I was listening to LBC 97.3 this morning.

Steve Allen, the “he’s okay for a bit but then gets a bit on your nerves” Sunday morning presenter, was talking about something-or-other and promoted steveallenshow.com as a way of finding out more about what he was talking about.

Steveallenshow.com is an interesting website. It looks as if it’s been put together by Dreamweaver (certainly the HTML source reads that way). It contains details about Steve, and a newsletter you can subscribe to. It contains an LBC logo (confusingly, a logo for LBC 97.3, the station Steve’s on, and LBC News 1152, the station Steve is not on). Crucially, it contains no links to LBC. As a first experience of LBC online, as you’d reasonably expect from listening to Steve promote it, it’s not a good experience at all. Because it’s not LBC online. At all.

Steve’s not alone in this; I’ve heard many other presenters slip in promotions for their own web properties in the middle of their show.

You can apportion some blame, I suppose, to the radio station webteam. Steve clearly wants to be involved with the web; so give him as his production team the chance to update his own site within lbc.co.uk - just as is successfully done on Virgin Radio’s The Geoff Show.

It’s confusing to me why management appear to allow this. After all, they’d not allow Steve Allen to also promote the fact that he was on talkSPORT (if he was, which he isn’t). Competing radio stations are right out. But competing websites appear to be just fine.

This is a little odd. Some radio stations earn in excess of 10% of their entire revenue from their online activities. And if you’re allowing your presenters to ‘own’ your audience, rather than the radio station that employs them, then you’re storing up trouble in the future. Steve can jump ship to talkSPORT, and take every single one of his listeners with him, since he knows who they are and you don’t. Who’s got the upper hand here?

That’s not to stop you from engaging with your audience through your own website - Leona Graham’s page on Virgin Radio contains a link to leonagraham.com, for example. But when on a radio station, promote that station’s website. When on LBC 97.3, you promote LBC’s website. That’s what management should be saying.

It’s evidence, should you require it, that radio stations are run by management who are radio specialists, not content specialists. And in the new multi-platform, non-linear world, you need more than just radio knowledge to succeed.

Photo: allegro Takahi. Of a different Steve Allen. Used under licence.

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