Five lessons radio needs to learn from Social Media: Part 1 Website Strategy

There are only 24 hours in a day and there are a millions of websites for listeners to go to on the net. So why would a listener come to your radio station website and spend their precious time? More importantly why are listeners spending so much time on social media websites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, MySpace, Linkedin, and what do the radio industry websites desperately need to learn from these websites?

Sure you can do a promotion for a free CD or a raffle ticket or a coupon to drive listeners to your radio website. But the user goes away after a couple of clicks or never bothers to come back. Today lots of station sites have less than 500 unique visitors a day. Most users on the Internet have greater loyalty to their Facebook groups and YouTube channels than they have to their favorite radio station website in their own city.

Five reasons for lack of radio website traffic:

1. Today radio websites are designed for time-delayed consumption, where a DJ or Promotions Director puts a couple of pictures or a video on every week. Or even worse, the media is driven from corporate to the sites in a pre-packaged, templated format. Guess what -- the user is not going to log on to a radio station site to learn about the latest women linked to Tiger Woods. They’ve already gotten it from a Facebook friend, their Twitter or RSS feeds, Google News or some other news aggregation. It’s good information to have, but this is not going to garner loyalty or repeat logins.

2. No two-way listener engagement on 99% of the radio websites. Even if they had a viewpoint on Tiger Woods’ affairs, a listener can hardly click a button and share them on the website…or listen to other community member views (not just the DJs).

3. No sense of community for the radio listener on the radio station website. The listeners cannot share their ideas, thoughts, audio, videos, photos and see what other community members are saying as easily as he can do on Facebook or YouTube or Twitter.

4. No tie-in with his social graph on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube. Can he post his comment on the tiger woods on your radio station website with his voice or  video, and at the same time share it with his friends on Facebook, his blog, Twitter, YouTube?

5.  Very little local content on the radio website to give a feel of community. More of it is corporate-driven. Listeners are more interested in county fair photos, local DJ videos -- not just the corporate feed.

Now how do you fix the issues so radio websites become more relevant in the age of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace?
1. Become part of the social graph of your listeners. Don't just create a Twitter or Facebook account, but engage with the listeners on these accounts. Most importantly, make sure all the Twitter and Facebook activity is seen on your own website. Otherwise you’re just making them go to Facebook or Twitter and not having them come to your radio website first. Today there are a lot of loyalty software programs from the radio industry but what we need is an engagement platform. Loyalty is a byproduct of engagement and radio websites desperately need two way engagement.

2. Provide tools on your radio website for your listeners to not just look at your Facebook or Twitter activity of your community, but allow them to post the comments, audio, photos and videos to your station website and have them share those views and media on other social sites. Two-way engagement with content and their existing social graphs on Facebook, Twitter, etc. is the key – and make sure it is not just one-way.

3. Give more creative control for local DJ's to post their mobile and other contents on the radio website. Corporate feeds are good, but go local and give the DJs / PDs more control and space on the website. Make it easier for them to share their stories from their iPhones, and Blackberrys -- even when they’re not in the studio. Give the listener a sense of community with their local DJs and their daily mobile lives outside the radio studios.

4. Give listeners a little control on your website:  The radio industry has to live by the technology company motto of “Innovate-or-Die.” Allow the listeners to decide what topics are discussed by the DJs. More feedback gives stations more opportunity to give consumers what they want.
Radio Industry and listeners do not need a new social network and new logins and password for each station, but our industry does need a new social strategy for its listeners and that should involve Facebook connect, Twitter connect  that most listeners  already have.

One company we found that can wrap all of this up in a neat little widget package is San Jose-based CellSpin. We spoke with CEO Bobby Singh in a Q&A session. He calls the CellSpin concept “Community Blogging”: 

This short video is a must see for all radio professionals in the industry.

CellSpin, which offers a suite of interactive apps for the radio market, now boasts a number of stations that have implemented their community blogging platform on their websites. They also have a chat function on the widget and launched the Facebook Connect feature -- which now means that users can log-in using their Facebook username/password and upload content simultaneously to a station’s website, Facebook and any other social networking site.

They now have five radio stations using their product live and more coming live soon. The Facebook Connect button is in the upper right-hand corner of the widget:

http://1075zoofm.com/dyn_page.php?id=442
http://hotjamz.org/shows/
http://www.kgvo1290.com/dyn_page.php?id=10
http://www.green960.com/pages/green_room.html
http://www.wfmd.com/pages/widget.html

--Carl Marcucci