Three Things We Could Use More Of

3 things that we in radio are not providing as much of as we should:

1. People. Radio stations are cutting staff. But only real people can give us the hours it takes to think about ideas, make the contacts, have the meetings, develop relationships, and more. To become aware of and the plugged into important people and events in the community takes time. As an industry, we have come to believe that if a PD has time to do the music and talk to the morning show, he is done. And if the jock has time to do his show or more commonly now voice track his shows, he too is done. There is no place in the planning for the “bigger than an iPod” part of radio. We have fired so many people that there is nobody left to do these things.

2. Faith and patience. We can give people things that they can’t get from an iPod but which they do want. But today too many radio people think that if they can’t do something perfectly, then they should give up. We don’t use Ning to build a social network because there is MySpace and it is so much bigger. We don’t do a concert promotion because the artist isn’t Madonna or we can’t do it as well as the competitor. We don’t send a DJ and listeners to do a remote from Hawaii because the DJ is not as talented as Howard Stern or we are not prepared to approach the advertisers who would want to sponsor it. Generally in radio today, there is a big lack of faith in developing talent and the station, and radio station managers lack the patience to build a reputation as being interesting in ways beyond the music. We (radio) don’t believe that hard work will pay off. However, I believe.

3. Interest. Today, a DJ should want to have a profile on Facebook, and start a group around the new music and his show and things that interest her that she can share with the listeners The new music meeting should be live on Skype, and turned into a Podcast. And the PD should blog about how the decisions were made. And people should be able to participate, comment, criticize. There should be a little social network for every interesting thing the station does – a big money contest or a marathon run to raise money for cancer. And there should be lots of involvement in those kinds of charity events. And the sales department should be interested in getting local advertisers involved. They can sponsor the morning DJ who does a cancer walk, or similar community event. But it all takes interest. We want the people to be interested in us, but we show no interest in them. We think that if we give them Rihanna then we have done something for which we should receive a big reward. Right. We don’t seem very interested in doing more than that.