Don’t ignore free radio research
Posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 9:38pm. #
Geoff Lloyd posts a wonderful piece on the TIML Golden Square blog (that’s the company that’s taken over Virgin Radio). In it, he says…
It’s very common in commercial radio workplaces to feel like your opinion doesn’t matter. If you offer your opinion on the output, you’re dismissed out of hand and told that you’re not like a “real listener”. … If you pass on anecdotal comments from friends, acquaintances etc, these are also disregarded, once again, because they’re supposedly not representative of the real audience either. … As for real feedback, on the website, or through texts/email/calls to the studio, this is often ignored too. And why? Because those people aren’t “real listeners”.
Not just is this blog a brilliant and revolutionary idea; this piece says a lot of what I’ve always felt. Geoff’s genius clearly extends to writing good pieces on the state of the industry.
It also shouldn’t be forgotten that your friends in future media - whatever station you’re at - can help and assist with many bits of useful listener input.
We know, for example, exactly how many people actively tune out during every single song; or every single feature; by simply reconciling the minute-by-minute online listening figures with what’s going on on-air. Working out the average %age of tuneouts over the last seven days, and ranking them, might show you whether your listeners are getting tired of songs, or whether a particular feature simply goes on too long. And we can add “like it / dump it” links on our radio players, giving instant feedback.
Using other data, we can work out a percentage of who interacts with Moyles at breakfast and not Mills at drive, based on SMS text numbers and telephone logs. We can ask our listeners for their feedback; and get our listeners to assist with new features. Using tools like http://www.last.fm/user/bbcradio1 or http://www.bbc.co.uk/soundindex/ we can watch for new tracks to play - tracks recommended by computer algorithm as well as the pushy record pluggers.
We can monitor calls-to-action to work out the most effective way of promoting a message. In tests I ran a few years ago, a 30″ promo was around a quarter as effective in driving web traffic as an almost identically-worded presenter-voiced announcement. Repeated mentions of a website feature in a thirty-minute period gave 30% more traffic at the first repeat, and about 10% more at the second (even when Jeremy Kyle was promoting the heck out of it, in his former incarnation as ‘Jezza’).
However, historically radio stations ignore what the future media team can tell them. Again, listeners online are seen as not real listeners; in spite of the fact that most radio stations now conduct music research online.
In my time at Virgin Radio, I listened to a colleage’s 10%-time idea, and enabled him to add a big screen to the office. Matt Deegan blogged about it, and I then added a picture of it to my Flickr stream. This contains just a sliver of information that should be really interesting to radio programmers: the latest version, which I saw when recently having a tour of the station, is even better.
So, don’t ignore your future media team. They’re not just the web geeks in the corner - they could be the very future of your radio station’s programming ideas.
Photo: flickr user wannaoreo. Used under licence.
