As you know, radio is facing challenges from new media. We at ByrnesMedia view these as new content providers which can enhance what we are already doing. Radio has always said it wants to focus ‘one on one’ with its listeners.
Social media truly does this through micro niche groups that are highly personal in nature. Greg Nisbet is a well known New Media specialist.
In this exclusive article for the ByrnesMedia Monthly Memo, he gives us some great advice on how we can start to use some new media to help radio achieve more traction and relevancy. Please contact me directly at ByrnesMedia with your comments and questions on New Media.
Dave Charles, ByrnesMedia Toll Free 1-866-332-1331 or email me at dave@byrnesmedia.com.
SOCIAL MEDIA RELEVANCE & VALUE Greg Nisbet – Mediazoic
Radio is about delivering relevance to listeners and value to advertisers. So is social media. While to some extent this overlap can mean that social media services become a competitor for advertising dollars, smart use of social media can help you leverage your own advertisers' dollars, and therefore ensure that you can capture new clients and retain existing ones.
Integrating social media into your station's overall business strategy shouldn't be taken lightly, as it's a big world out there and there are a lot of people calling themselves experts. However, there are some small, easy steps that can be taken that won't cost you much time and, if properly implemented, should end up making you money. The great thing about social media, unlike building web sites, is that even non-technical types can do it. I'm living proof of that.
Let's start with Facebook. I do a lot of seminars for businesses, most of whose owners are in the 40+ age range, and they are usually shocked at how many business promotion tools come built right into Facebook if used properly. Back in February of this year, Facebook made a big deal of its new Facebook Fan Pages feature. These Fan Pages are spaces within Facebook that are custom-built for promotion of businesses, and are completely different from the Facebook Profiles that your kids use to send vampire kisses to each other. They are free and require little technical knowledge to create and maintain, which is incredible given that one Facebook Page contains a functionality for which you'd normally have to pay a web developer thousands to build on your station's web site. Organizations that have such pages gather "Fans", individual people who are interested in interacting with their brand, and who want to keep up to date with what the organization is doing.
2009 might go down in the record books as one we’d all prefer to forget. The economy tanked, revenue was down and lots of great people lost their jobs. There were casualties in small, medium, and large broadcasting operations, but hopefully we have all learned valuable lessons and are now better positioned to function in this new economy. The indicators are turning positive as we begin a new decade. This is the time of year when we all think about the future and do a little crystal-ball-gazing. Here are a few things that might warrant your attention in 2010.
Revenue: Generating local dollars will be more important than ever. National dollars have declined in many markets over the past two quarters because of the economy, along with the shifting of dollars to larger and other medium markets. With that in mind, here are five areas you might want to look at to be successful in 2010 when it comes to generating local revenue.
Continuous Training: Radio as an industry needs to offer our sales executives better training and I believe we need to come together and set up some industry standards. Radio experiences a high attrition rate, not because our sales people have not been trained to sell, but because they have not been trained for the 75% of selling that occurs after the order is signed. We need to invest more in training our account executives in how to create and manage results and less on closing ‘deals’. Sean Luce says “People are your greatest asset? Wrong! Well trained people are your greatest asset. In tough times, it's hard to imagine your training doesn't get more in-depth and intense. Imagine any military trying to win a war, saying, we're not going to train the troops we're sending into the field this time. Believe me, they would all be cannon fodder. You should expect as a rule of thumb, a 30-1 return on your training dollar as long as you stick with it and follow up as a sales manager. And oh yes, whenever you send someone to training—you as the manager better be there with them. Otherwise, how do you know what they are coming back with? This is where there is no accountability for training as many managers think they don't have to attend the sales training seminar...
