By Randy Lane

The sale of WABB-FM/Mobile not only represents the end of a 50 year era for a legendary Top 40 radio station. In many ways, it symbolizes the end of radio’s golden age.

Bernie Dittman, WABB’s colorful owner who passed in 2006, is surely wearing both a sad and happy face today. Sad that the station he built with unmatched passion is disappearing. Happy that it was never sold to a major commercial company. WABB started and ended as a local, family owned station. WABB has been acquired by EMF and will become a Pop Christian station March 1st.

With new social networks popping up daily, it’s easy to tune them out. However, there is one newbie you can’t ignore, and that’s Pinterest.  

What is Pinterest?

It’s a virtual pinboard that allows you to organize and share (or “pin”) things you find on the web. Common uses for Pinterest include wedding planning, home decorating, fashion, and cooking. It’s social because other pinners can comment, like, or repin your pins.

by Randy Lane, Stan Main, Angela Perelli and Stephanie Winans

Did you know that in order for your morning show podcast to get credit with Arbitron, the podcast (if you post a whole hour or whole show) has to contain 100% of the broadcast audio including commercials?  We didn’t either.

Not only are you not getting any ratings value if you’re posting your entire show online; you could potentially be losing ratings by providing your morning show on-demand, commercial free.

Why might you still want to do a full podcast even without ratings credit?

• To please the P1s who can’t listen to the entire show live by providing it on demand

• To drive traffic and increase page views and hits to your website

• To sell ads and/or sponsorships of the podcast page on the website

Here are five things you can do to get ratings credit for podcasts:

1. Take short excerpts of content (at least five minutes; less than 10 minutes) from the encoded broadcast (not from the stream). You can have a great segment of the show that leads up to or follows commercials (minus the commercials) as your podcast.

Ratings Tip: The podcast has to be at least five minutes long to get credit for a quarter-hour in Arbitron.

Tech Tip: Cut the podcast down to mono to reduce the file size by 50%. Since these segments will likely be talk, there is no need for them to be in stereo.

Upside: Short podcasts enable listeners to download and forward them to friends as part of your viral marketing strategy.

2. Share exceptional segments with your fan base via social networks and loyal listener email. Since P1 listeners tend to be active on station online platforms, the podcast will likely get some click-throughs, and we can only hope that a few of those listeners will have a meter.

3.  Stress the urgency of listening to the podcast within 24 hours, because Arbitron tallies the data daily. If someone listens to that A-list interview or compelling segment next week, you do not get credit. Eric Rowe, from the Roula & Ryan Show, KRBE/Houston, swears that their strategy of posting the daily War of the Roses segment “only until midnight” has increased ratings. Check out more on this strategy here.

4. Your podcast must be encoded with the broadcast encoder. Arbitron provides a separate encoder for your radio station’s stream and the station’s broadcast. If your podcast is coded with your station’s stream encoder or no encoder, you won’t get credit.

5. Be careful about airing an excerpt from another radio show. For example, If Rush Limbaugh goes on a controversial rant and you rebroadcast it, a PPM panelist’s meter will likely pick up two codes and you are likely to lose credit for listening.

If you are in a diary market, here’s what you need to know:

• If a listener writes in their diary they listened to your station without noting it was a podcast or stream, you will get credit in Arbitron. At present, the diary only has a time entry and does not ask the diary keeper to specify if the listening took place on the station broadcast, internet stream or from a podcast.

• If the diary keeper writes down your website, e.g. “wabb.com,” or the name of your podcast, “QTip and Nick’s podcast” for example, you will not get credit for the listening.

KEEP IN MIND: Streaming and podcasting continue to comprise less than 1% of listening according to the latest study by Arbitron.


If you have questions about any of this information, read Arbitron’s PPM Policy Brief on Time-Shifted Listening here or contact us.

If you're in radio in Canada, stay tuned for an article on podcasting and BBM.

You have probably seen this viral video of Kristen Bell on Ellen from earlier this week. (If not, read no farther. Watch it here. We’ll wait…)

At first glance, you might think she’s cute and a little odd with that sloth obsession of hers. But break down the segment and it’s a brilliant example of character and storytelling.

Sometimes listeners amaze me. 

I know sometimes we radio people tend to think of our listeners as a singular, loyal, salivating throng that only exists to listen to our show and hang on our every word. Turns out that's really not true at all. Surprise! Our listeners are made up of a bunch of unique people with varying degrees of education, attractiveness, happiness and how much they really give a blank about our show.

“When guys say ‘I’m not a role model’. Well, yes you are. You’re just a bad one.”-Tim Tebow

Tim Tebow is a true HD character. He's authentic, real and honest. He's passionate, principled and inspiring. He has heart. He’s vulnerable. He’s the boy next door and an underdog.

You can’t dispute the undeniable wisdom of School House Rock; feel free to sing along:
Three is a magic number,
Yes it is, it's a magic number.
Somewhere in the ancient, mystic trinity
You get three as a magic number.

Why Three? Because it resonates, it sticks, it’s memorable. We’ve been programmed from childhood to respond to patterns of three in the stories we grew up with; The Three Musketeers, The Three Little Pigs, The Three Wise Men.

We have all gotten caught up in someone’s quest for transformation. In fact, most television competition shows rely on the concept of personal transformation – the X Factor’s Chris Rene (overcoming addiction!), Dancing with the Stars’ Chaz Bono (overcoming a sex change!), and just about any pairing on The Amazing Race (people in relationships coming to a new understanding about each other! All while digging through ox manure on a farm in Sri Lanka!). Audiences like stories. We like to be inspired. 

If you were asked to define your personality brand in 3-4 words, could you do it?

The American Marketing Association defines a brand as a "name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller's good or service as distinct from those of other sellers."
   
The key word in this definition is distinct. Today everyone has an opportunity with social media to strengthen and distinguish their personality brand.

If I have learned one thing it’s that there are lessons everywhere.

Take a kindergarten Christmas concert for example. Have you been to one lately? The kids memorize their songs; they make their placards displaying greetings in other languages (Aloha! Konnichi wa!); they practice their line-up and stage entrance. The big night comes: the room is filled with parents wielding video cameras. The class hits the stage and, well, things aren’t perfect. A girl on one end dances to her own beat. A boy in the front holds his “Ciao!” sign upside down. The boy on the left refused to wear a white button-down like the others and instead has chosen a striped green rugby shirt.

Some things you can’t control no matter how much you practice.

Imagine next week you find out that Rick Dees, Scott Shannon, or (enter your own Radio Deity here) was going to be in town sitting in a hotel room listening to just your station, and your show.

What would you do differently to prepare? How much better would your show’s production value be? How hard would you work on your recycler promo? How awesome would your horizontal and vertical teases be? What would you spend more time on?

Rob Basile read my article in Radio Ink and had some valuable thoughts of his own to add. Here is the article I wrote, with Rob's additions below:

1. Set goals and celebrate victories: There are ways to measure growth other than ratings, so establish clear expectations -- digital, ratings, sales, etc. As a manager, it's up to you to communicate the goals to the point where every employee can repeat them back to you.

As news/talk stations shift to include more lifestyle and celebrity news to the menu of topics, producers, program directors and talent are all asking: “When is an entertainment story considered news?”

The short answer: If everyone is talking about it, then it's news, and you should be talking about it too. 

Has this ever happened to you? You are on the phone with someone like a co-worker, friend or business associate and after you say goodbye you say "I love you" (the way you end conversations with a loved one). Talk about embarrassing!

Take calls on embarrassing stories where listeners said “I love you” to the wrong person or someone said it to them.  Take the segment one step further and record and edit these ideas:

If you struggle with finding your voice and your humor in your writing, you’re not alone. Radio people, hired to talk on the radio, are now required to write too. Blogs! Status updates! Tweets! And you thought you were off the hook.

Write to Done,  a writing blog, posted tips on getting more humor in your writing. Many of the tips are parallel to what makes funny radio, and yet we read social media posts and blogs all the time that lack these basic elements.
Here are the tips, with my thoughts on them.

The McRib. Pumpkin Spice Lattes. The Little Mermaid. These products whip us into a collective frenzy because of their limited availability. You snooze, you lose. Use that same concept around podcasting your hottest features to win in PPM.

I've been fired, unexpectedly, what's the first thing I should do? 

Take a deep breath, relax and figure out a way to turn this huge negative into one of the biggest positives of your life. How easy that is to do is proportionate to the number of dependents you have. If you don't have any dependents, congratulations because this is seriously a huge opportunity to make your life better. You need to have some faith and not turn a bump in the road into a recurring nightmare.

Take care of yourself first. Take the time to process what has just happened. Embrace your feelings whether they be shock, hurt and disappointment. Then as best you can release those feelings and let them go. The next stage is likely to be anger. Embrace anger and then let that go as well. Connect with family, friends and business people who support you.  Take a deep breath (ok, several) and remember: this is not the end of your world. If you've worked in radio long enough - you've been here before. You got it through it then.  You'll get through it again."

I was just on the phone with another amazingly-talented, super-attractive and meticulously dressed Randy Lane client. "Dave," you may be asking, "How do you know they were meticulously dressed if you were on the phone with them?"

Stop asking questions, it confuses me.

There has been so much bad parody material over the past few years that many consultants and programmers pulled all parody content due to poor focus group showings. If, however, you have the talent to execute great parody, then don’t follow that advice. It doesn’t apply to you!

Parody works when it is authentic and is used to develop the characters on the show. See Jimmy Kimmel’s now infamous feud with his then girlfriend Sarah Silverman over Matt Damon and Ben Affleck here, for an example.

Kurt Cobain once said, “I would rather be hated for something I am, than loved for something I am not.”

An article showcasing That Guy Kramer morning show (Play 98.7/Tampa) co-host, Miguel Fuller, brings Cobain’s point to light for those of us in morning radio. Fuller, who is gay and black, is open about his life on the air.  He feels that people should get to know him for who he is and not just as that gay person. “Not only am I gay, I’m also black and struggle with weight issues,” he said.

Successful films, sports teams, TV shows and radio shows are built around personalities and performers. The same is true of politicians! The Gallop Poll has been polling presidential elections since 1960 when John Kennedy ran against Richard Nixon. Gallop asks voters their opinions of the candidates based on how they stand on the issues, their voting records, level of experience and their personality.

Newsweek published Steve Jobs’ playbook for managing the creative process at Apple in the form of ten commandments.

We’re always inspired by Steve Jobs’ thinking and innovation, and found these commandments relevant for radio (most of them, anyway).

Radio is in the business of audio. So why are many morning show podcasts neglected or difficult to navigate? Because we don’t take time to view our content from a listener’s perspective. Podcasts should serve both P1s and the casual listener (who you hope will become a P1 after listening to your awesome podcast). To create a podcasts page on your website that is listener-friendly, consider the needs of your listeners.

September 14, 2011
I had a GM once who reminded me every time we hired someone new that I needed to encourage them to come in with new ideas. And more importantly, I had to try to implement at least one of their ideas within the first month. He would ask: “Is it going to hurt us to do it?”  And if it wasn’t going to hurt us, then I was to do whatever I could to make it happen.