Master The Social Network

it's easy, engage, be real and don't take it too seriously.  According to Michael Lebowitz founder and CEO of 'Big Spaceship' corporations make 5 mistakes:

Mistake 1
Faceless corporations do not have a sense of humour, they are not good at funny.  Or worse they get it badly wrong like Durex South Africa who allowed a tweet joking about female sexual violation to be sent out … oh dear, oh dear.

Mistake 2
They are too slow to respond.  In a world of instant gratification social media demands an instant response. Journalist Robert Jordan from Forbes gives the brilliant example of those pesky 'Tamagotchi' virtual alien pets that you HAD to feed and water, or they died. That's just like social media.

Mistake 3
Companies have no voice.  They are politically correct and inoffensive like a BBC Local radio phone-in.  Social media demands that your company has a voice.  Have fun, visualise and engage with your customer.

Mistake 4
They are nameless and faceless.  When a customer @yourcompany do they actually become part of a dialogue or are they just sending their @ into a virtual void? Be human and be polite - reply and engage.

Mistake 5
Companies try to reduce everything to a process and that includes social media.  You just can't do that, social media is a living breathing organism that you nurture and form a relationship with.

Social Vandals

@archiveatBBC most of us are aware that during the late sixties and seventies the BBC television archive ran out of shelf space.  Rather than build more shelves they decided to perpetrate the most appalling cultural vandalism and destroyed or wiped many shows that would deprive historians and the public for the rest of human time.

I have my own story about the LBC and IRN archive - a new owner at LBC decided that we had run out of shelf space and that the archive was to be pruned down to just a handful of 'important' recordings. (Familiar story hey?) I along with Chris Lowrie (still at LBC)  and Derek Cole (Now at Sky) were given the task to fill a very large builders skip with archive tapes.

The three of us decided that this would be cultural vandalism.  Derek went hunting around the building and we filled the skip with all manner of junk - old sound mixers even a broken dishwasher from one of the kitchens.  Then we layered a thin cover of tapes on the top - to make it seem we had emptied out most of the archive.

Then came the tricky bit making the archive room look less full of tapes.  Well by shoving a lot of tapes closely together and sliding reels on top and by farming off the whole of the LBC show 'Cinema Screen' to its former presenter - Carol Allen - we managed to pull it off.

Writing this I can still see in my mind Carol Allen's old estate car driving away from the underground car park so weighed down that there were sparks coming from underneath as it caught the concrete floor.

Fast forward to another time and place and our precious archive was now stored at Kings Cross - a bid for lottery funding had been put in to have the whole of LBC/IRN recordings from 1973-1997 digitally archived.  The bid was successful and Bournemouth University took on the mammoth task of cataloging all the tapes.

A few weeks ago I was teaching a student who had a masters in Journalism - I asked what their dissertation was about? "Oh comparing the BBC radio and Commercial radio coverage of the miners strike during Mrs Thatchers time as Prime Minister, did you know there's a fantastic audio archive of commercial radio on the University Library system?

As a footnote 'Cinema Screen' and all its tapes that had been sitting in Carol Allen's garage were lovingly collected by the British Library and now reside in their archive.

FREE Radio Imaging

There's loads of #free #radioimaging stuff out there.  Companies hungry for your business will tempt you with all sorts of downloadable goodies.  Here are just three offering production beds, SFX elements and more.
Air Media
A small company in Halifax (UK) that offers production music, news beds, travel and SFX elements. They currently allow you to download their SFX elements for FREE.  You can buy their whole library in January for just £85.00  If you ignore the rather irritating sales voice across the demos, the actual musical compositions are pretty good.  Find out more click here  
Radio Jingles VIP
No contact info base for this company, but again they offer some useful free elements, some quite bad celeb drops where the station endorsed by the star is, er chopped off. They also quite like the word awesome. Find out more click here
Music Radio Creative
A company run by Mike Russell - you can't get to hear what you are going to get without liking MRC on Facebook or Google+ or subscribe to Mike's Newsletter - that's good marketing, and again MRC offers a number of 'jingles' rather than production elements, so if you are still after the singing jingle, Mike would be your first port of call. (He also does some nifty Audition Training on You Tube, see my Blog Page for more) Find out more about Music Radio Creative click here

Serves You Right

Why John Lewis @johnlewisretail is a High Street star? And what the radio industry can learn from their business model. I bought a TV from John Lewis last year.  I didn't intend to buy from the store, I had been looking on Google for the best deal for a Samsung TV.  Suddenly in the corner there was a John Lewis banner ad with the very TV I was looking for, they would price match their competitor and offer a 5 year guarantee and throw in two active 3D Glasses and a BluRay 3D film for free.

So I bought the TV online from John Lewis, I received emails telling me exactly when it would arrive, one phone-call and a text on the day.  When the TV arrived at the door just a few days later  I was addressed as 'sir' and the deliverer offered to unpack the TV and asked me to fill in a customer satisfaction survey.

From that experience I am a John Lewis convert.  I wonder how many others JL converted in the same way?

OK so here are some things they do that make them stand out from the competition.  When they advertise they think multi-channel and they use social media to compliment their campaigns.

Listeners consume radio in a multi-channel way.  Listeners don't care by what means they listen but if the content is relevant to them, they listen by whatever carriage. The industry should put as much effort behind the scenes to make it easy for them to listen on any platform from FM to Android Apps.

John Lewis have had online clearance sales twice a year for 10 years now and have a customer email base that they actively engage in.

Again the radio industry should work hard on getting listeners to engage, offer content on their websites that draw traffic and create another revenue source outside spot and sponsorship. As an example the superb snow pictures on LBC973  that compliment the output with being radio or audio based.

John Lewis are confident that they offer the best customer experience.  They have very good Wi-Fi in their stores, so it is easy to go online in store and price match.

The radio industry in the UK should be confident in their programming.  Nothing worse than a PD that says 'Let's try and sound a bit like Radio 2.'  ugh!

If you want to read more about John Lewis and their online attitude to sales click here.

I have a dream

My dream radio - could it be the future? Had a strange dream last night (too much Costa Coffee at University I guess) I had invented the perfect radio I called it RiVo.  It had good old FM on it but linked into Radio DNS it had DAB and DAB+ it was clever and could do software updates and receive HD radio it could also pick up streaming from its built in wireless, and record downloads to play later and make suggestions about what you might like to hear (Like TiVo which was also on my mind yesterday)

The clever bit was that it could talk to other similar radio devices.  So the car radio when it was parked outside the house picking up our wireless network could talk to the kitchen radio, they could share information and the kitchen radio could send downloads and info to the car radio.  Brilliant - now all I need to do is to turn the dream in reality.

Press here for freedom?

China has tightened its control on the foreign journalist.  Banning them from a shopping centre in Beijing that was mentioned in a blog about peaceful protests.  The interesting thing for the ruling Chinese Communist Party to comprehend is just who is a journalist these days?

In times past you could always spot a journalist, they were lugging a great big tape recorder or had a camera crew with them or were desperate to find a working phone booth to file their story back to the newspaper.

Now everyone with a smart phone is a journalist.  With a phone you can take high res photos, HD movies, record good quality sound and be a first hand witness to any event however momentous however banal. You do not need a phone booth just an internet connection to file a story.  I think that the Chinese authorities will face the same inability to 'control' the media, as Hosni Mubarak or Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. Why? Because everybody is carrying the 'media' around in their pocket right now.

Ghost in the machine

I saw a ghost yesterday.  It was a ghost from the past but I could touch it, see it and even smell it?  Way back in 1981 I joined a brand new spanking radio station in Southend called Essex Radio.  They had just spent 1.2 million pounds on a fantastic set of studios in a building they called 'Radio House' The studios were built two floors underground in what had been the printing press room of the local paper.

Well I left the station in 1984 to join LBC and have been back once since in 1988, but yesterday I returned to those old studios, now owned by Yellow Media.  I suppose its like going back to your old school, first of all everything seemed a lot smaller than I remembered. But to my astonishment and a testament to the superb engineering skills of Essex Radio's Chief Engineer - Andy Gemmell-Smith the place is pretty much how I left it.

OK the studios had been refurbed by GWR when they owned Essex, but they still had the original second generation of mixing desks in the studio and they were laid out in the same configuration as the original studios of 1981and the racks room was exactly the same with the same equipment. Even the studio speakers were the original Tannoy Super Red 10B's!

A new DAB radio station starts broadcasting from the studios in a few weeks time Chance Radio and it will be great to see live programming come once again from those fantastic studios in the heart of Southend-on-Sea.  (Picture above Chance Studio - old Essex CR2 studio with Eela Audio desks and BCX playout.) They are streaming now click here to listen.

Pay As You Go

Pay as you go but it's free to listen.  A few days ago I was talking to a guy who runs a streaming radio station I asked him how he made money?  He said, "Just like the big guys, I don't, but I do break even." He gets some revenue from advertising gigs but the rest of the revenue comes from the DJs on the station, they pay him to be 'on the air' which pays for the PRS and MCPS licence and daily running costs of the station. It gives them a profile and a stage to get more 'real' work such as gigs and private DJing work. 

It reminds me of another friend who runs a station in Portugal he expects his DJ's to work for next to nothing and create their own income either by sponsorship or advertising, which he takes a percentage or they can use the station for profile for their other work in clubs etc.

I can't see this model working in commercial radio in the UK.  But in 2011 there will be some searching questions to be answered about revenue streams and commercial radios relationship to sad tired old spot adverting.  OFCOM's new product placement rules could be part of the answer, who knows? I do think 2011 could be quite a bumpy ride.

Stream ON

Why does Radio 2 sound so good? If you're expecting a critique of the station stop reading because this is a blog about a visit to my good friends David and Diane and whilst chatting in the kitchen, as you do, I noticed how good, technically, Radio 2 was sounding coming out of their kitchen radio. 

Turns out they were listening on a Logitech Squeezebox to an internet stream of the station which sounds much better than FM and obviously better than grotty crunchy DAB.  The internet radio could also play his music collection, get anything from BBC iPlayer play podcasts and had a whole range of other apps all in a neat little radio with a full colour screen and all for about £113.00

Yes there are a few things to think about before buying an Internet steaming set, the server either has to be on your home PC or NAS drive or you pick up the default servers in Germany and the US and it appears to be hard to switch easily between those options, which means if you have the server on your home PC or Laptop, they have to stay on all the time. But I was very impressed by this set.  I did ask Dave why he didn't have a DAB - he laughed and told me they don't get any DAB signal where they live - well what a surprise!

Listen with mother

I learned to listen to the the radio with my mother, sounds very middle class but somewhere after the BBC News and before Woman's Hour the Home Service (Radio 4) would put out Listen With Mother a rather middle class cosy view of a child's world with suitable stories and inane rhyme.

Radio today has turned its back on our children with one DAB station - Fun Kids and a half-arsed bit of Radio 7 called Big Toe.  The kids will not care though, they have plenty of media diversions, from computer games - now the biggest part of the UK entertainment industry to scores of TV channels beaming shows just for them, and should they get bored of all that there is plenty of stuff on iTunes for them to download.

The trouble is, the kids of today are tomorrows radio listeners and if we don't get 'em young they will never get into the habit of listening.  I have just finished working on a kids series for radio.  'Professor Hallux builds a body' 14x 8-10min episodes for Fun Kids and the Wellcome Trust, brilliantly written not by me but I produced the sound design and did nearly all of the post-production, save one episode.

To compete with the iPod generation a kids radio show has to have high production values, gone are the days when a child will happily listen to some old fart singing 'Five Currant Buns' which seemed to come round with annoying regularity on 'Listen With Mother'

So my plea to the radio industry is don't forget the kids because in about ten years time they may come back and bite you on the bottom.

End of the peer

The great unwashed want to have a say in your radio station.  I know it's ghastly and there was a time when the only way 'they' could interact with your radio shows was to call  - and you could ignore them, or they had to write, usually on scraps of paper in green ink which you could file in the waste paper basket.  Now they Facebook, twitter, text and speed dial until you eventually have to pick up the call.

So just what's going on? Here's an interesting quote from my old boss Steve Parkinson talking about the Kiss audience: "The big picture is they expect entertainment on demand, on multiple platforms, and they want to interact with their peers and favourite DJs in real time on mobile, by instant message and social media."

That's an awful lot of extra work. Providing on demand and interaction requires clever software and merging your IT content producers with your DJ's or Radio Producers.  BUT is it worth it? I think a better question is can a business afford not to travel the two-way street where your listeners or customers get a chance to have their say.

Your job is to get that interactivity to work and departments to synergise with each other. I have been busy creating a series of Podcasts/Downloads they have their own web page, podcast page, twitter, facebook fan page, You Tube Channel and you can subscribe to them on iTunes.  It's the future of your next piece of audio but it has increased our workload more than threefold.

Content is King

Any old crap will do; there was a time when the poor old British public had just three TV channels, four national radio stations and if you were lucky or unlucky a BBC local radio station, then along came a handful of commercial radio stations.  But let's face it if you didn't like what was on those handful of TV and radio stations the only alternative was to go down the pub or read a book.

The programme makers of that time knew that fact, I think it made them a bit lazy, sure there were some great shows but there was also a lot of dross - it didn't matter though because the audience figures were never that bad, because there wasn't any choice.

Now all that has changed and content is king, there are now 100s of TV and radio channels all competing with each other to get your attention.  It's the same if you are presenting a radio show.  Life used to be easy - grab a few records,  the what's on file and shove together some half arsed competition like 'Beat the bleedin intro' and the hoards were listening avidly.  Truth was they had no choice and put up with your crummy competition with a book token as a prize.

So what to do? How do you make your show shine? How do you make it different?  The key is engaging and thoughtful and compelling content.  You need to put effort in, do the research, do some decent pre-production, because slowly, slowly your audience is leaving you. 

The old ones who can't work a computer are dying, the young ones are off with their iPods and the ones in between have started downloading audio books to play in their car, now they've realised what that plug thing is by the cigarette lighter socket does.

So think a little more about what you do and what you say.  Put a bit of added value into your show and it will pay off in the long run.  

Thanks for not tuning our way

I don't listen to the radio anymore! Oh I do have Nick Ferrari on in the morning but that comes off the cable telly.  Oh and I do have Radio 7 on but that comes off the computer.  I do download Chris Lowrie's very fine weather forecast but that's not listening to the radio is it? Or is it? I'm confused?

Very Demanding

Radio is DEAD, long live the Podcast, well not quite but last week Absolute Radio knocked up 900,000 downloads, that's heading dangerously toward a million.  My good mate Paul who runs the service at Absolute says that even his 70 year old dad is listening.

We both agree 'Podcast' is an ugly word, consumers think they need an iPod to listen or have to download material, neither of which are true.  In fact Paul's dad, does what I do and that's stream stuff straight from iTunes.  So I am joining Paul's campaign to stamp out the word Podcast and long live the much better and streamlined word(s) ON DEMAND and that can mean audio and video. You can read Paul's blog by clicking here

Best Recorder?

Best recorder for radio interviews?  I have narrowed it down to three.  Visit the website www.creativeradio.com and click Best Recorder.  I have used and tested each machine and give my personal verdict between The Marantz PMD661, The Tascam DR0-07 and The ZOOM H4n.

Other ways of getting that interview recorded?  Another option is to use a camcorder with an external microphone.  My camera the Canon HF21 has an external mic input and records very high quality sound.. and you get free pictures as well so you could ad some pics to your radio interview and stream them as additional material on your website.

Using personal Dictaphone machines - they tend to have crappy sound and are not geared up to quality recording and with the Tascam DR0-07 at £129 inc VAT don't cost that much less.

So visit www.creativeradio.com and check out my reviews.

RadioDNS

It's like radio but with pictures. Doh! isn't that TV?  Well no it's more your bog standard FM radio gets in bed with the internet and they are a bit frisky with each other.  FM and DAB already transmit identifiers in their carrier RadioDNS want to add a url link so that if you have a combined radio internet enabled device like a phone or at the moment a handful of radio sets, the radio can talk to the internet and you can receive visual information and links to interact with the station as it broadcasts.

So RadioDNS might be able to do the following: Hear an ad, want to know more? You could hit the radio equivalent of the 'red' button and be put in touch with the advertiser.  Want to buy the song you're listening to? Hit the one click button and Bob's your close relative you get the song downloaded to your iTunes library.  Something on LBC getting your goat? Hit the button and  get thru to the studio..

So just like ordinary radio but with pictures and interactivity - what will they think of next?

Spotify for IPhone

Spotify have just announced an app for the IPhone, Spotify like LastFM is a streaming music service where the user gets to choose the playlist . Again this is another form of sound (radio) carriage, limited to the bandwidth of the mobile phone network. Spotify on wiki

The End Is Nigh!

Commercial radio could die out within 15 to 20 years as advertising revenues dwindle, the MediaGuardian Changing Media Summit heard today.
Claire Enders, the founder of Enders Analysis, made the prediction, pointing to the large number of radio stations in the UK that are currently unprofitable.
She said revenues from classified, online and search advertising all outstripped those from radio, and that advertising agencies were tuning out of the medium.
"There is a next generation of people in agencies who are not that keen on radio," she said. Read the whole story in The Guardian

Full Stream Ahead

Struggling satellite radio operator Sirius XM is planning to stream its subscription radio to the iPhone and iPod Touch.The American company almost filed for bankruptcy protection last month as new sales were reported to be down, even thought 19 million people are subscribed to the service.The streaming would act as an additional platform on which paying members could hear the advert-free audio channels. (Source Radio Today)
What we say: It does look like the future of radio could be in the form of streaming. There are challenges for the mobile phone industry and government - if everyone started to stream their favourite radio station the mobile phone network will get through an awful lot of bandwidth. Bandwidth that in the UK is not in place yet.

Australia's mi Roamer and Germany's Blaupunkt jointly announced the world's first Internet car radio just last month, and given the competitive nature of technology, Internet radio could likely be a reality on most new cars within the next five years..read full story in previous blog