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.

A view of a power plant in Houston, taken on February 20th. Photo: Louis Vest. Used under licence.

Google Calendar on your website using PHP and stuff
If you use my code for this, you might like to note that there are quite a few contributed bugfixes, which fix, er, some bugs.

Has digital radio had its day?
I'm quoted in this piece. Executive summary: "no".

The BBC iPlayer and buzz monitoring in action
Nixon McInnes decides that I might know what I'm doing, and that "the BBC still kick ass", which is very nice of him. Must get back to the kicking.

Is Radio Suffering From Too Little Research?
Self-serving post from Edison Media Research. Yes, research is good - but as Henry Ford said, "if I asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have asked for a faster horse".

Adrian Fitch's spring training
The Fitchster uses one of my photographs, and concerningly writes about 'going hard', but it turns out it's about cycling.

Another of my photos
… a rather old manual montage, originally shot on film would you believe, used in this blog posting

Intempo Rebel Kills Radio DJs (Gizmodo UK)
"A music sampling system that, once tuned into an FM station, records the 40 most played tracks and then edits out the DJ chatter and the ads." Nurse? The copyright!

This is a tidied and edited list of my del.icio.us postings from February 15th to February 23rd. You can subscribe to this list, live, via rss.

A while back, I posted about journalists, in my view, not doing adequate research into a story before printing it.

I discover today that it’s not really journalists’ fault: the computer network of one national newspaper, at least, has extremely restricted access and can’t even see… this website. “Yes, sorry,” said the journalist I was chatting to, “there’s a really fierce firewall here”.

I’ve no idea what this website does that means that a major newspaper wishes to block access - unless it’s related to blocking Media UK which would be an odd decision too - but I’m pretty amazed at that. Reminds me of my days running Media UK as a limited company, when the internet access was so slow (128k ISDN line, shared between 30 people) that it was often quicker to go down the road to the internet cafe.

Anyway, perhaps I’m being a little harsh on some journalists - not their fault if the tools to do their work can be witheld like that. It does explain a whole heap, though: if they can’t see little blogs like mine, then what else can’t they see?