Wednesday Blogs

60° - light rain/mist at 10am. Left: view from the day job window - a mixed office/residential area on the northside of downtown Lansing.

Good Morning from Michigan. Clouds/fog/rain - but quite warm this morning. A nice rainy fall day.

Around my blogosphere:

Listener Engagement. We've written about this many times over the last 20 months. This morning Fred Jacobs contributes more to the conversation this morning. With apologies to my friend for overquoting:

"A radio station social networking initiative is about engagement. It is about providing listeners with the chance to discuss, dig deeper, and get even more emotional about your people and your programming. Until now, the audience has been forced to remain passive, with the exception of showing up at station events. With social networking, they can get in the game, participate, and become more loyal and knowledgeable about a station and its brand."

"It's just a matter of providing them with the means to connect with one another. We see this at focus groups and Listener Advisory Board groups. Ten strangers come together to talk about your station, and end up in the parking lot, arguing and sharing their views about music, bands, and yes, your station. Many other consumer brands would kill to have the type of emotional connection that many stations have with their customers."

Would kill indeed! Very cool stuff! Fred's post here.

Telling It Like It Is. Mark Ramsey sums up the current PPM controversy/litigation in a few words:

"This is a case of the interests of the radio industry and its advertisers being hijacked by a small number of selfish parties who don't like PPM because PPM doesn't like them as much as diaries do. Pure and simple."

Mark's complete post here.

Webcasting: Monday's Edison Media-sponsored Streaming/Music Royalties was fantastic (although the audio quality a little less than ideal). If you missed, its archived here.

During the webcast - Attorney David Oxenford had some great contributions to the webcast and offered some great real world ideas for radio, especially the smaller markets to expand their reach and consumer convenience.

David mentioned making your newscasts available for listening anytime on the web...and stations that do local sports offering 3 or 4 area games through web streaming; since you can only do one on the air (of course, HD could change that!). High School sports typically means $ for small market radio.

It was time well-spent and kudos to Edison Media's Tom Webster for putting it all together.

Scratch. Pop. Click. Vinyl on the air. Randy Raley's doing it once a week...tracking an album on his classic rock station in Normal, Illinois. Very cool. Read about the adventure here.

Have a great Wednesday!