Social Media 101

Let's get one thing straight. If your station does not have a FaceBook (FB) presence, you need to get on it now. And I'll do what I can to help you figure FB and every other Social Media website out, if you stick around and subscribe. But I have to tell you, some stations that are signing up for FB are going about it the wrong way. They have signed up with a regular user account! Why is this bad? For a several reasons...

• FB frowns on users having multiple accounts
• FB intentionally created Fan Pages for businesses
• Advertising your Fan Page is more professional than advertising your Personal Profile page
• Fan Pages have analytics! Helloooo! Don't you want to know the demographics visiting your page?
• You can manage multiple Fan Pages with one account
• You can import your Announcer Blogs into a Fan Page through RSS feeds
  
• You can send a message to all your Fans with one click

Let's take these one by one. FB has strict Terms of Service and will shut down anyone with multiple accounts. So, if you have assigned the FB account to an intern, and they get caught, you lose your FB presence. Then you have to go through a bunch of rigamoro with FB to get it reinstated. So, best to play by the rules and limit the surprizes.

Face Book anticipated people creating multiple accounts; one for personal, one for business, one for hobby, etc. So FB came up with an alternative solution: Fan Pages. Fan Pages are for businesses, public figures and anything people can be a fan of, like radio! They are similar to a regular profile account, but there are differences.

When you advertise your FB page anywhere, it is more professional for a business to have a Fan Page, rather than a regular account. It's similar to the ideology that it is better to have a Top Level Domain name for your website, rather than using a Geocities website. Also, on FB you can target your ads to members in your listening area! By having a Fan Page, you can then analyze the demographics of people visiting. If you are a station that targets 18-24 females in Scranton, PA, you can target your FB ads to reach that demo! The analytics is one reason to have a Fan Page over a Group too.

If you have a cluster of stations, it is easier to manage all the Fan Pages with one log in, rather than having multiple log ins for multiple accounts. This saves time and effort. All analytics are measured from one log in, for each fan Page you have. And it is easier to remove people you have given admin privileges to.

Since the Fan Page is similar to a regular user profile, you can add applications such as an RSS reader that allows you to pull in your Announcer's blogs. You are probably already doing this on your station's website (or you should be), but the advantage here is that when a blog is updated, it can post to the Fan Page status, which in turn will show up on your fan's profile page. And, should a fan decide to leave a comment to that status, your fan's friends will get a link in reference to that comment, which will entice them to also see your station's Fan Page. This is set up in your favor! It is made to help you get more "followers" which will in turn create more loyal listeners.

And finally, you can send a message to your fans with a simple click. So, you can send out contest remonders, sever weather alerts, and special offers from your advertisers to your Fans. And that can be appealing to your advertisers. You can also use FB Connect on your website to connect your listeners to your Fan Page. At a minimum you should include a standardized FB logo and link to your Fan Page to make it easy for your listeners to connect with you on FB.

One final word on setting up your Fan Page, which actually applies to all Social Media sites you set up: Make sure there are multiple "administrators" for your communities. Seriously, your business manager should have access, just in case you need to change the personelle in your programming and/or promotions department. But, you probably knew that already.

Stick around and subscribe! Next we'll talk about Twitter!

Follow me and if you need any help with your Social Media integration, fee free to conact me at 860-506-3768.

Free Music!

I read Holland Cooke's article that was published today on Inside Radio. Holland shared the link through Face Book. You can read it here. This got me thinking, and ranting in my own mind! We've been hearing about the labels desire to tax radio stations for many years. After all, as Holland points out, that's what they do in other Countries. But will it really come to that here in the USA? Are the labels that hungry, to bite the hand that feeds them?

Well, we see what they are doing to Internet radio with royalty fees. It is really frustrating to see bands like Metallica on this band wagon too. After all, the ONLY reason for their rise in popularity in the late 80's and early 90's was due to "file sharing"; fans made copies of Metallica's music and shared it with their friends, and so on. That's how I was introduced to Metallica! (Sorry I won't link to them. They don't like to be shared.) But I digress.

The issue at hand is whether radio stations should pay the record labels for each song that is played. This is a model that seems to work in other Countries, so from the labels perspective why not here too? The problem with the label's theory is that we live in a different world now than we did 50, 25, 10 even 5 years ago! The proliferation of sharing information through the Internet is a different way of thinking and doing business. If you think about it, Radio is an anologous file sharing system. People get their news, weather and traffic information "shared" with them for free. And listeners get to hear "content" for free, whether it be music, talk, theater, etc. It has been with Radio's "file sharing" help that so many musical artists have been successful.  

The Internet makes it so easy now to gain an audience, and a following. If I were a musical artist, I would self publish. And I think there are enough good independent artists to keep music alive on the radio without the need for record labels. It is a matter of radio managers being smart and putting  more self publishing acts on their stations. With Social Networking, a station could easily find and add thousands of songs by independent artists to the play list and slowly weed off the dependence of the record labels.

It has to be said that Radio stations are just as guilty for allowing this dependence on record labels too. By eliminating music directors positions, and taking away the Program Directors ability to add music that the local audience wants, in lieu of some corporate mandated playlist! Some stations do have a Home Grown show. Why not put more of these local musicians in regular rotation? Radio has set itself up for this scenerio from the record labels. But threatening to switch to all Talk is not the answer. I think making an effort to find and play more independant artists is a more productive and more cost effective solution. Radio needs to understand that people now have a choice of what to listen to via the Internet, via iPods. But if you put your play list in their hands, and allow (enlist) them to find independent artists you will once again beat the odds.