Shedding more light on the broken compass

A little more fuel for discussion on the CBC's left leaning "voters compass" Click here for some interesting opinion/information.

Media Bias

The CBC has been accused before of a Liberal bias. Have they taken it to a new level? Click here to check out the story and thank your lucky stars that we have Sun Media coming on line to provide a little balance in national television news.

Our job is to stay out of this sort of partisan posturing.

Why?

This was in my email this morning. Pretty darned simple. And interesting. And challenging. Click here and watch the video.

Here is a note that was passed on to me by Warren Neufeld our center manager in Portage. The video he refers to generated significant traffic to their website and demonstrates the power of images. It highlights why it's important all of us begin to think in terms of video and not just sound. Check it out by clicking on this video link. Here is how Warren set up the piece for me....

Our local hockey team - the Ptg Terriers are in the mist of a playoff push. We were doing the play-by-play on Sat night and just happened to be also doing video at the same time. As luck would have it we captured a very controversial ending to the game.
Check out the enclosed link to see the video.
It certainly underlines the importance and impact we can have.

Hope this never happens to you.....

Our Director of Engineering Laverne Siemens sent this to me. (By the way, the photo above is NOT Laverne) Wild!! Check out the video.

Push vs. Pull

Here is a little chunk of a conversation between Media guys Mark Ramsay and Guy Kawasaki. Ramsay runs a media consulting company and Kawasaki is author of a new book called "Enchantment - The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions". Both are industry leaders in the area of new media. Ramsay was questioning Kawasaki about "push" and "pull" technology.

After you read this, think of how we engage our audiences.

You advise on the best ways to use “push” and “pull” technology. Can you define what those are?

“Push” marketing is when you are controlling the mechanism, the timing, and the quantity of what you’re sending to people. You push out email; you push out your tweets.

“Pull” marketing is when you have to convince people to return to your website, return to your Facebook page, and so you have to attract them continuously.

Both have a place in enchantment. Twitter is a very useful tool for enchanting people as is a great Facebook fan page.

Let’s talk about each of them. In terms of “push,” you mentioned Twitter. What are a couple of great Twitter “push” tactics to promote enchantment?

With Twitter, I think the key is that you tweet out interesting links and that you are seen as the source of stories and pictures and video that other people would not have found in your particular area of expertise.

So, if you’re an expert in radio, you should be tweeting out the great interview about the future of radio and what it means in a world with Pandora, for example.

The second thing is something many people do not agree with. I think you need to repeat your tweets to make them effective. You’re in radio. You can’t assume that the person who listens to your station at 7 a.m. is also going to be listening at 7 p.m. So if you push out something interesting at 7 p.m. through Twitter it’s unlikely that the same the person who uses Twitter at 7 a.m. will see it.

You need to repeat it.

Very often the radio station with the most repeats is among those with the highest ratings.

Yeah, I rest my case.

What about great tactics for “pull”?

For “pull” marketing, it’s all about generating great content that you have a real reason for people to come back for – there’s new stuff available all the time.

There’s value, there’s information, and the common thread of “push” and “pull” is that “content is king.” it really is.

And new content is king. It could be photos, it could be video, or it could be the interaction of the community. It’s not necessarily true that you have to provide all the content; because you can have very, very interesting forums, but ultimately “content is king.”

Separated at Birth.

From the Brier. Manitoba third Jon Mead. The Dr. Evil of curling.

What we want to say vs. what they need to hear.

One of the age old challenges of doing radio (or any media) well, is selecting content. It's the process of understanding what sort of message to craft for maximum impact and relevance with the audience. Put another way, it's the job of making yourself matter. If your content is interesting and engaging to your audience, you'll matter. If it isn't, you won't. It doesn't matter how "good" you are. It's matters how relevant you are.

The key is knowing who is listening. It's finding out about the people on the other side of the radio and thinking about them all the time. Who are they? What do they care about? What do they not care about? What do they like to do? What are they likely not to do? If you can get the answers to these questions, creating on target content get's a lot easier.

Make it about the audience, make it local, and make it matter. Have fun!!

Then and now.

I felt a little nostalgic today. Here is the result. Big 8 and K-Tel. And for those of you under 40 here's some Howard.

Morning!! Here is a recent entry from Mark Ramseys daily blog. It speaks to standing out, rather than just standing up. The points he makes are excellent and I wonder how we measure up against them?

Why doesn’t radio get more love given (as we’re always reminded) that almost everybody listens to it almost all the time in almost every place?

This is one of the industry’s greatest frustrations, and it’s particularly frustrating when advertisers and others in the know echo themes popular in the cultural ether. Themes like “Pandora is really cannibalizing radio” and “Sirius XM is really eating your lunch.”

This is a problem I discussed at length with marketing blogger extraordinaire and best-selling author Seth Godin in a conversation that will post to this blog soon.

Usage, Seth told me, is not the issue. Attention is the issue. And attention is shifting and shifting fast in large part because attention follows novelty, as anyone who has ever listened to or programmed a Top 40 station knows.

Attention follows novelty. Consumers hunger for what’s new even if their habits have yet to catch up with their attention.

The problem is that “habit” is about history while “attention” is about the future. Attention points the way for future habits just as a car’s future is where it’s heading, not where it has been, no matter how long it has spent there.

Attention is what we see reflected on the lips of agencies who profess the myth that Pandora is more important than radio. Attention is what we see reflected in stories on CNN and in the Wall Street Journal. Attention, powered by novelty, is what consumers spread amongst themselves, it’s what they talk about with each other.

Radio’s vast usage is at risk as long as its attention deficit persists. And its attention deficit will persist as long as radio clings to vast usage as its best story.

It will persist as long as radio surrenders novelty to startups and streaming pure-plays and innovators whose primary concerns are the passions of consumers rather than the demands of an industry which takes those consumers for granted.

If you want to fix radio’s attention deficit, forget about vast usage. Instead, open to novelty.