When Rich Brooks from Flyte New Media asked be to be a part of the Social Media FTW conference as a speaker I was surprised. I’m a humble radio DJ who has eaten cat food on my show. Not exactly who you’d expect to be lumped into a group of speakers with a vast knowledge of social media.
I accepted though and was glad I did. How much useful information I gave at the Social Media and Traditional Media panel with the Portland Press Herald’s Justin Ellis is debatable, but the experience was fantastic.
If you couldn’t make the Social Media FTW conference or were in one of the other great concurrent sessions, let me fill you in on what I shared about how Q97.9 radio uses social media.
One of the first social media tools we began to use was podcasting. People use DVR’s to time shift when they watch their favorite TV shows, so why not the same with radio. We post the Q Morning Show in its entirety minus the music and commercials, and publish it on wjbq.com where people can download or listen to in their browser, and on iTunes where they can subscribe to automatically receive new episodes that they can sync to their iPods or iPhone to listen on the go. This gave us another avenue for sponsorship within the podcast and on the podcast page on the website.
We began to use You Tube as a great way for our listeners to get a behind the scenes look at what we do on the radio that up until video on the web, was only heard. We created our own channel on You Tube and embedded our videos on wjbq.com. We also use it to in conjunction with our clients for value added to their advertising campaigns like this video in conjunction with Funtown/Splashtown USA.
Using a free website called UStream we started running a live web cam from our studio during The Q Morning Show. UStream lets anyone with a webcam and an Internet connection easily send live video to the web. This let our listeners get an even greater behind the scenes look during our show. In addition to live streaming, UStream also lets you save video that can be embedded on other websites. When Senator Susan Collins was on our show shortly after John Edwards announced he had an affair and questions arose about his paternity to a child, Senator Collins addressed it by saying “Don’t you think he is the father of the child?” We struck gold. Our video made it to all three local television stations, The Portland Press Herald, ABCnews.com and even was featured on Fox News. Our brand went nationwide all because we thought to turn on a camera. If you want a viral video, always have a camera and shoot everything you think has the potential to be interesting. You never know.
We use Flickr, a free photo sharing website, that gives us the ability to upload pictures and video taken with cell phones. This allows us to instantly drive traffic to our website if we have anything interesting that our listeners might like to see, be it in the studio or on location
We have several Facebook fan pages to help us connect with our listeners. One for The Q Morning Show where we can announce things that people may have missed on the air, such as a discount on Kelly Clarkson tickets for one day only. It also lets us post pictures, video and our podcast that will show up on the Facebook pages of our fans. Facebook also provides a feature called insights which allows you to get a snapshot of who your fans are.
We just recently launched a station Twitter page, which is just another way to reach our listeners. Those same special deals an announcements can be tweeted, and for some show up instantly on their cell phones. Public conversations can take place with listeners and we can get instant feedback on what we’re doing.
Radio has always been interactive, but with social networking it takes that interactivity one step further. The same applies for any business. Using these free tools to connect and interact with your customers is just another piece of that marketing puzzle. Millions of people use social networking and they’re just waiting for you to reach out to them.
If you’d like to learn more about Twitter, check out my Word On The Tweet Podcast that I produce with Fred Abaroa. Each week we gather people together who use Twitter to talk about what’s new and what’s interesting about it. And we have a lot of fun too. Our most recent show features Rich Brooks and Jacia Kinsman from Social Media FTW.
A big thanks to Rich, Jacia, Chrystie for inviting me to be a part of Social Media FTW. It was a blast!
I was cleaning out some files the other day at work and forgot that I had dubbed this off of a cassette that I had made for my grandmother. This is from 1991, my very first job in radio working overnights at Oldies 95.7 WMJ in Ellsworth Maine. It was a different time in radio when you didn’t have computers that played all the music for you. You fired everything off yourself. Music, jingle, ID’s commercials. At the time 95% of it was on carts, which are similar looking to 8-track tapes and were used for their durability and continuous loop of tape that didn’t require rewinding. That was great unless some idiot pulled a cart out of the machine before it was done.
I worked Saturday at midnight and Sunday at 6AM when the least amount of people were listening. It’s a good thing too! Listening to this now it’s a wonder I was ever hired! I was terrible!!! Listen to that thick Maine accent.
18 years later the accent is gone and I’ve still managed to hold a job in radio, and at the same station for the past 13 years no less. Not an easy feat these days. Let’s hope that trend continues. Gotta keep that roof over my head.
Want a good laugh? Go ahead and listen.
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Like it or not, we live in a changing world. In fact it’s changing so fast that some people can’t keep up, while others embrace the change easily and allow it to benefit them.
In the span of just one month, I have witnessed two major political players make national news from the relatively small city of Portland Maine. Both of them did so via the internet. Would this have happened ten years ago? Probably not.
On August 13th, I posted video of The Q Morning Show’s interview with Senator Susan Collins, where one of my partners, Lori, asked the senator what she thought about John Edwards affair. She was quite candid, going so far as to say “Don’t you think he is the father of the child?”
Within 24 hours the clip had made its way around the internet on various political blogs, including abc.com. The video was also shown on local television news stations, printed in the local paper above the fold two days in a row, and even made it onto Hannity and Colmes on Fox News. All this attention coming our way that wouldn’t have ten years ago when we didn’t have a video camera in the studio with the ability to record and post video to the web.
Almost a month later to the day, it happened again. WCSH’sRob Caldwell had the opportunity to interview Senator John McCain. One thing you learn very quickly by watching Rob is he is not afraid to ask the questions that the American public wants to know, no matter who he’s asking.
Rob asked the Senator the tough questions, and he pretty much crumbled. When asked what experience Governor Palin have in the field of national security, McCain replied, “Energy. She knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America….”And, uh, she also happens to represent, be governor of a state that’s right next to Russia. She understands Russia.”
Huh? Based on that logic, I understand Canada very well because Maine is right next to it, however I digress.
What I’m really trying to point out here is how mainstream media used to make news for the internet, but today the internet makes news for mainstream media. Our video of Susan Collins on a radio station made local and national television news from a post on a blog on the internet. The same happened for WCSH’s interview with McCain.
The irony of it is that both of these interviews were done originally using traditional media outlets, but didn’t gain national attention until they were posted to the internet. In fact, I didn’t even know about the McCain interview until I saw a post on Facebook about it.
If we didn’t do a web video broadcast of The Q Morning Show each day, Susan Collins comments would go largely unnoticed. If WCSH didn’t post their video to their website and allow other websites to embed the video into their own sites, Rob Caldwell might not be seeing his interview as part of Meet The Press on Sunday.
Wow what a day this turned out to be. 24 hours after we did what seemed like a typical interview with Senator Susan Collins on The Q Morning show, I never would have imagined it would be revisited. I guess that’s what you get when you decide to have a webcam in the studio and a United States Senator says something that is viewed as controversial.
I started running a live webcam using ustream.tv earlier this year. I think Interactivity is vitally important to broadcast media these days, and I was doing my part to provide that.
A nice feature that comes with ustream.tv is the ability to record from the webcam and embed it on a webpage, which is what I did when I posted the video here after the interview. The internet being what it is, things can become viral very quickly, and the next day we got a phone call saying that the video had spread to many political blogs and You Tube. The political blogs of course were mostly democratic, since Senator Collins is republican.
I couldn’t imagine what the fuss was about until I did a Google blog search and found the excitement was over a comment Senator Collins made about John Edwards. It never crossed my mind that people would think this was shocking, inappropriate, uncalled for, or whatever anyone might think about the comment.
I’m not going to lie. I loved this! Finally some attention on my meaningless little blog in the corner of the internet. So I spent the day reading all the posts all over the internet and even posting in the comment section on a few. It’s really been great reading.
The news eventually made it to the mainstream media with The Portland Press Herald calling me for an interview, WCSH requesting a copy of the video, and WGME running the story and linking directly to this blog. My traffic suddenly started to spike in the afternoon, and when I checked where it was coming from, it was wgme.com Very cool.
I’m am relieved though. I’ve been told that Senator Collins will be happy to return to our show in the future. That was my only real worry about all the hub bub. Hey at least it wasn’t like our interview with Barack Obama.
It’ll be an interesting show tomorrow. It’ll be the first time we include ourselves in our newscasts.
In case you’d like to read the reactions to the interview for yourself, I’ve compiled a handy list of all the places I’ve found one. If you have one yourself, let me know.
Anyone who is a radio broadcaster would like to think that they work for the only station that anyone listens to. We all know of course that that could not be further from the truth. Radio listeners in the car are button pushers. If they don’t like what they hear, they’re off to another pre-set and will probably come back to you when they don’t like hearing whatever the other guys are doing. All this button pushing can lead to a fair amount of confusion as to who they are listening to.
We had a listener call this morning and ask us if we had an answer to the trivia question. Well at the time, we weren’t asking any question. In fact we hadn’t all morning long. We weren’t confused by this though, as this happens all the freaking time! Without missing a beat, I went right ahead with the caller and said, “No, we don’t. What do you think the answer is?” Is this mean? Yeah I suppose so, but people usually take it pretty well when they find out we’re playing with them.
She gave the answer, “They use a land line,” to which I replied, “Ohhh no, that’s not it. Sorry.” Usually we never hear back from the person. Today however this woman called us back to find out why she didn’t win after she had heard the answer on the air, the SAME answer she gave. Well she had me now. I fessed up, and told her I was playing with her because she’s calling the wrong radio station. She laughed it off and was a little embarrassed, but I told her not to be because it happens all the time. For the record she was trying to call Kid and Meredith at Z107.3 in Bangor Maine, a guy I used to work with 15 years ago.
There’s two ways I can take this kind of behavior. Either listeners love your station so much, that they have you programmed into their speed dial and call you without even realizing they are calling the wrong station. Or they’re complete prize pigs who do nothing but call radio stations to win stuff and have the first six speed dials on their phone set to the studio lines of all the local radio stations. Tough call here.
I never did find out what the trivia question was.
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When Rich Brooks from Flyte New Media asked be to be a part of the Social Media FTW conference as a speaker I was surprised. I’m a humble radio DJ who has eaten cat food on my show. Not exactly who you’d expect to be lumped into a group of speakers with a vast knowledge of social media.
Anyone who is a radio broadcaster would like to think that they work for the only station that anyone listens to. We all know of course that that could not be further from the truth. Radio listeners in the car are button pushers. If they don’t like what they hear, they’re off to another pre-set and will probably come back to you when they don’t like hearing whatever the other guys are doing. All this button pushing can lead to a fair amount of confusion as to who they are listening to. 