Radio Success Is Easy Compared To Social Media

ARB's Jacquelyn Bullerman on Social Media at Arbitron Client Conference:

Success is easy to measure.  Audience growth.

Figure out what's broken and fix it.

In social, it's not that easy.  No goal can mean random acts of digital.  There is no "experienced social media expert."  Everyone is learning.

Strategy = why are we posting?

Are connections and relationships developing as you post?

Success is the pieces becoming a "whole."

Data is not a report card on your actions.  It's a compass on what's valued by your community.

President Obama hugging Michele, biggest on social was use of social media at it's finest - Data + Content + Goal.

Look beyond Facebook insights categories go look at what types of pictures or videos you posted or status the type of pic matters

New hires aren't groomed in overnights anymore. Most radio hiring is in digital department.

If your content isn't strong, it won't matter.

A great spoken word pitch that sounds like a live read must be reframed to take advantage of the internet.  Trim "keep listening for your chance to call to call in an win" BS.

Repackage content provider syndicated content to create engagement and insert yourself into that content.  You're not an RSS feed.  You want a personal relationship with your listener via your social media which drives broadcast radio, streaming or your website usage.

Figure out a way to be smoother than just always doing ads in social tactics.

Post in a way that says I care about you.  Share this with everyone you know, because I care about your community.

Invest money in your goals.  Too few radio companies are doing this.

What Share Will Move You Up To The Next Tenth Of A Rating Point?

ROI Media's Mark O'Neill at Arbitron Client Conference in Annapolis:

How much is a tenth of a rating point worth?

Track "Persons Using Measured Media" (PUMM) vs Your Audience Flow

Example:  clean up a station's 11:45 quarter hour by eliminating a stop set and moving those units into other breaks resulted in rating point growth from a .5 to a .6.  Just doing this at a time when total radio audience (cume) is going up, got the station up to a .8 after several months of having done this.

Example #2:  5:15 pm.  Took commercials out of the 5:15 break and doubled the units in the 5:45 break.  Stopped only once that hour and within two months that quarter hour had almost doubled and the long stopset at 5:45 took down the rest of the daypart.  However, since the market's PUMM was also going down at that time as opposed to earlier in the 5 pm hour, they went from a .3 to a .6 in the daypart with just that one stopset change.

A little inside baseball from JA:  A&O&B "Post-survey Box Scores" reports routinely contain this info for both all our PPM and diary markets for this reason.  Clean out the highest/growing market audience quarter hours and place clutter into quarter hours with dwindling market audience to improve the entire daypart.
The goal:  even out the station's audience flow quarter hour by quarter hour and avoid extreme "up" and "down" quarter hours.

Revenue goes down almost immediately when PPM rating points drop, but can often take several months for the revenue to catch up with audience increases. 

Lesson:  it's worth money to do what it takes to stabilize and grow rating points. Look for opportunities within your cluster where a nominal increase in AQH would yield a move up to the next tenth of a  rating point to optimize rating point-driven revenue.  That's when the programmer and sales are on the same page.

Urban PD panel (Skip Dillard, WBLS; Jason Kidd, WPGC and Jay Stevens, Radio One) Music Insights:

More from today's Arbitron Client Conference in Annapolis:

• PPM = less "favors" for record promotion people.  There is no margin for error now.
• Songs last much longer than 12 weeks and off
• Fewer titles manage to cut through
• Some titles hold up and grow even with 2,000+ spins on them
• MScore, callout and online testing's larger samples can be apples and oranges.  As a result, sometimes MScore can offer opportunity for new things, but can also doom a song much more quickly than online testing methodology

Don't Focus Too Much On Switching

As my previous post demonstrates quite graphically, it's possible to improve your competitive position, depending on the time of day and day of the week somewhere between four and perhaps even more than 15% by understanding why your audience switches to other stations and when/why they switch from shared-cume competition to you.

It's also important to remember that PPM has helped us to see that there are four kinds of listeners which can impact your success:

1. Those who turn their radio on to you first.
2. Those who only leave you when they turn off their radio.
3. Those who switch to you.
4. Those who switch away from you.

Those first three are driven by brand expectations. Only the last one is driven by your formatics and execution.

The first two are your most loyal fans. Focusing too much on #3 and #4 means you're spending too much time catering to the least loyal listeners to you.

Since being top five in daily cume and also top five in daily time spent exposed is the primary success factor as demonstrated by PPM, you can't ignore any of those four audiences. Figure out and achieve the optimum balance between satisfying your core to get the most daily occasions/days per week regularity possible while constantly bringing new cume in as well.

MScore and PPM data are the science of that.

Achieving that proper proportion - as it always has been - is the "ART" of being a great talent or programmer.

Keeping (M)Score

Media Monitors’ ability to cross-reference what PPM panelists do with what radio does - on a minute by minute basis - is providing new ways to see and understand how the average person uses radio throughout the day.

For example, this chart displays the minute by minute “normal” switching average of all stations in the top 40 US metros across a statistically-typical weekday.

This chart shows a sliding four minute window (similar to the opportunities to switch during any song). Media Monitors then tallied all the switchers to another radio station (switch off is not counted) as a proportion of the average audience during these four minutes. The process was done and aggregated for all music stations in all these markets.

That is the black graph on the chart with its scale on the left axis.

Next to that, you will see the percentage of stations in these 40 markets that are in a commercial break at each minute, as one of the obvious correlation factors and for reference only.

This is plotted as a green shade on the chart with its scale on the right.

It's noteworthy that not as many people switch stations for commercials during the workday as do during the drivetime periods.

Since this 1% to 8% of the audience is leaving one station for another, when considered broadly, the well-programmed station often gains as much as it loses if not even more by careful placement of programming based on the behavior of their shared-cume competition and listeners, but the average is about 4% in and 4% out in the majority of minutes calculated.

The highest points in this switching, 7-8 am and 4-5 pm, likely occur because of these audience members changed listening location.

If you discovered your listeners doing that, what could you do to change that behavior?

I Have Never Seen THIS Before

MScore data from multi-markets and leave it to Reba to be the first one to accomplish it and then be savvy enough to blow the horn about it!

Something tells me that you are looking at the future of music promotion here. Real usage data on a song/artist in real time.

Is THIS Why They Call The Future "A Brave New World"?

Director of Technical Sales for RCS Barry Hill's Conclave webinar last week was a fascinating presentation of the new analytical tools Media Monitors has been developing to help us all understand the new world of radio listener usage and behavior data coming online in both the U.S. and Canada, thanks to PPM.

For example, since it has always been a leap of faith requiring a certain amount of bravery to add new music, it was very comforting to see what appears to be the "normal pattern of a typical song's spin life" on the average station in this Miley Cyrus song's history of airplay and listener tracking:

After six or seven weeks of growing familiarity and acceptance, the courageous programmer is rewarded with 14 weeks or so of positive listening growth each time the song plays to be followed by the inevitable burn which turns into more tune-out than tune-in.

Before you jump to the conclusion that PPM clearly demonstrates that the average current hit's life is 20-22 weeks, take a gander at this one (guaranteed to give Alanis' promotion team some heartburn) a good example of the fact that PPM panelists sometimes do what they do and it simply defies obvious logic:

Up in August, down in September, up in October, down in November, up in December, down in January, then up for nine weeks in a row! Huh? Is it somehow seasonal in its appeal? Does it burn after four weeks and then stop being negative in another month in spite of/because of continued airplay? Are some panelists going away for a few weeks and then coming back into the panel? Or, WHAT?

"Ironic," indeed.

If you have a more plausible explanation of what's happening with this tune, I'd love to hear it. Meanwhile, this info should serve as proof that radio programming remains 50% science and 50% art and no high tech tool - as yet, at least - has changed that.

MScore: A Music Revolution

Thanks to Country Aircheck for the ink:

Looking for a reason to attend Albright & O'Malley's 2009 Pre-CRS Client Seminar on March 3? With a keynote by media research specialist Jeff Vidler, Mike O'Malley's "Roadmap '09" perceptual study and the instantly applicable work of talent coach Tommy Kramer – not to mention live performances from Josh Gracin and Jessica Andrews – its not like this platform was needing any more support. But that didn't stop Jaye Albright from adding a real kicker. This one's big.

The event's final session, prior to Andrews' musical closing, is titled, "The PPM Music Test 'MScore Switch' Is On." MScore is a number developed by Media Monitors to indicate whether a song is more or less likely to make a listener switch away from a station. And it's based on hard data.

As attendees at Country Aircheck's 2007 PPM Seminar may remember, the ability to marry the PPM's moment-by-moment listener data with Mediabase airplay data now gives us the ability to see exactly how the audience reacts to every song. But where Arbitron's Gary Marince whetted that 2007 crowd's appetite, Albright is preparing to serve a meal.

Remember, 14 markets are currently live with PPM, and 19 more will be online by year's end. Turn one of Country's deepest thinkers like Albright loose on this growing pool of data, and the results are, frankly, beyond compelling.

Here's a taste, with quotes straight from Albright's presentation:

• MScore Makes Research Look Good: "If you see callout, auditorium and online music testing, you'll see very few surprises."
• Superstars Don't Matter: "With rare exceptions, songs matter."
• First Impressions Can Mislead: "Some songs take a while to grow on the audience."
• Familiarity Has An Edge: "However, some songs grow audience with the very first week of airplay."

Of course, there are other issues with far-reaching implications for programmers, not to mention record labels. Once PPM has extended itself into the top 50 markets, how with the number of currents be affected? Albright has a prediction. The balance between programming for TSL or cume also gets close inspection.

And then there is the very real concern that a P1 PPM holder – who may be providing data for years, unlike the regularly rotating diary takers – could inadvertently become the hub around which all of the station's programming revolves. Or, as Albright asks, "Should I drop a song when it is obvious that one or two of my heavy-user panelists doesn’t like it?"

Overall, it's clear we've only yet scratched the surface of this well of data, which promises to only get deeper. "The more you see," Albright admits, "the more you'll want to see." There's also little doubt that MScore has the potential to become yet another flashpoint between labels and radio. Albright likens it to when Country started doing callout research 30 years. "But," she says, "in the long run I think it's going to be very good for all of us."

After spending 90 days drilling through data on 17 Country stations in Arbitron's 14 PPM markets, Albright has put together an eye-opening 45 minutes to cap the A&O event. Admission is free and all are welcome, save those in competitive situations with A&O clients. Email Mike (mike@albrightandomalley.com) or Jaye (jaye@albrightandomalley.com) for your invitation.