"We Don't Have A Strategy Yet"

Creating a solid strategy begins by recognizing when you lack one.

When President Obama was quoted so widely last week, it reminded me of some great advice from John Parikhal, founder of Joint Communications, The Media Fix and Breakthrough Management.

It's also a good time to ask yourself if you have one. 

John calls strategy the outline and says it must be long-term.  “Tactics are the colors that we paint with inside the outline.”

Keys to building an excellent strategy, which I assume the Prez is waiting for from the Pentagon and our potential allies:

1.  ID the win.  Establish a clear long-term goal.
2.  Know the players, both your troops and the enemy.
3.  Sift all available info to focus the plan on reality.
4.  Know the rules of offense, defense, flanking and guerrilla warfare.

Admitting you don’t have a strategy is actually a great place to start building one.  The tools to get it done (for a radio station, since I’ll leave foreign policy to greater minds):

1.  Research
2.  Advertising, promotion and marketing.
3.  Management skills.

The researcher feels every GM should spend 12 hours outside the radio station each month by simply listening to the radio with a different member of his staff and take the morning personality or team for a drive in morning traffic to listen to the radio at least once every 90 days.

Parikhal encourages his clients to learn what motivates your own staff and your listeners psychologically.  Every person is unique.  Figure out what makes each of them tick.

In your workplace, for example:

Drivers        Expressives     Analytics        Amiables
——            ——                 ——               ——
Save time    Save effort       Save face       Save the relationship
Action         Applause          Be right          Trust
Control        Social              Avoid              Support
GM             Talent             Researcher    Sales

He says that “most companies don’t understand Analytics and Amiables, in spite of the fact that they most often are the people who are the “long timers” on every staff.

For Your Tool Kit

My recent items (5 Last) "Measure It To Manage It", Simple Stats To Track,  Gauging Your Growth and Radio Management Vital Signs attracted a helpful, welcome response from Andrew Curran, COO at DMR:

Love your series of areas to measure. 

Since you mentioned having people start a spreadsheet, I thought I’d share with you one that we developed with a variety of Key Performance Indicators in mind. 

Feel free to pass it along (click to download the xls). 

One tab is a detailed view and one tab is a top line management view.

A new acronym to add to your vocabulary:  "KPI."

(5 Last) "Measure It To Manage It"

16.     Number of local stories on your website with listener comments/reactions

17.     Number of blog posts by every personality ranked by page view and responses.

18.     Open rate of your weekly e-mail (to determine effectiveness of subject lines, etc.)

19.     Text Club subscriber rate and unsubscribes

20.     Website Metrics: 

           a.  Unique Users

           b.  Total Pageviews

           c.  Top 5 Most Viewed Pages

 - a final set of numbers from some smart managers willing this week to share what they watch to be sure their stations pace toward their goals.

No doubt, you can think of many more.

So can I, but if you have 20 priorities, do you have any priorities?

Start with this 20 and focus on the handful of them where you find your farthest from where you want to be that will move you forward fastest to where you need to be.

Once you ingrain the levers on them in your daily execution, pick another five and repeat until all 20 metrics are positive.

Only then, start to look for more metrics to measure and manage.

(More) Simple Stats To Track

Readers have been sharing the numbers they watch like clockwork to be sure their stations pace positively.

A few more:

11.     Number of public appearances per week by each on air personality/estimated number of people who attended each appearance

12.     Number of cold calls per week by salesperson

13.     Number of spec spots presented to new prospects per week

14.     Number of irritating commercials which harm listening levels per week

15.     Number of advertisers per month (and names) on your competition, not you

Thanks to BCAB for inviting me to moderate their research panel which featured Chris Byrnes, Warren Kurtzman and Sean Ross, providing the idea for creating a list of key objective management data.

Gauging Your Growth

I started the list with just five.  Now, thanks to many readers, you're going to want to start a table or a spreadsheet to track these numbers on the same date each month:

6.     Annual survey of email database: how satisfied are you 1-10? (% "very vs % not)

7.     # of Facebook friends + gain/loss + followed by # of people

8.     Twitter followers (gain/loss)

9.     Total number of units available for sale per week/revenue = average unit rate (track for total and also by sales person)

10.     Number of different advertisers per month by business category

Radio Management Vital Signs

Crucial (but no-cost) numbers to track to make sure your station is on course:

1.     Call your station’s business office phone.  How many rings before someone answers?

2.     (if you have ratings) Weekly cume (daily cume if PPM) trend

3.     Target demo TSL (daily sessions if PPM) trend

4.     Track streaming hours tuned monthly.

5.     Contacts in your listener email database (grown/loss)

Write these numbers down on the same date every month.  If they're not consistent or even better, growing, you're dying.

What else do you trend to be sure you are on pace toward your goals?
 

Why The "Record" Business' Hair Is On Fire

A study from Strategy Analytics reports that downloads and streaming music services such as Pandora and Spotify are set to pass CDs as the music industry’s biggest U.S. revenue source.

SA's Ed Barton posted data on its website predicting U.S. digital music sales will rise to $3.4 billion this year, moving it ahead of the $3.38 billion in revenue from CDs and vinyl.

Within 3 years, digital music will surpass physical purchases globally, he adds.

I can't possibly top the comment in reaction to that news from The Conclave's Tom Kay in this week's Tattler:  "No wonder I’ve had such a devil of a time trying to find that Lady Gaga 8-track."