No Exceptions? (smile)

I applaud stations which have a strict "no personal phone calls while you're on the air" policy for air talent. Personal emails, txt's, Tweets, Facebook updates, etc too.

That's because a successful personality simply must wade into all of those pools to mine content for on air use if a station hopes to keep today's listener fully engaged and interactive. You can't be fully involved with listeners if you're chatting with your family and friends.

However, at a client station recently, the reception desk may have carried things a bit too far.

After a midday personality who will remain nameless here got off the air recently, she received a phone message that said:

"Taylor Swift called and wanted to talk to you, but I told her that you were on the air and couldn't be disturbed."

New rules: interrupt me for superstar calls, but only after you've administered the "are you REALLY???" test to the caller.

No one ever said that being at the switchboard at a successful country radio station was going to be easy.

How Smart Is Your Phone?

Thanks to the competition between Nokia, Apple and RIM, it's getting smarter and smarter.

Hopefully, it won't be too long until all cell phone music player manufacturers realize that the #1 extra consumers want is an FM radio built in too.

First one in will sell a bunch, I bet!

Nielsen: more than 20 million U.S. telephone households (17 percent) are wireless

.. and, as the economy softens, look for that percentage to increase, making it harder than ever for radio researchers to find representative samples. That average bill is $40 per month per landline household.

In addition to the universe of U.S. wireless substitutors, Nielsen's study reports that:

• U.S. cord cutters tend to have lower income-levels-59 percent have household incomes of $40,000 or less
• Smaller households, with just one or two residents, are more likely to cut the cord than larger households
• Moving or changing jobs are the biggest life events associated with cord cutting: 31 percent of cord cutters moved prior to cord cutting and 22 percent changed jobs
• Wireless substitutors tend to use their mobile phones more than their landline peers, 45 percent more per phone, but still save an average $33 per month in a household of one subscriber, less $6.69 for each additional wireless resident, when they cut the cord

Alison LeBreton, vice president of client services for Nielsen Mobile, said "As wireless network quality improves and unlimited calling becomes increasingly pervasive, we expect the trend toward wireless substitution to continue… "

But wireless substitution doesn't work for everyone, says the report. Ten percent of landline phone customers have experimented with wireless-only in their household, but then returned to landline service. Nielsen reports that needing a landline for another service (security system, satellite TV, pay-per-view, fax machine, etc.) is the primary reason people mend the cord.

For the full paper, "Call My Cell: Wireless Substitution in the United States," please go here.