From one of Dial Global’s “Simply About Music” (SAM) affiliates, courtesy of Beau Phillips:

There’s a SAM affiliate in Illinois that’s been with Dial Global for a couple years.  Over the last year, the station had flattened out in the ratings. Earlier this year, we developed a plan to get some street buzz for the station. Like most stations they had no money for promotions. On Fridays instead of calling the station SAM, we rename it after a “facebook fan” that we select….its called FACEBOOK FAN FRIDAYS. We re-do new imaging for the station every Friday, calling it stuff like “Tina Smith-FM”. We run promos saying what we’re doing.  We play up the fact that “all this great music is thanks to Tina”…and “if you see Tina today, thank her.” Turns out people like to hear their name on the radio ALL DAY, and end up telling their friends.  The station’s Facebook friends have gone from a few hundred to a few thousand.  And for whatever reasons, the ratings doubled in the last book. I’ve given this idea to other SAM’s, along with producing generic Facebook fan imaging for them.

Interesting tactic that’s less about gathering Facebook fans and more about generating some excitement and word-of-mouth out in audience-land.

Now if the station has a mechanism to “can” that word-of-mouth and make the whole process easier to share and communicate to friends (exactly the purpose of social media), you have a great opportunity to power the ability of an audience to share themselves with each other in your presence.

That, my friends, is called “branding.”

Will this branding yield ratings like it seemed to do in this case?

Try it and find out.

Here’s one of D-G’s sample promos:

Subscribe to all the Mark Ramsey Media podcasts at iTunes.

Don’t take my word for it.  Take the word of Gary Vaynerchuk, a guy who would not exist in the public spotlight were it not for all things digital.

Gary, who is now a speaker and mega-entrepreneur and Sirius/XM host and author and former interview subject right here in this blog – in addition to being one of America’s best-known wine merchants, makes some important points in this video:

It’s not the platform, it’s the message.

And you have to fish where the fish are.

And guess what?  Radio provides a very spacious aquarium.

It’s really the essence of branding.

Creating an impression which lasts.

This is forgotten when we obsess on legendary call letters even when the legend is only in our minds, not the audience’s.

It’s forgotten when we focus on today and don’t bother to build for audiences yet to come.

A great brand is like a PIXAR movie (and most PIXAR movies are, indeed, great brands) – it’s always fresh and worth enjoying again for reasons anew.

I was having a conversation with a big-time radio producer and programmer, recently, and I asked “where is the up-and-coming young radio talent?”

His answer:  ”On YouTube.”  And he corrals talent for a living, folks.

Lasting impressions require a frontier which extends beyond the current fiscal quarter and beyond the conventional jock-hunt.  It requires a readiness and willingness to create entertainment (and information) across platforms.  Exactly where the audiences are.

To do otherwise is to take my fossil metaphor a bit too literally and become locked into the past forever.

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Who in the world is Gordon Paddison?

Do you remember the movie Wedding Crashers when that viral video made the rounds where you paste your own face over the face of one of the stars of the movie and you send it to your friends?  That was the work of Gordon Paddison.

What about the social hubbub surrounding Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, one of the most popular movie franchises of all time? That, too, was the work of Gordon Paddison.

Gordon is the head of a company called Stradella Road, a branding and marketing and social media company specializing in the entertainment space and their clients include the likes of Facebook, Fandango, Google, AOL, Variety, Paramount, and the one and only Peter Jackson.

Listen to our entire interview here – or subscribe to all the Mark Ramsey Media podcasts at iTunes.

Gordon, when I first met you I asked how we spark some social media conversation about this or that and you replied with the perfect question.  You asked, “Well, what do you want people to talk about?”  In other words how do you organize the conversation?  You have to organize that conversation around “assets.” you said.  Explain what that means and why that matters.

Conversations must be contextual.  Radio stations have great assets.  People always say, “Well, movies are easy, because movies have great assets.”  But actually, any brand – any business – can have great assets.  Sometimes the assets are employees, and you can take those “assets,” the employees, and turn them into an editorial toolsets to position your business.  And your business, your brand, gives you a context for dialogue with your consumers.

Then it’s important to talk conversationally, because most of the dialogue online and particularly in social media is a volley of conversation – it’s almost like call and response.

We’re trained from “the old days” in broadcast media, which was more of a one-way conversation.  Now we have moved to a dialogue, and it’s important to allow that dialogue to be partially owned and to be driven by the consumer.

So it’s a little bit like ping pong but with a point if you can make it properly.

You say a radio station has abundant assets.  The norm in radio is to say, “Okay, I’ve got my radio station and I want to use my social media assets to promote my agenda and spread word-of-mouth about my station and its various activities.”  You’re suggesting it’s much more than that, right?

The great thing about a radio station is you have the shows, you have the content, you have your advertisers…there are a lot of different elements that you could exploit.  You have your personalities.  Indeed, the great thing about radio is that it’s driven by personality, so if you take the personality, the promotions, all together, and you look at the elements, each one of those becomes something that in social media can certainly be activated.

It’s about finding the dialogue with your consumers.  A lot of businesses I find are surprised when they start having success in social media.

We’ll set up something on Facebook and Twitter and then all of a sudden they’ve got 1,000, 2,000 people who are following them and they go, “Holy crap, what do we do now?”  And we answer: “Well, you actually have a dialogue.”

That’s the spirit of social media.  You have to be prepared to engage and to be part of an open dialogue.

Now you use the expression “success on social media,” and I’m interested in the definition of that phrase.  What does it mean to be “successful” in social media?

Here’s the thing, success in social media takes all different forms.

Some people will say, “We want to get people to like our Facebook page or tweet a certain number of things so that we can get the most people.”  Realistically, it depends on each business.  For some businesses that are highly transactional and you can actually track how many SKU’s are going out the door it’s going to be very different than for a branding play where someone like BP today has a very different objective than they would have had nine months ago.  At a certain time, at a certain inflection point, your metrics can change and your goals can be different.  Sometimes it’s branding, sometimes it’s direct response.

There’s a feeling among a lot of broadcasters that if we have a Twitter feed, if we have a Facebook page and we post some stuff on there that our job is done and it’s just a matter of counting how many people follow us.  That’s not true, is it?

Well, it depends.  For stations, any kind of platform acts as a syndication point.  Of course there’s a monetization strategy that each station may have but in terms of a marketing toolset, certainly, the stations could think of their websites or their Facebook page or Twitter as a repository that permits syndication, so whether they’re using limited assets or full content, it gives you a place to park and direct people to.

A lot of people always think of the old “walled garden” of portals as their destinations.  Well, realistically, you don’t need a destination, you need a refilling station so when you’re sending people out into the field you want to be able to have them go back and be able to reload, and the same thing is true of your consumers because often your best soldiers are your consumers.  They’re the ones who are going back and reloading so they can go out and talk about how cool you are.  You’ve got to give them some place to go and get a drink of water.

This is one of the challenges I think for broadcasters because there’s a tendency to view the website as the end-all and be-all be – the “portal,” if you will – whereas what you’re saying is that the purpose of social media is to enable syndication, enable the spreading of the word, and essentially take your message off your “home base,” is that right?

Absolutely but also it really does require the marketer or the brand to determine what they want to use the medium for.

Certainly, I’ve encountered a lot of businesses who will say, “Well, our interns are the best ones who know the most about the medium, so shouldn’t they be driving this force?” And the answer is yes, they do know the medium and they’re certainly great people to help drive a dialogue and to identify where the dialogue exists, but people who have years and years of branding experience shouldn’t necessarily put themselves out of the equation.  They know exactly what they should be doing with their brand.  It’s just a slight tweak to understand and to start an engagement effort and to understand what a two-way dialogue is in another environment.

It’s really about just setting your metrics, and then saying, “Okay, this week we’re looking for brand lift,” for example.  To say that the site itself is a be-all and end-all may be true if you’re looking to drive someone through a transactional funnel and that’s what that site is built for, but still you need to go and fish where the fish are.  You can’t say, “Okay, everybody over here,” and expect everybody to come.  That doesn’t work in the real world or the social world, so you’ve got to be able to have the dialogue where the dialogue exists and then have the reference to drive the dialogue where you want it to go.

Where do the ideas come from?  When you work with your film industry clients – with Peter Jackson, for example – where do the big ideas come from?  How do you design programs to gain engagement, interaction, and involvement?

I would say ideas come from Peter Jackson like water from a faucet.  He is incredible that way – in fact, most filmmakers and artists are creative fountains.  Realistically, the job of a marketer is basically to not muck it up.  It’s to do a good job to try and to turn a creative asset into nuggets of dialogue that won’t give away the farm but can hopefully spur a conversation and create excitement.

I don’t want to use a term “engagement” because what’s “engagement”?  It’s really excitement.  Especially if you’re trying to go to the movies or a concert or to buy someone’s new record or someone’s new movie on DVD, you want to be excited and say, “I really want to have that.”

That’s an interesting switch from “engagement” to “excitement.”  You’re really upping the ante.

Absolutely, at the end of the day we’re talking about ephemeral products here.  You buy toilet paper because you’re pretty sure you’ll need it.  But you go to a movie because you think it will be fun.  That’s a very different use scenario.  There are needs in your life and then there are wants, and activating a want is different than activating a daily need.

It’s interesting you say that, because a lot of what happens in radio on the marketing side is need-based, not so much excitement based.  It might be, for example, win this, win that, get your bills paid, get your mortgage paid, get a job for a year, things that have a tinge of practicality to them as opposed to something which is built for sheer excitement.

I’ve done a lot of research on this over the years and I found from my movie experience the consumers that we “gave away” things to, the people who enter contests, are the lowest converting customers at the box office – and I’ll tell you that’s not just true for the movies.  People who are sweepstakes-oriented and win this and win that generally are not your highest value customers or typically your advertisers’ highest value customers.

That’s interesting.  So who are the highest value customers?

Well, very clearly, if you have an email database, people who have decided to opt-in because they have an interest in a particular show, in the type of program you’re doing, and the type of business you’re in  – those people have a connection to your product.

I know when I was marketing, we had a 40% lift in recurring consumers due to our email database.  Those are people who chose and opened emails based on their proclivity to consider what we were marketing to them and discussing with them of great interest.  That was particularly effective.

If I’m a radio station and I were to come to you tomorrow, what are the first things I need to do in order to build and develop a successful social media strategy?

Tell me what you care about.

Tell me the most important thing you care about.  It’s not just about “setting metrics,” it’s about what you care about.

What do you as a business really care about?  What do your consumers really care about?

Too often, what ends up happening is, “Oh my God, this tactical execution I saw is really good, so let’s do that.”  But wait a minute, let’s get 50,000 feet up and say for the business we want to move in this or that direction, and you may suddenly realize you need to do local cable ad placements.  That might be what moves the needle for you.

You need to look at the media mix and what really represents the opportunity for you.  A lot of people go immediately to tactics, but first they need to ask what’s right for the brand.

What do you really need?  How do you talk to your consumers currently and how would you like to talk to them in the future?

That’s the difference between strategy and tactics.

Correct.

I was reading a post on “what every blog needs to be great,” and was struck with the results of this poll:

Why was this so striking?

Because these results don’t simply answer the question for blogs.  I would argue they answer the question for any brand – even a radio brand.

How much effort does your radio brand invest in its distinctive voice?  How distinctive is your voice, in fact?

It’s almost impossible to imagine a distinctive voice that doesn’t in some way involve actual human voices.  A “distinctive voice” is an expression of personality, if not “personalities.”  In our zeal to skim and trim and thin, what are we doing to fatten our humanity, our voice, that which makes us most real and authentic?

Compelling and exclusive content is actually secondary, and it’s a reminder that all content – exclusive or otherwise – lives in a context.  And that context is the distinctive voice of the brand.

Both of these elements out-score the idea of simply being “unique.”  In fact, I could argue that being “unique” without possessing a “distinctive voice” is like having a body without a soul.

Note, too, that the idea of promotion and marketing and optimization – all the stuff we ponder heavily when vexed with the problem of “getting the word out” – all those items are viewed as relatively unimportant compared to what’s at the top of the list.

In other words, as the old saying goes, nothing kills a bad product like great advertising.

This picture is good to remember as you build out your brand and invest in it ingredients designed not simply to satisfy, but also to captivate.

This is the first of a two-part conversation with AndoMedia Group’s COO Paul Krasinski about the state of and prospects for online radio.

Ando is, of course, a company at the heart of the online radio universe – from metrics to ad insertion to enabling the capability to stream in the first place.  No company is closer to the success stories and lessons for improvement than Ando.

Paul and I covered six key ways publishers (e.g., broadcasters) can enhance the power of their online radio efforts and better monetize those efforts.

Watch this video:

If you prefer the audio version, click here:

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This graphic is courtesy of RadioTime.

What this picture leaves out is the suddenly changing definition of “radio” in a world where personalization, customization, and connection rule.  All of those factors will soon be built into cars, and the entertainment delivery system will be one of the most potent differentiators in the dealer’s showroom.

Yours will not look like mine because I will be able to make mine my own. There will be no such thing as an “audio entertainment system” per se.  It’s all entertainment.  It will have more in common with the face of your iPhone than the face of your current radio “dial.”

Pictures will figure in.  Interactivity will be central.  I’ll be able to connect with friends and share things on the fly.  I’ll be able to connect with my content “in the cloud” and my PC at home.

In general, the radio industry has no idea what’s just over the hill.

Where is the symposium of broadcasters to discuss the shape of tomorrow’s automobile entertainment system?  Where are the pilot projects pitched to Detroit meant to facilitate this transformation and to make sure today’s broadcasters are part of the future of entertainment on the road?  Where are the dialogues with Detroit about how to serve their customers’ needs better?

Instead, we get a self-serving and gratuitous trickle of announcements about HD radio creeping into this car or that one.

Meanwhile Detroit plots the overhaul of mobile entertainment altogether.

One day soon broadcasters will recognize that consumers control the future, that the future cannot be dictated to an audience who lusts for choice, connection, and control.

I hope that day comes soon.

I didn’t even know it had a headache.

But so says WIRED magazine in its September cover story.

Here’s the heart of their argument:

Over the past few years, one of the most important shifts in the digital world has been the move from the wide-open Web to semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display. It’s driven primarily by the rise of the iPhone model of mobile computing, and it’s a world Google can’t crawl, one where HTML doesn’t rule. And it’s the world that consumers are increasingly choosing, not because they’re rejecting the idea of the Web but because these dedicated platforms often just work better or fit better into their lives (the screen comes to them, they don’t have to go to the screen).

As this picture shows, the Internet is bigger than ever, but the Web is declining somewhat in terms of the volume of Internet traffic devoted to it.

Where is the rest?  In peer-to-peer, in video (which includes YouTube, something that ideally should fall under Web, it seems to me), and other types of apps which use the Internet for transport but do not use the Web browser.

WIRED adds:

Within five years, Morgan Stanley projects, the number of users accessing the Net from mobile devices will surpass the number who access it from PCs. Because the screens are smaller, such mobile traffic tends to be driven by specialty software, mostly apps, designed for a single purpose. For the sake of the optimized experience on mobile devices, users forgo the general-purpose browser. They use the Net, but not the Web. Fast beats flexible.

Even if WIRED is wrong about their case (it is, after all, in the interests of WIRED’s publisher, Conde Nast, to have mobile apps that showcase a curated experience for a profit), there’s no question that Internet-driven alternatives to the Web are growing.

Your Twitter app?  Your Facebook app?  Apps, all.

So what does this mean for radio, besides the obvious idea that you’d better be thinking in terms of apps?

It means, as Anderson writes, the future will be “less about browsing, and more about getting…our appetite for discovery slows as our familiarity with the status quo grows.”  In other words, give me services that make my life better and I’ll embrace them.  But don’t expect me to hunt for them.

Radio – especially that corner of radio heretofore called “News/Talk” – would seem to be ideally positioned to solve a problem for many consumers who might have one.  particularly if the information I want to “get” is related to critical issues facing my day:  Scores, weather, traffic, headlines, etc. Providing these values, however, is less about propping up our brands and more about showing the way to the solution of key consumer problems.

In other words, there should be an app for that.

And maybe there is – but not driven by the megaphone that is radio.

There may indeed be an app for everything, but how do you discover the solution to your particular problem?  How do can I “get” without browsing?

Maybe the answer is radio’s “megaphone.”

You can app your brand – or you can wrap an app around a solution to a problem.  The latter is the bigger win.

Hear WIRED’s Chris Anderson explain his argument in this interview with On the Media’s Bob Garfield:

(download the mp3 here)

Indian radio will pay a flat 2% rate to music companies following a ruling by the Copyright Board, reports Radio and Music.

The decision ends a two-year fight between the music and radio industries in India. Earlier this year, the Supreme Coart gave the Copyright Board four months to resolve the dispute over music royalties.

Currently, Indian radio pays 850 rupees ($18) per hour of music irrespective of the size of the station. According to an estimate, as much as 18% of ad revenues goes to the music industry.

The new system will be based on a 2% share of advertising income. It is expected that the new fee will also expand the number of stations that actually pay for its music.

What happens to your world if FM radio chips are installed on mobile phones?

Not much, probably.  But here are two unintended consequences to consider.

For a full blow-by-blow look at the implications for FM chips in mobile phones, read this.