Talking to No One

photo credit: © Photography By CalvinCropley

I’ll always be a softy for radio.  I spent too many years in the industry for it not to be in my blood.  I sometimes wish it would go away, it reminds me of that old football injury that makes it hard to move in the morning but you wouldn’t trade the pain for the time you had.  Anyway I digress.  I was very optimistic last week when I was being probed about social media by a GM that I know of some radio stations..  Asking good questions, going to do some home work etc.  I gave them some things to take a look at links and sites and said after you absorb this what we talked about come back for more.

We never even began to use or utter the word ‘twitter’, Facebook was going to be challenging enough.   I’m sure that even with this person being in marketing, that discussing twitter would cause a brain meltdown.  I checked out their Facebook sites, and sure enough they have a station that has over 2,000 likes and have never even made one post.  Didn’t stop the fans who like the page from contributing, although it was that no one from the station ever looks at the site to communicate or comment to their fans.

It’s a lot like there was a time when an on-air talent would actually pick up a phone.   Today so much is voice tracked that you can call all you want but no one is there to answer the phone.  A lot like the facebook page that is getting ignored.  Why do they want to continue to ignore their audience like this? Now I’m sure, well I hope that there are radio stations that get it and have pages with good engagement, and maybe cross promoting some clients?

The conversation last week and seeing the one page made me take a look at a couple markets I’m very familiar with.   I’m looking at a Alternative Rock Station that has operates under a personal page and does a really good job, I just wish they were doing under a ‘Like’ page so that they don’t get shut down one day for operating as a business on a personal page.  The same station also has a like page, and you guessed plenty of people engaging on their wall and zero posts by the station.

In the few markets i looked at there were lots of mediocre at best pages and in some cases, just slapping a page up and calling it good.  There are a couple of stations doing a decent job, and some on-air talent doing a very good job but all of those are under personal pages not business pages.  I think there is a tremendous amount of potential synergy between the two mediums that can have some real benefits, not just for the listeners but also the businesses that advertise on those stations who are on Facebook.  Being able to take care and enhance the consumer and the advertiser at the same time would be worth a look don’t you think.