Alice's Restaurant Still Rocks....

28° - sunny at 10:38am

Welcome to Black Friday. No I did not get to the mall at 4am; I actually slept 'til 9.

If any PD or GM has their doubts as to whether their Classic Rock station should be airing Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant Massacree" on Thanksgiving Day - here's some totally unscientific data to ponder.

To preface: over the past week, I've written about special Thanksgiving Day programming stations around the country were offering - and that includes those stations that have promoted the airplay of Arlo's 1967 18:20 masterpiece. Writings on this blog are indexed by search engines such as Google and a few others.

On a normal weekday - this blog typically receives 85 to 125 unique visitors. Saturday and Sunday about half that.

Yesterday a holiday, I was expecting weekend visitor levels - if that much.

Surprise: the "unique visitor" numbers were more than double their usual weekday levels. Most were first time visitors too. All new cume!

And the search engine "keywords" that brought them here were all a variation on "Alice's Restaurant" on station XXXX.

A small example of those searches is on the right. Pretty cool to see!

It's something to think about when putting together plans for next year's Thanksgiving Day programming - especially if you were a classic rock station and passed on airing Alice's Restaurant yesterday.

A Movement?

49° - overcast, cold & windy at 11:51am.

Did I mention that autumn hit Mid-Michigan? It's cold outside!

The past week has brought wise words from wise folks regarding the current state of our industry - much of it sharing a common theme:

Bill Figenshu: "The press has created stars out of financial operators. We have made company leaders personalities, who now believe they can operate radio from the budget line, not the content line. Senior executives with creative content ideas, on-air and online, will be the trend in 2008. Not bankers."

Lee Abrams: "Most broadcast groups are run by “operators”. They ‘operate’. Talented, but they could be successfully running anything, like a group of Wendy’s franchises..." "That’s how many radio operators are. Disattached from the creative product."


Dave Lange: "The key to our future lies in THE PRODUCT and we all see the need to get away from all the money concerns and the 20 year philosophy that sales and money solves all problems."


Fred Jacobs: "There are thousands of creative, smart people who are silently suffering inside radio stations, dying to re-prove their worth and value."



Mark Ramsey: "...it is time for our industry to step up, and that means our leaders need to step up. This is not about perception. This is not about radio's "image." This is about real, tangible action."


John Rook: "If radio is to reinvent its days of success, it must replant the seeds allowing program directors to take full responsibility of programming. It is they who should be interviewed and quoted about programming, not the company head. Until then radio will be without programmers."

Dave Martin (back in August) quoting author Gary Hamel: "I dream of companies that actually deserve the passion and creativity of the folks who work there, and naturally elicit the very best that people have to give."

Putting these quotes together inspired by Seth Godin and one of his many pieces on spreading ideas:

"The most important thing you can do is choose who you're hanging out with. The second high-leverage thing is to put dynamics in place that reinforce the ideas you'd like to see spread. Celebrate the heroes. Make it easy for those ideas to spread..."


Also as inspiration - Arlo Guthrie's classic 1967 recording of Alice's Restaurant Massacree:

"And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in - singin' a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. And friends - they may think it's a movement."

There's no other business I'd rather be in. An absolute. That said - let's keep this movement going.