Radio and new media strategies for 2010
Posted on Sunday, December 27th, 2009 at 7:18pm. #
Last week has been a good week for reading; and here’s just a little of what I’ve read…
If you’re in radio, and building new studios in 2010, make sure you think about how your new studio will look when you have cameras in there – writing in Radio World International, Markell Lambright from CBS points out that “because most radio stations are designed for talking, they make terrible sets for video production”. Food for thought if you’re building a heap of new studios for radio stations in, you know, central London.
Staying with radio, if you’re looking to rethink your website strategy in the New Year, you can call me from February 9th. But you might also want to read these eight tips from Jennifer Lane’s Audio4cast blog. Not all are relevant to the UK market, but all give food for thought. And here’s another great point from Bitterwallet, in an article by former radio-chap Paul Smith, pointing out that London Heathrow’s website is too sales-heavy and not the service it should have been during the recent snow. Media UK’s traffic showed a large spike during the snow, as will local radio station websites themselves: were the flashing ads the only things that your audience saw? A not altogether serious blogpost from raxraxrax.com makes this point in a different way…
I’m becoming more and more interested in research – from the incredible information you can get from a well set up Google Analytics account, to electronic measurement. Jacobs Media’s blog has an interesting piece about the kind of research that Starbucks do on their customer. This looks an ideal session for the Radio Festival in 2010. And more research results in better understanding: ‘broadcast is booming‘, says Stephen Waddington. “Conventional wisdom says that people are switching off the TV and radio and moving to the web. Wrong”, he says, then shows us radio and television figures. I’m spending a lot of time reminding radio companies of their main raison d’etre – their transmitters – recently, and thus why technologies such as RadioDNS are useful.
Talking about RadioDNS technology with many people in the US, one question kept coming up: “who makes the money?” The concept of ‘open’ technology (“agree on technology, compete on content”) is second-nature to many of us who work on the web, but not to many of our management teams. Nicely, Google has published a great article on the ‘meaning of open’, which is well worth reading: I’ve not seen MBA students being decried as old-fashioned in such an obvious way before. The article quotes a formula from Hal Varian, which could just as easily be applied to those that have spent most time working on RadioDNS: Reward = (Total value added to the industry) * (Our share of industry value)
Finally, I’m also a great proponent of “10% time”, and while Flickr don’t use that term at all, a recent posting by their team on the benefits of, um, adding snow to their website, is a good read if you, too, want to be convinced about letting your tech team do ‘fun’ as well as ’serious’.
You can see the full list of ’stuff I read’ by adding me to your Google Reader, under your ’sharing settings’ link.
