Building Buzz

Mark Ramsey did a terrific presentation a few years ago at CRS on “How To Build A Buzz Plan.”  Here’s a brief replay.

Step #1 - using buzz to your advantage

Are we buzz-worthy?

1.  Are we that good?
2.  What’s NEW?
3.  Is the station easy to talk about?
4.  Authenticity rules.  Make only claims you can support.
5.  Find network “hubs” (influencers in your social circle)
6.  Get those "huggers" involved in your radio station.
7.  Give away “free samples,” bite-size audio and video chunks of your radio station.
8.  Be outrageous and surprising.
9.  Fight for a well-defined cause (see ice buckets for ALS - but once it gets that big, you may not be able to "own" it.  Best to create your own local events.)
10.  Build a listener community.  Grease the wheels of buzz starting with them at live and online events.

A plan to get you to "10 out of 10," starts tomorrow.

Does Anyone "Binge" On Your Blog?

In the news:

• People Are Totally Binge-Watching Arrested Development
• Binge Viewing: TV's Lost Weekends
• Is Binge Viewing Good or Bad for Netflix?
• Eight Great Shows You Haven't Binge-Watched
• Binge Watching Is Our Future

I will leave it to smarter minds than mine whether waiting until the weekend to gorge on one whole TV series by viewers is good or bad for the future of Netflix and all of traditional media, but this much is clear:  creating something so delicious that the audience can't wait to fully savor it all in one lengthy session is greatness defined.

Are you podcasting and blogging every day?  Is it so terrific that your listeners make a point of coming to your website or through social media to savor everything you created this week?

If not, as good as your traditional ratings and audience shares, your content isn't good enough to compete in what is certainly to become tomorrow's media.

Heck, if you're not reading this material every single day, MY content isn't good enough either.

I'm working on it.  How about you?

A 24/7 News Source

If you are the lone person in your studios over the long holiday weekend and even the usual local sources are staffed lightly if at all, how do you stay in touch with "the news" locally?

Twitter has a few lessons in how to do that.

Which is very helpful, but is also a reminder of how easily local radio could be replaced by social media as a local information/buzz/interactivity source for your listeners unless what goes between the songs is immediate, in the know and in the now, 24/7.

Voice tracking is convenient and easy for YOU, of course, but what's in it for the listener?

“Oh, Wow?” Or, “Oh, Crap?”

Clear Channel’s WMZQ/Washington’s 3.8-3.6 October-November 12+ ARB trend of course can’t be attributed to any one thing, but the station’s 3.7 (July)-3.9 (August)- 4.3 (September) moves in the wake of going commercial free every Tuesday from 8:00 am to 6:00 pm since August, among other things, may underscore that keeping a station constantly fresh, even when you’re doing something you know listeners really love is an important part of the game.

Is it saying that they even get used to a full day commercial free and it can become old news after a couple months? If so, can ANYTHING be kept fresh and top-of-mind enough??

With that in mind, a client PD asked me this week if A&O has an "oh wow" oldies list for country after reading online about the pros/cons of maintaining freshness of destinational formats by maintaining/platooning spice songs in and out.

We do, and also could, of course, start a comments thread in reply to this thought of the many, many country novelty songs, could-a/should-a been's and one hit wonders of the format over six or more decades.

There are hundreds of them.

But, country is a transitional format with a constant need to keep a great balance of male, female, 18-24, 25-34, 35-44 and 45-54 appeal, let alone the right mix of “P-1” music vs “P-2” appeal songs, I recommend looking for “oh wow” songs from new music rather than opening up marginal gold songs that one age group might find exciting to hear but another group will simply not get the musical reference point from before they came to country music.

The Band Perry’s “If I Die Young,” which of course has turned into a breakthrough #1 hit for an exciting new group started for me as an “oh wow” song which added a nice quality of freshness to our sound because it was so different from everything else when it first came out 30+ weeks ago.

Zac Brown Band, Jason Aldean, Carrie Underwood, Miranda Lambert, Chris Young, Luke Bryan, Lady Antebellum and many others got their first traction on country playlists with an “oh, wow, what/who was that?” song. Taylor Swift’s “Tim McGraw” not only did that on radio, but also on the ACM Awards TV show when she went into the audience and sang it face to face to Tim.

Now, THAT moment was a WOW.

Look at the playlist of some of country’s most-successful PPM stations and you’ll see “buzz record” new music being used very cleverly.

Consultant playlists, by definition are “safe,” since we build our national recommendations on consensus research, but A&O sometimes adds new music right into heavy rotation when we hear music that creates sizzle.

So, for me, country’s “oh wow” category is built most often on exciting new songs that resonate with the values and universal life stories of all the ages we need to energize every age and gender.

How about you? What songs do you use to keep your rotations fresh? How do you play them?

The Immense Power Of Buzz

147, 262 and counting.

Need I say more?

When is the last time you did something to make a statement that 147,000 people noticed and wanted to support your efforts in under 24 hours?

Stand for something meaningful.
Be who you are.
Act on your beliefs.
Do it in a big way.
Show courage.
Take responsibility.
And, unlike Steven, try to keep it legal.

For Example

A reader emailed me this morning, asking what I meant when I said:

"You’d experiment with new sounds which excite you so as to gain an edge over other radio stations your target might also spend time with."

... in yesterday's post. Here's an example, on the air right now at many A&O client stations, in spite of the concerns pro/con whether new artists like Tyler Dickerson's opportunity closed with Disney's announcement closing his Nashville label last week.

I think he has an impressive debut LP and on it is a very clever track that could not be more topical right now, "Save A Few Billion For Us," so we created a special "economy mix" of the song (click to listen, right click and "save as" to download it) to build some fun and buzz.

If you like it, feel free to download and spin it. Gettin' viral is what it's all about!

I'd love to know if you use it, how it goes and would love to hear what original musical fun-makers you invent for your listeners as well.

April Fool!

As Tom Taylor reminded us all this morning:

"Successful April 1 stunts leave everybody feeling good. Bad ones leave local cops unhappy and some aggrieved citizen writing the FCC about the “hoax rule.” Radio’s gotten egg on its face many times for half-baked ideas that sounded great in the studio, but which had disastrous consequences out in the real world."

Last year, Dave Pettitt and his Island Radio/Nanaimo team orchestrated what I think may be one of the best executed community deceptions I have ever heard. The key: they had all local officials not only informed at the planning stage, but also got them to help pull it off.

"When listeners called our "City Hotline" they received a message from Kim and myself. People still stop us and tell they were had. It was a pretty successful April Fools Joke."

Day #1: a planted news story, based on fact, but with a silly local angle.
Day #2: (April Fools Day): The story becomes the day's topical talk-about (click to listen)
Day #3: (click to listen) Listeners react to be sure everyone knows it was all in fun.

That's a textbook case of how it's done! What are you planning?

Cume

I called Country Aircheck last week to chat with Lon Helton when their ace statistician Jeff Green happened to be answering the phone.

Jeff’s encyclopedic knowledge includes songs, artists, music, radio and many other things, not the least of which is Arbitron ratings data.

He had the sound of slight panic in his voice as he asked if I had been watching the PPM trends of country radio cumes in the 13 markets now currency. I had, of course, and we both agreed that country’s cume in all of the markets was higher six months ago before the data was currency.

Now, with extra sample for ethnic populations and 18-34’s, and the markets having officially said goodbye to diaries, country radio cumes have been slipping across the board.

Worrisome.

Green asked if I thought the trend was due to ARB methodology or to country music trends.

Both things play a role, I believe. It seems to me that the image of country is absolutely great among listeners thanks to lots of exciting media coverage of our hottest stars, but the fact that Tim McGraw was moved last fall to issue an apology to his fans after his label decided not to release new material and went with a “Greatest Hits” collection says a lot about how conservatively Nashville’s labels are responding to the economic slow down, making our current music fare a bit less exciting than it was in 2007.

“If That’s The Case,” he opined, remembering the mid-1960’s when The Beatles reinvented pop music and the group had three of the top ten charted songs, maybe country radio should start listening to the best-selling albums and just play the best songs, perhaps two or three at a time.”

Personally, I think most A&O clients do a very good job at keeping listeners passionately-excited about our best music and artists, which is why they generally do very well, but then I got to thinking about what else we could do...

* How about asking your audience to vote pro or con on whether we should play nothing but Dixie Chicks songs during the hour of Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony and do what they vote for whether it’s yes or no?

* How about creating a Randy Travis-Carrie Underwood duet mix of “I Told You So” then and now?

* How about digging into all of the Grammy-nominated country albums to see if there might be some hidden gems for you to “break exclusively?”

* How about doing something as risky as those things on a regular basis?

It might make some conservatives in our core upset. But, who knows? It might build your buzz a bit, getting that cume growing again.

What do you think?

I was going to ask Lon Helton when I finally got a chance to talk to him, but by that time I had forgotten why I had originally called him.

Next.. (Your Station) Girl?

The same folks who created the social networking hook Obama Girl are now working with Canada's incumbent candidate/PM Stephen Harper, as campaigns get more videos online to potential voters (some they'd like 'em to see, and some they might not) that they could ever do with the traditional media.

Will working with such an obvious new media buzz-creation site work? Or, does it need to seem self-generated? We'll see, but so far, it appears to be, in spite of being obviously generated by a professional organization (after all, here I am linking to it too!)