked to supply a url where the show or podcast can be accessed or a digital recording of one or more of the shows or podcasts for the judges to sample along with the completed submission form. On receipt of an entry, the entrant will be emailed a submission form to complete in no more than 1000 words covering the points mentioned in the judging criteria below.

Judging criteria

Content
What is your podcast or radio show about? How do you select your content?

Experience
Who is your podcast or radio show aimed at and how is it marketed to them? How do listeners access your podcast or show?

Creativity
What makes your podcast or show unique and interesting? How do you use your content to attract listeners?

Effectiveness
Evaluate how successful your show or podcast has been in achieving its original objectives. Give evidence such as size of or increase in listenership, listener interaction or good PR (please note that your submission will be judged for its relative success. Judges will be instructed to pay attention to percentage growth, rather than simple volume of listeners).

All the details are here on the BT Digital Music Awards website.

 

Next Radio Conference

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I’m a big fan of ideas.

I read about them, seek out things I can watch or listen to that have them in and, where I can, go to conferences where people reveal them.

Obviously I spend a lot of my time doing radio things and i’m always keen to hear what people have been up to in my sector. The difficulty is always finding events where people are prepared to share their ideas and where it’s cheap enough to go.

I’ve been talking to James Cridland about this. He’s been to loads of conferences – often because they get him to speak – and we’ve been comparing notes. We’ve chatted about events that have done something clever, have had great speakers, have been fun, have been drunken, have been rubbish, have been cheap, have been expensive and a million other things. We’ve been thinking about the Radio Festival, Music Radio, Radio at the Edge, the Academy’s monthly events, the Student Radio Conferences, RadioDays, the Radio Production Conference – all of them really.

We’ve been keen to find out if there’s a different way to do a radio conference. Can you make something inexpensive, fun and interesting? Can you create a radio conference that someone would take a day off work for and pay for themselves to go to?

So, we’re having a go.

It’s a radio conference about ideas. It’s called Next Radio. There’s just 120 tickets. It costs £99. You can get yours here.

We’ve been inspired by the TED Conferences and want to create something that’s driven by ideas and passion and is routed in radio. We’ve got sessions planned about talent, music, advertising, radioplayer, archives, social media and even memory. Today we’re announcing the first of our speakers, but we’ve got a few more to announce over the coming weeks.

There’s more information at the Next Radio website. I can’t wait to see you there.

Apple’s Cloud Announcement: Four Types of Music User

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A whole wave of announcements at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference today, but for me the most interesting thing is that the nature of music downloading has now changed.

Apple had two music announcements connected to its new iCloud service. The first was that any music you’ve bought through iTunes would now automatically sync across all of your iOS devices. Sensible and similar to what happens if you sync multiple devices manually to iTunes. The second was that for $25 a year a ‘MusicMatcher’ would catalogue all of your songs – however you’ve acquired them – and if detected as one of the 18m songs in iTunes, they would upgrade your copy to 256kbits and then make it available across all of your devices.

The files you get will be DRM-free MP3s, so once your initial year subscription runs out, anything you’ve matched remains in upgraded (and I assume now completely legal) form.

To me, the big shift is that previously there were two types of music – legal and illegal. Legal was music you’ve downloaded and paid for, music you had rented (through Napster/Spotify-esque service) or music you had streamed from a licensed provider. Illegal music was everything else.

Now though, I think there’s been a shift away from the status of the music to the status of the user.

Seemingly there are now four kinds of music user:

1. Buyer

Someone who purchases a track directly.

2. Thief

Someone who illegally downloads tracks.

3. Glutton

Someone who uses a music rental service – eg Spotify/Napster – where they pay for the privilege of any track on-demand for a monthly fee, available whilst they continue to subscribe.

4. Fixer

The new one. A fixer is someone who ‘acquires’ music and then licences themselves (and their collection) through a Cloud subscription.

In effect, the record companies have taken the step of regulating illegal consumption if it’s for personal use. Their gamble is that the majority of illegal users are reluctant thieves and would go legit for a small amount – $25 a year. But lots of $25′s potentially adds up to a significant new revenue stream. It’s an interesting, even enlightened, gamble – but will it pay off?

Tweeknotes 30th May – 5th June

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A return to tweeknotes – things i’ve tweeted about in the past week and other things that have popped into my head.

Lots of news recently about X and Xtra Factor judges and hosts chopping and changing. We had months of “who’ll be the X-Factor USA hosts and judges” and we’ve had the Cheryl sacking/re-appointment stuff too. It’s a narrative that’s intertwined with the UK series as well, with a direct knock-on to who’ll be judging UK hopefulls. Similarly there’s been a bit of to-ing and fro-ing over the Xtra Factor hosts with a seeming last minute swap of the very talented Matt Edmondson to the, er, singer, Olly Murs.

I think the genius of all of this publicity is it makes the audience care. Surprising changes, before launch, prompts press and more importantly the audience to have an opinion. Good or bad, it brings you into the show’s world – massively improving the chances of you tuning in, partly to see if you opinion was right.

What’s also amazing is how few other media properties (and probably with the exception of Scott Mills) – radio shows – use narrative to bring audiences closer.

Other things popping up this week:

 

Radio’s Twitter Obsession

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Dick Stone wrote a blog post about Twitter last month, touching on the fact that stations looking at Twitter buzz has replaced “all the lines lit up” as justification for  a particular feature etc. I’d go a bit further than what he said and say that radio has an unhealthy and incorrect obsession with Twitter.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Twitter. I was an early user and still a regular one – Tweetdeck tells me I tweet on average four times a day. It entertains me, I get to hear from people much brighter than I am and it’s helped in work – it’s connected me to people that now use our services and it’s helped us get press coverage too.

I am, however, like many of us, a media wanker. I like showing off and I like hearing from other show offs. I’m so entrenched in using it that I think it’s the cleverest most important and relevant thing in the world. I can talk about those super-injunctions, I can get i-rate about the latest Daily Mail poll and revel in Charlie Brooker’s put downs. The problem is real people, they really couldn’t care less.

They’re not stupid, they know what it is. Well, how could they not, it infects radio and television like a media-spawned virus. It’s just not that interesting for them. The vast majority of every Twitter mention on the radio is clutter that gets in the way of stations communicating with audiences.

Here’s a list of things that radio gets wrong.

Usernames

Stations have created the most confusing way to tell people how to get involved via Twitter. Often different presenters each have different accounts with different descriptive styles. To take Radio 1 as an example (but similar problems affect everyone) – they go from @chrisdjmoyles (a dj in the middle?) to @fearnecotton to @gregjames to @scott_mills – an underscore ffs! They also mention @bbcr1  (an abbreviation they use nowhere else) sometimes on-air, but not all the time. Often they mention that station account and a DJ account together. There’s also now the introduction hashtags on air – be it for a breakfast feature or for something like #r1bw.

Giving out confusing Twitter usernames is the equivalent of giving all of your presenters different phone numbers or email addresses with different domains. It’s hard for listeners to understand and for people not on Twitter it’s irrelevant clutter that gets in the way of content that’s relevant for them.

Follower Counts

One of the biggest issues is an obsession with follower counts. If you’re a webmaster who gets annoyed at the amount of social network mentions compared to website mentions, i’ll tell you the answer – it’s all because with Facebook/Twitter presenters get to see a number increasing in the corner of their screen. They equate more ‘likes’ or ‘follows’ with success. Presenters crave feedback and this gives them it. It is, of course, irrelevant.

There is little accuracy to Facebook’s ‘like’ numbers and follower numbers are inflated too. Why not go through your Twitter account removing anyone that’s not a ‘real’ person – corporate accounts, spam etc. You’re hesitating aren’t you? Why, because you’re obsessed with having a high follower number! How many times have you seen “just ten more followers and I break 500, or 1,000” etc. Totally pointless metric.

The right things to measure are how many @replies have we had, how many retweets, how many click through – measure the engagement – that’s the true measure of your success.

Follow Me Pleading

“Hi, you can follow me on Twitter, i’m @somethingquitecomplicatedtodowithmyname”. Why? It’s the modern equivalent of hearing “give me a call” without giving a reason why. “Hi, you can follow me on Twitter, i’m @somethingquitecomplicatedtodowithmyname (not that it helps as you probably don’t know my name),  i’m quite needy and I can use my follower numbers to show people like me and replace the fact the PD hasn’t snooped me for a week and I had a slightly poor RAJAR”.

The vast majority of your listeners are not on Twitter. They don’t want to follow you. They can’t follow you. It slightly annoys them because you’re going on about something that they don’t use and can’t be involved in. Every time you mention it you exclude people. In fact, it annoys the people who already follow you, as you’re wasting their time with a link that’s irrelevant to them.

Your aim should be to signify to people on twitter that you’re on it and if they follow you they get a benefit – without annoying everyone else.

“Paul just tweeted @localdj asking for the new Take That song, it’s on next” is a great way to do it. You’ve told people your username, you’ve shown there’s value in getting in touch that way and it hasn’t cluttered the radio station.

Reaching Twitter Users on Twitter

The trap radio people fall into is that they think “Hey, we’ve got 200k listeners – if I talk about Twitter on there that’s the easiest way to get more followers!” whilst ignoring the massive number of people who aren’t interested. This slips into “oh, just one more mention” and on it goes. More clutter on the radio.

A much more efficient way of growing followers is to use the places that they’re more likely to be – Twitter.  Use other presenter of station accounts to retweet your messages and just write interesting messages that will be organically retweetable too! Also remember to follow people who @message you and the station during your show

Depending on how you’ve written your data protection rules, you can also use Twitter’s email checker to see if people who email you have a Twitter account that you can then follow. Just export all the email addresses of people who’ve been in touch to a fresh Gmail account – then just connect your Twitter account to it. It will tell you out of those people who’s got an account and away you go adding them.

Also make sure that the places people go to find you have links to your Twitter account – station websites and email newsletters as well as your Facebook page.

Twitter is about relationships not replicating broadcasting.

A few people just use Twitter to send messages out, never engaging with anyone. This is clearly a bad thing. But you probably don’t do that, do you? You send @replies and reply to listeners that message you, you’re all interactive, right?

How many of you follow back listeners? How many of you actually read the stream of tweets from your listeners that aren’t to do with your radio station? Do you independently get excited about what you’re listeners are up to? They follow you, but you don’t follow them – well, unless you follow them because you feel you have to.

If you can’t bear muggles infecting your feed create a list for ‘listeners’ – you can then read their tweets independently of your ‘real’ friends. But do it and engage with them. Congratulate them on births, commiserate on staying in and doing exams. They will be so impressed that you, that famous person, is interested in them, that you’ll have a listener for life.

Is it really you?

Punters want to follow presenters because they buy into them on-air and want that on-line and in their feed. If you are a personality presenter at the top of your game this is probably fine. You are probably mainly like your on-air persona, even if the volume is turned down a little bit in real life.

If your on-air persona is just that, and Twitter is the ‘real’ you then you have a problem. The reason the listener followed you is because of who you are on-air. If that’s smiley and breezy they’ll be surprised when they find out you mainly tweet about the government’s failings, back and forward in-jokes with the presenter on the station across town and plugs for your club nights. You need to deliver on your on-air promise – whether that’s a lie or not.

Station Accounts

One for the bosses – does your on-air team have a strong enough personality to justify a Twitter account each? You can almost justify the Radio 1 example at the beginning by saying that all their daytime jocks are big personalities and can sustain separate identities. Is it the same for, say, a small ILR? Do your listeners really know the name of the afternoon presenter? Is getting them to engage with a Twitter account for that person adding too many barriers to get a connection with a listener?

I believe that for the vast majority of people, they follow presenters as an extension of the radio show and station. If they disappeared off the radio, following them on Twitter wouldn’t be as interesting any more. For this reason, I think the majority of stations would do better with Twitter if they replaced their individual presenter accounts with that of a station one.

Also from a cynical business perspective, presenters are plugging their own accounts on your time, to your audience. Their growth in followers comes directly from them being on your  radio station. The numbers they amass and the relationship built can then be transferred to your competitor radio station.

When Chris Moyles finally disappears off Radio 1 to a new station, he’ll be giving 1 million Radio 1 fans reasons to switch radio stations.

The way around this is to let each presenter ‘host’ the station Twitter account during their show – but also at other times where it’s relevant. There’s no reason why the breakfast show team shouldn’t be tweeting about Eurovision at 8pm on a Saturday night.

The sell to presenters is that by using the main account they’ll be reaching more people and better improving their chances of growing audience -ie a follower who wants to hear about Breakfast will also find out about reasons to tune into the evening show.

Some people say that this isn’t the essence of Twitter – that brand accounts don’t match the authenticity of individuals. I disagree. Especially in radio, by combining the station’s brand values alongside individuals that live that brand, actually makes station accounts more compelling – and help to drive audience.

Return on Investment

As mentioned before, Twitter and Facebook are often enthusiastically used by presenters because it gives them instant feedback – but sometimes at the detriment of station’s own objectives.

Have a plan for how media is used. Don’t use Twitpics – work out a way to have those snaps go to a station website and link to that. Track all of your links so you can see what’s driving click thrus, measure which presenters are sending the most traffic and share the good practice amongst everyone.

Make sure that station key messages are used on Twitter too. If there’s a big breakfast promotion, tweet at different times in different ways talking about it. Radio followers are probably all P1s – there’s a great chance to increase hours by using Twitter properly.

Summary

Overall, Twitter is a great resource and platform to help grow audience and engagement. Remember though that the vast majority of your listeners probably don’t care. It’s not your job to evangelise Twitter to rejectors, it’s about finding ways to reach existing Twitter users with the right kind of content that helps grow your station and improve connection with your audience.