One A Day

Yesterday's list of 16 metrics A&O&B encourages you to track consistently (Programming By The Numbers) is completely overwhelming.

So, try this:  put a different one of them on your day planner every other workday.

Give yourself 30 minutes the first day to update the stats on that area of your responsibilities.  Set up a once-monthly meeting with anyone else who is responsible for that area.  Have them track the numbers and bring them in writing to this meeting to distribute with everyone.

Don't allow it to go longer than a half hour.  Look at the metrics for that one thing compared to the last few months of both your radio station and your competition.

If you're trending up, bettering the folks across the street, give pats on the back all around, award rewards and set up the next update on that one measure one month from today.  The better you're doing, the fewer meetings for all.

If you're not doing as well as you'd like on that set of stats, encourage everyone who has anything to do with it to spend some time later today thinking about what we could do to improve.

Set up a one hour meeting tomorrow to brainstorm, evaluate and prioritize all of the ideas you can generate.  Save the last ten minutes of the meeting to assign duties.

At the next full staff meeting report to everyone on the issue and what needs to be done by the whole team to fix it.

Get back together next month and repeat.

Do what W. Edwards Deming recommended.

If you don't know who he is, it's time to start reading.

Or, reach out.  A&O&B will help adapt his principles to your specific situation.

Programming By The Numbers

Thanks to Radio Ink Magazine for being the impetus for this article by Mike, Becky and me.  They published it yesterday.  In case you missed it: 

Nielsen’s recent report that for the first time in many years the country format national average shares experienced three down months in a row combined with Mike O'Malley’s almost-simultaneous blog post highlighting the A&O&B national country music database music acceptance trends has to be at least a little concerning for Brand Managers.

My post last week in reaction to just-published NuVooDoo format perceptual data showing that country radio success tends to be more music-driven than other formats, while the highest-rated A&O&B client stations have more personality-driven appeal than our “average” client and at the same time Dan O'Day and Becky Brenner have been enumerating the traits of the very best PDs, all of which no doubt made any sharp programmer sit up and wonder what success factors most deserve their time.

Perhaps (though I doubt it) there may have been a time when a radio programmer only had to worry about how their station sounded and “sounding great” was sufficient to be a winner. 

Even all the way back back to when Gordon McClendon, Todd Storz and radio’s many other creative format and research pioneers of the last six decades attacked existing ways of doing things and won, they tracked specific numbers.  You could hear those stats reflected in how their radio stations sounded.

Today’s complex media, lifestyle and demographic environments create a new problem. 

There are so many things you could possibly track which could help you win or lose, the key to success is prioritizing them, understanding which ones drive you to where you need to be as well as what you need to do in your programming to bring them to life:

• Ratings:  Share, persons, total cume audience, heavy users percentage, daily, weekly, monthly trends.
• Stream audience:  uniques, average active sessions, listen live tune-ins, mobile downloads, mobile streaming.
• Music:  how many of the songs you play most often are “favorites” for a third or more of your target?  How many are rated “positively” by at least 65-70%?  How many are burnt to the point that double digit percentages of your target is tired of hearing them on radio?  How many of the songs you play were “never liked” by similar percentages?  Who do listeners feel plays the most?  The best variety according to their tastes?
• Formatics:  what proportion of the entire market’s radio listeners understand your unique position and consider it valuable to them?  Does your content drive usage at the exact times the rating methodology requires on a consistent basis compared to the other choices available?
• Personalities:  how likable are they face-to-face with those on other stations?  How memorable are they?  What are they being remembered for?  How high are their negatives versus their positive images?
• Outreach:  how many non-commercial appearances do you do compared to your competition?  How well do you take advantage of them in turning listener contact into loyalty, giving the folks who do see you reasons to listen immediately?
• Reception:  what are people coming in to talk about?  What questions are they asking when they phone us?  How many are positive/negative on specific things we do?
• Website and blogs:  Visits, page views, uniques, average session length, page views per session, blogs page views, video views.
• Listener phone lines:  what are they requesting?  Complaining about?  Where are they calling from?
• Branding:  how does your brand make people feel?  How does that compare to all other stations you compete with?
• Technical:  can everyone you need to listen receive you with a powerful signal?  How does your station compare to other choices?
• Social:  Facebook likes, people talking about this, engaged users, viral reach, paid reach.  Twitter followers, following, tweets.  Others:  what percentage of your target uses each of the others?  How viable in similar stats as above are you in the ones they make use of the most?
• Database:  Email database compared to your competition?  Loyalty club members?  Response rates?  New %?  % in metro?  Contests vs non-contest players?  Active in the past 90 days?  Text club members, # of texts, response rates.
• On air contesting:  how important is it to your usage?  Do you dominate the image or are you beaten by someone else?
• Info elements:  weather, news, community involvement and service.  How important is each to your success and how strong is your ownership of the images that matter most.
• Events:  what percentage of your target knows what you do?  Are they motivated to participate?  What other events do they attend and would like you do be involved with?  Where are the best locales for our external marketing?  What % of our time is being spent in those places?

Ask any radio researcher.  If you have the money and listeners are willing to take the time, they can design a perceptual questionnaire that tabs all of these metrics for you and many more.

The challenge for Audio Program Director/Brand Managers today is that every one of the time-proven data points still matters a lot, but the nature of today’s changing listening patterns means that many more new numbers you must track are also crucial to understand and compare in every heritage and new media competitive environment.

Prioritizing and measuring them all while acting on what they tell you about all station activities and endeavors in fun, creative, authentic ways so that it all feels and seems “easy” is what builds a lasting winner.

That is how you get to the number which has always mattered the most:  #1.

You Can’t Manage Time

.. but you can work to prevent it from managing YOU.

• Do a weekly priority plan each Sunday evening.  Make appointments with yourself during the coming well to be sure you complete these tasks.  If it will take 45 minutes, slot in an hour for it.
• Create two file folders, one with your name on it and the other your boss’ name.  Give the one with your name on it to your boss and show him the one with his name on it.
• Save all discussion items for each other in the folders and plan two meetings a week where you go through both folders together as quickly as possible.  This way, your meetings are never dominated by one topic and each of you can prioritize the things they need the other’s help on just before each meeting.
• Never touch a piece of paper twice.  Deal with it, delegate it, file it or toss it.

Yes, of course, you have long known these tricks.

The real trick is doing it.

"Whoever wants to be a judge of human nature should study people's excuses."
-- Christian Friedrich Hebbel, German poet

Top 10 Time Wasters

Arthur A. Hawkins II wrote a book on business effectiveness I bought in 1996.  It's out of print, I just learned when I attempted to buy a copy for a client, so I fear that this blog may be the only place you can get these tips:

• Procrastination & Excuses.  If you don’t start, you can’t finish.  Reach your goals & objectives by continually working toward them.
• Running Errands & Traveling.  Plan ahead.  Combine tasks and trips.
• Rushing.  Don’t try to do everything at once or wait until the last minute.  List what must be done and the time it takes to do it.  Schedule and plan ahead but allow for the unexpected.
• Telephone, Mail and E-Mail.  Why are you calling/writing?  Clearly define your purpose and what you want to accomplish.  When you’ve accomplished your objective, hang up and move on.
• Paperwork, Reports & Memos.  Keep is short and sweet.  Get to the point immediately and be clear about it.
• Meetings.  Schedule meetings carefully-time, date, location, length, type, attendees.  Avoid unnecessary meetings.
• Television.  Informed viewer or couch potato?  Determine what’s really important to you.  Be a self-starter, do something important.  Turn it off!
• Planning & Decision Making.  To accomplish what you want, you must act!  Plan it out in detail ahead of time.  Bottom line:  Get the job done.  Decide!
• Computer.  Why make entries already there?  Plan-know what you need and where & how to get it.  Back it up.  Limit your time on line.
• Just Say YES.  Don’t bite off more than you can chew.  If you can’t fit something into your schedule, no matter how tempting, don’t accept it!

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?
 

Time Saver

Kevin King, PD and aka "Hobie" at Cat Country 98.7/Pensacola taught me this trick more than a decade ago and I can testify that it works!

For all the paper on your desk that never goes away and doesn't require action, put it in your "MTWGA" file. 

Check the file every two weeks, either take action right away or toss. 

"MTWGA - Maybe This Will Go Away"

Do your 'to do' list for the next day before you leave for home.  Check e-mail in the morning before you leave for work.  Saves an hour of work starting your day.

Face it:  managing your time requires quickly deciding what NOT do to.

How Much Time Should You Put Into Anything?

The Network Solutions conference in London was about social networking, so that's what these very smart folks are focusing on (click to watch the video montage). BUT, it's really about everything you are asked to do.

Time management tip: "Are you getting more out of it than you put into it?"