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!
So much for my thought to edit Ryan Seacrest’s Wikipedia page to say he was once spotted drunk in Los Angeles wearing a sombrero screaming lines from ¡Three Amigos!
Being anonymous makes people confident that they can trash a Wikipedia page, but sometimes you’re not as anonymous as you might think. When the WJBQ Wikipedia page was vandalized, it was a pretty simple matter for me to trace the IP address of the edit and find out who did it. That was fun!
Actually, I think the real reason that Wikipedia is limiting edits is because of what Frank did on 30 Rock:
Will Senator Susan Collins comments on John Edwards have any effect on her campaign? That’s what the Portland Press Herald asked retired political science professor Oliver Woshinsky today:
In connection with this election, I think it will have exactly zero effect. There are so many things that are going to happen between now and the election. The economy and oil prices are going to take absolute precedence, and the war is still on people’s minds.
No offense to Mr. Woshinsky, but that’s a big duh.
So while I still have your attention, and since I won’t have it for much longer as this whole thing starts to die down, let me address something about our interview with Senator Collins. One question I see asked over and over on the comments in blogs and on the Press Herald’s site is why we didn’t ask Senator Collins about John McCain’s past indiscretions. Answer: It’s old news, and not the current water cooler talk among our target audience.
We asked the senator a year ago about Larry Craig when he was the talk of the nation, and she was also very candid with her opinion on that matter. We’ve even brought up silliness from John McCain previously which you can hear in our interview with Senator Collins here:
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The thing I wonder most about this newsmaker we seemed to create, is would it have even been news if we didn’t have the video? Would anyone have gotten the audio from our daily podcast?
The Susan Collins video is still spreading to my astonishment. It made the front page above the fold of the Porltand Press Herald which quoted me in a telephone interview and from this blog. I caught it last night on WCSH 6’s NewsCenter at 5:30, and it made the 6PM newscast on WGME 13.
The Associated Press picked up on the story and it’s made its way to The Boston Globe.
Now the question on my mind is how far will this go? What started out on political blogs is now spreading through mainstream New England press. Will it hit network news? CNN? Fox? NESN? The Food Network? It still unfolds.
There’s one thing that should be pointed out in WCSH’s story and a few others I’ve seen posted, and thanks to bloggers for noticing too. Senator Collins was NOT asked if she thought the child belonged to John Edwards. She volunteered her opinion on that.
I’ve heard from Collins staff and she is still a friend of the station and is still willing to appear on our show in the future. When she does it should be an interesting conversation to say the least.
Here are a few more links to sites that are covering this story. A few of these links are the same story as it was pulled from the AP. WCSH 6’s video is above, and kudos to them for including embed codes for their videos.
I never expected this to happen, but when I posted video of our interview with Senator Susan Collins on The Q Morning Show, the Collins haters seemed to muckle right onto my little video to bash her as much as they can. They’re all in an uproar because when talking about the John Edwards adultery scandal the senator said:
Would he go sneaking into a hotel in the middle of the night to see a child who’s not his? I don’t think so.
This is awesome! Well, kinda awesome. I got all excited when we received a call at the station saying the video was making the rounds on the blogosphere. I quickly checked my web stats and found no unusually high traffic, no trackbacks, no Google searches landing them on the Collins post. After a Google blog search, I found that they were linking back to our ustream site for the video. I guess I can hold off on loading thejeffparsonsproject.com up with Google Ad Sense.
As for what Senator Collins said in the video, I can’t believe Collins haters are worked up over that. Is a senator who actually speaks what everyone else is thinking really that bad? Kind of refreshing if you ask me.
Collins haters can bash her all they want, but the truth is she WILL be re-elected, so suck it up and deal. For the record, in case you care, I’m not Republican nor Democrat. .
I’m not sure what’s worse: her speculative comments about John Edwards or the masturbatory nature of the on-air talent at the radio station
I’ll have to keep this short because my masturbatory nature doesn’t allow me to type well: STFU.
As I write this, the list of blogs covering this is growing and not ONE only Collins Watch links back to thejeffparsonsproject.com. Bastards. Thanks! At least abc.com mentioned The Q Morning Show. I’m waiting by the phone for them to call. I’ll be here all day.
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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.
