Locality Switch

Just because you’re a community station doesn’t mean you will have an audience. I don’t believe marketing yourself as “community” will get you more than a handful of listeners, at the most.

If this is true, how does a general interest station market themself?

It’s a tough one, but tough problems encourage creativity. And creativity, I hope, is in our domain. After all, we are a creative medium, right?

Firstly, let’s check out what the CBAA has to say in their CBAA Handbook.

Marketing relies heavily on designing programs or policies which satisfy the needs and desires of its target market. It particularly involves research and promotion. Marketing is about discovering your clients and identifying their characteristics. More importantly, it is also about the type of radio station you are, what you want to achieve, how to go about it and how to measure your success.

Source: CBAA Handbook: Marketing

This is very wise advice. In fact, this must be my favorite chapter in the handbook, and is probably more relevant to us now more than when it was first written. At least from what I see of the general interest community stations that are around me (or what I don’t see!), I think we need help at marketing.

So, the CBAA reckons we need to “satisfy the needs and desires of its target market”. That’s all very well and good, but if you’re licensed as a general interest station for a local geographic area, your interests are probably defined as ‘whoever lives in the area’.

There is also the issue of what to market. What should we really be selling to the community? On air programs? Volunteering? Sponsorship? Donating? With so many choices, the default thing to market is everything, all at once! This is great, except people don’t like having a million things shoved down their throats. They need time to digest everything.

What should we do?

What I suggest is placing focus on a particular aspect of your station, and then push that for a couple of months. For example, you may want to have an increased amount of hits on your website (an easy way to measure an increase in awareness and interest). Go crazy trying to get your brand and URL out there. Spend two months trying to push this whole idea into your local community.

Be creative. Find all of the noticeboards in the area and get something interesting posted up on those; something catchy and memorable. Approach the local sports club and ask if you can get stuff in their newsletter. See if the local schools can do the same. What about a notice in the local newspapers?

But wait. Before you go ahead and push something like this, you need goals. This is critical. Without goals, your team won’t know what they’re aiming for. They won’t know if they’re succeeding, or doing badly. After a while of going crazy trying to push an idea, they will loose interest, because they have no metrics to measure up against.

What sort of goals should you set?

Firstly, they should be realistic, but just a bit out of reach of what you are currently are attaining. In the instance of increased website hits, there is no point saying you want 500 unique visitors this month, if you already have that amount of visitors on a regular basis.

It’s important to set goals which are measurable. If you can’t measure the response to a campaign, it’s almost pointless. Saying you want more listeners isn’t a good goal to set, because how do you measure listeners? Sure, you can do a survey, but those are expensive and take some time.

Be creative. Have goals. Have fun!

The Community Broadcasting Foundation announced in their July 2009 Email Newsletter that they would soon be offering grants for IP based Outside Broadcast equipment. Well, it’s finally arrived. Here’s the details.

Any long term or temporary community station without any existing IP OB equipment may apply for the grant of up to $2,500. This opportunity is only open this year, so if you miss the 12th October 2009 deadline for submissions, then there is the chance you may never be able to apply for this type of grant.

Taking a look through the application form, you are asked how many OBs you did in 2009, and are asked to list the last five OBs you have performed. While it does say “if applicable” next to this bit, my guess is that stations with a previous history of OBs will be given priority.

The application form has a table with different categories of items, with a place to write in your quoted amount for each of the ones you are applying for. Categories include notebook computers, USB modems, Mixing consoles, Microphones, Audio interfaces and most curiously, Audio Streaming Software.

The Audio Streaming Software category is either badly worded, or implies that they don’t want to fund hardware solutions. It looks like AudioTX and Tieline are out of the question. I suppose this isn’t surprising, as the OB-over-IP Manual released by the CBF didn’t really cover any hardware solutions (or any open source software packages, either!).

What does this grant opportunity mean for the sector? It means that it may now be possible for many stations to move away from POTS codecs and leased lines which have been used for traditional outside broadcasts, and move towards IP equipment over 3G connections. It will allow for much more programming freedom, and will possibly allow for more OBs to occur.

Easier and cheaper OBs will hopefully allow for more community interaction and involvement, and that’s what we’re here for. Right?

Governments have a tendency to make things much harder than they have to be. Take, for example. social media. It’s a simple thing, isn’t it? Even a kid with elementary computer skills can understand how to post something to YouTube, a Blog, or Facebook. Why do our politicians get it so wrong?

Bureaucracy.

Let’s look at the short lived blog of Senator Conroy’s: The short lived Digital Economy blog. It looked and smelt like a government website, and got so many things wrong.

How about the Twitter account of my local Mayor, Councillor Larry Bolitho. The tweets are written in third person, each one starting with “Larry Bolitho”, and proceeding to tell us where he is. There aren’t any personal thoughts in there. Oh, and have you seen the instruction manual and disclaimer which comes with it?

Responses will be at the discretion of the Mayor… Who@HillsShireMayor chooses to follow on Twitter is at the discretion of the Mayor.

It would be great if our politicians could get with it on this whole social media thing. Some of their present attempts are just embarrassing.

However, there is someone who is up to date on this whole social media arena. Barack Obama. Have you seen the Whitehouse website? It’s beautiful, functional, accessable, and also integrates with social media platforms.

Anil Dash wrote a blog post about Government internet startups. He notes that they are now actually doing things right:

Now, .gov websites have historically been backwaters at best, a bunch of awkwardly-designed, poorly defined sites that only met the bare requirements of a web presence. But of course the current administration is comprised in great part of digital natives, and it’s remarkable how quickly they’ve remade the .gov world into not just a number of compelling websites, but into a broad set of platforms that are going to inspire as much technological innovation as Twitter, Facebook or the iPhone did when they unveiled their technology platforms.

It’s great to see what the Government of the United States of America is turning out, in terms of websites and useful web tools. They are being innovative, and are truly leading the way in government web presences. Countries around the world should use this as the benchmark, and strive to meet it.

Let’s hope the rest of the world can see the benefits of social media and the web, and start doing things properly. It can work to their advantage.

Twitter’s Trending Topics is where you can see the most popular topics on Twitter at the moment, and check out the stream of tweets related it it. It all works in real time, which opens it up to a whole heap of spam.

Twitter makes is really easy to get your message in front of a large audience through these trending topics, which spammers are utterly exploiting. To get your message in there, just include the trending key words in your tweet, and you magically appear in the stream for the topic.

It’s not only the spammy messages which are annoying – it’s also those foreign language messages which appear in the streams. I don’t need to see the tweets from those speaking another language – it doesn’t help me one bit.

How can this spam be stopped? Well, it would be fairly easy to remove the foreign language tweets from the stream – just have a set of common words for each language, and if the tweet matches another language’s key words, then Twitter can hide it from my stream.

The issue of real spam would be a bit trickier to fix, but I believe it is a very doable. The first thing to do would be for Twitter to scan each tweet and see if it has a whole heap of trending topic keywords in it. These are the most obvious type of trending topic spam.

Second thing to do would be placing a little link on each Tweet in the stream of Trending Topics which says “spam”. If people click that, it flags it for moderation. Oh, and to avoid abuse of the spam button, it should be only be available to users who have been on the site for a few months.

Finally, I believe that it should take a certain amount of time of someone being a user before they can actually appear in the trending topics stream. It won’t hurt if the new members don’t get in the stream, will it?

These are a few simple ideas which I humbly present to Twitter to help remove the low quality contributions by people who feel it is necessary to spam up my tweet-box.

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, you would know that I have been at Hope 103.2 all week, on Work Experience. It’s been great. Truly, it’s probably been the best week I’ve had for several years.

I learnt heaps, especially about Axia Audio over IP systems, as well as Dalet 5.1, and all sorts of other tech goodies they have in master control. I was able to go around to each of the departments at the station, and see what their jobs entail, and help out a bit. I even got to do a cold call to try and sell sponsorship!

However, the best part wasn’t the tech. It wasn’t the marketing, sales, programming, promotions, events, creative, production, or on air teams. It was the atmosphere of the whole team at Hope 103.2, and the great vibe of everyone. I haven’t seen such a unified team in a long time (I believe the last time was LoveThat a few years back, but it was a smaller team).

I’ve met some great people at Hope 103.2, and I hope to keep in touch with them as time goes by. Perhaps I should even sign up as a volunteer? Would I have enough time in the day if I did that? Maybe. I suppose I should just be lead by God, and follow his guidance.

Anyway, thanks so much, Hope 103.2!!

I started work experience yesterday at Hope 103.2. It was an absolutely fantastic day; I can see why people enjoy working there!

However, our school’s woodwork room caught fire today! It has been reported that the fire was in the Dust Extractor, and an investigation is taking place as to why it started. My guess is that it had not been cleaned out properly on a regular basis, but that isn’t for me to speculate on.

Luckily, no one was hurt. The whole school evacuated pretty quickly, which is to their credit.

However, it’s amazing at how fast news travels these days. The community really drives a lot of what is being published by the media. The Hills Shire Times had a story published (with an accompanying photo gallery) on the event by 1pm, and I heard the story being covered on the Fairfax radio news on both the 1pm and 2pm bulletins.

I’m pretty sure this story wouldn’t have been covered if technology isn’t what it is. Think about it: the news reporter probably wouldn’t had to of been at the school – a resident or student could have called the media, or the Fire Station sent through a media report to Fairfax who in turn published that.

The photo gallery probably would have been the doing of a resident who emailed them through from the convenience of their camera phone. (It wouldn’t have been a student because these shots are from the bus bay, and the school evacuates to the oval, which is on the other side of the school)

Of course, this is all just speculation, and I could be wrong on this particular issue. However, there is no doubt that this is how the media works for larger scale events – you see “viewer footage” on the television news all the time. The media is changing, and it is becoming increasingly community driven.

Spring is coming soon, and in The Hills, we celebrate with the Orange Blossom Festival – it’s an annual festival encompassing over forty events over a two week period.

2CCR FM is the local broadcaster for this area, so it’s our duty to broadcast as much of this as we can. With the festival official community opening on the 12th September, we have only a month to get our act together. Luckily, our first meeting was last night.

I’m hoping to broadcast at least five or so of these events, mainly the outdoor fetes and markets they are holding. The general nature of these outdoor fetes means there is no phone line available, meaning we can pot any POTS codecs away (not that we ever owned a pair!). I’m hoping for Audio-over-IP all the way, man! (Using open-source software, such as IceCast)

I won’t go into the details of our meeting right now – I’ll reveal bits and pieces as the days go on.

However, here’s a few key things which I hope to work on for the festival to ensure we really reach out to our community, and make the most of it:

• Full OBs – not just live crosses The presenters, music, etc. should all come live from the venue to capture the full spirit of the event
• Heaps of people I don’t want a half-heated attempt from anyone; we need swarms of our people dresses up in the polo shirt mingling with the crowds of onlookers
• Heaps of Interviews Quick chats on-air with members of the public, as well as longer interviews with interesting people
• Particular focus on membership and sponsorship We need to make sure we talk with interested people to sign them up as members; the same goes for potential sponsors – it needs to be viable
• Heaps of brochures No one should walk past us without getting one of our fancy glossy brochures

It’s going to be a long journey to get the results I dream of, but I know we can make it. The key to making this work, in my opinion, is to make sure we involve as many people as possible from the start. When the meeting was called, I made sure I called heaps of people to confirm they could come (never rely on a mass email for anything!). That is a start, but that needs to keep happening throughout this whole thing.

Wish us luck! (And if you want to help, email me!)

I want to share a video with you. It’s a video of Steve Ballmer, from Microsoft, getting really excited on stage about software developers.

You can see, this guy gets really excited about his community of developers! Community.

There’s a reason Steve is excited about developers: Microsoft’s success is thanks to the massive amount of applications developed around their operating systems.

Community radio is also driven by community, hence the title. If the community doesn’t support community radio, we won’t be able to run much longer.

So, are you passionate about your community?