BEING “SOCIAL” IS GREAT!... BUT BEING WELCOMED INTO THE “CROWD” IS EVEN BETTER!

From advertising, search, and marketing “experts” touting tactics and phishing targets for the next big “consumer” thing, to corporate and communication giants going viral and casting their message into what is a global phenomenon, “social media” is the absolute new “now” destination. It has blossomed inside a ubiquitous delivery system and changed the way we communicate, wherever we are.

My FACEBOOK is open as I write, and I know that my friends and I are just a microscopic speck in a world populated by in excess of 100 million users, and growing. If FB were a country in this world right now, it would be the fourth largest behind China, India, and the U.S. China’s Q-ZONE is even bigger than FACEBOOK, with 300 million users. My SKYPE ticks away on my taskbar and tells me I am one of 16,672,885 users currently online. There are over 200 million blogs. ASHTON KUCHER and ELLEN DEGENERES have more TWITTER followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama… And it goes on.
Social Media facts and figures are big, never-ending and everywhere. The numbers quickly become an irrelevant blur, and the “right now” I have used to preface them gets more important, because the numbers are redundant as quickly as they are written. In the new social media world, growth is exponential and continually imposing fundamental change on all we do.

In the rush of all this, as a “communication” business it’s imperative we take pause and consider how the real folks out there interacting with one another in these global social environments actually feel about being bombarded by a sea of interlopers they didn’t actually invite into their social circle and space. Being social is great, but being welcomed into the crowd is even better.

Central to the development of LDR “listener driven radio” and our vision of “crowd-casting” and “sourcing” was the need to enable radio stations to capitalize and build on the listener relationship and trust they have already established and cultivated. Stations and brands have successfully used Radio technology for decades as a delivery system, and have spent enormous time, resources, and investment in creating loyal audience and fans through this traditional medium. Radio brands are well positioned to expand both their dynamic, and their listener relationship across the platforms their listeners are now also embracing and using. Understanding and respecting the expectations and trust they have established with those listeners, and how this translates as they interact with them across new “social” platform opportunities online, on cell, and socially, is paramount.

How radio brands, and the clients and content they introduce, engage with audience in this emerging and still embryonic environment, is going to be as different as the move from the days of sponsored live theatre shows and sung commercials was, to “formats” and cpm based spot schedules; the last new “normal” in radio broadcast.
Radio brands actually get to be in a real-time conversation now; no longer talking out, at, or to a gathering that once had few places else to go. Despite this exponential growth in technology and platforms, radio as a delivery system has managed to preserve the majority of its share of audience, time, and consumption to the stations and brands it delivers. In itself, this is a head start in a space being competitively populated by a multitude of offerings that have no defined audience, and in many cases no clear proposition, coherence, or inherent trust.

TIM BERNERS-LEE, father of the World Wide Web, spoke on the essence of social networks at the DAVOS conference in January this year, noting where the real worth lies, and saying in part that: “…social networks, when grounded on a reputation-based system, have the potential to change the way we make decisions together, and how we decide what's the truth.”

The sense too, that demographics have less significance for media today is to a large extent well-founded, although the values at play in the psychographics of audience has always been recognized and with us. It was a lot easier to categorize demography and predictive habit in times when there were far fewer choices or experience of choice. Where radio music brands once used the formative years of an audiences music experience as embedded prediction for future habit and listening strategy, the experience of today’s generations has such a plurality from so many sources, that it changes everything that needs to play next. Moreover, the demographic shift as of 2010 translates into there being more Generation Y than Boomers in the world. Social Media plays to this, and has created a new context for what we consider to be content, and how we impart it.

In his excellent book “SOCIALNOMICS: How Social Media transforms the way we live and do business”, ERIK QUALMAN suggests we will no longer search for services and products, they will find us via social media. Already the news we once acquired daily on a broadsheet, now finds us, instantly wherever we are.

For radio, inviting the audience in is only the first step in building a whole new relationship and trust dynamic. Listener driven interaction is the new norm, and a genuine two-way and shared experience, where we as broadcasters learn a new communication conduct, and open up free access through our delivery systems; and listeners give us fresh vision and insight into shaping the brands and content those systems carry.

----------------------------------------------