A Reply to Fred Jacobs on Radio's Social Media Value

On Fred Jacob's blog today he talks about social media "friends with value".

At a time when most radio brands are doing a reasonably good job of amassing “likes” on Facebook, the missing piece is connecting with these fans to achieve this outreach goal. Keeping in mind that most stations are scrapping for every available marketing dollar (and often coming up short), taking advantage of your “audience’s audience” just makes sense.

And now thanks to Google Wildfire, we can even calculate the ROI of brand advocacy and outreach programs.

This is somewhat misleading. After all, what station is actually running a proper social media channel to convert their own listeners into fans of their advertisers? So, first let's understand the difference of "influence" and "value". If you are tracking the virality of your station's posts, you are tracking "influence". If you are tracking specific ad campaigns that you are running on your social media channel for your advertisers, then you are tracking "value". But stations are not currently running ad campaigns for their advertisers on their social media channels. From my observations, stations are only interested in reposting the latest memes.

Sites like Klout and PeerIndex have been measuring influence for several years. And national brands are clearly interested in the influential social media leaders. But influence is not enough. Influence itself does not bring home the bacon. You can have a highly influential social media leader following you, but you have to know what they are influential about, and be selling something in that niche. If Lady GaGa tweeted that Pennzoil was on sale at Autozone, would her followers really show buying power? The same can be said of a station's audience influence. Will the station's influence and it's audience influence alone bring home the bacon for the brand?

Stations actually do not need followers with influence. What stations need to do, is a better job of connecting their followers to LOCAL advertisers through their social media channels. Of course using the "influencial listener" model, stations even have an opportunity to connect LOCAL non-listeners to THEIR advertisers, if done properly. But stations are not connecting their listeners to their local advertisers. Instead, right now stations seem more concerned with reposting the latest memes (no ROI there), and that is a misguided use of social media for radio stations because it does nothing for the station's advertisers. If I were an advertiser, I would ONLY advertise on a station that would actively bring their social media followers to my business or at a minimum, my website (not my Facebook page).

I can actually show stations how to get an ROI with their social media. I've written about it in Radio Ink and Allaccess. Contact me if you are interested in a free evaluation.