What Social Media Can Learn From Radio

Yesterday at the 140 Conference Ontario, I tossed out a couple of ideas that apparently resonated with a few people, so I wanted to share them here.  I’ll likely end up either rewriting or refining this later, but since most of what came out of my mouth was off the top of my head, I wanted to get it down and expand on it a touch before it went to that same part of my brain as “pick up more paper towels.”

The dirty little secret of the radio industry is that pretty much every station in North America (yesterday I was charitable and said it was only 90%) runs content on the weekends that is prerecorded, but done in such a way that it’s meant to sound live.

The practice is as common as having a little red light that says “On Air”, and in the business we call it “voicetracking”.  It’s been going on as long as anyone can remember.  I got my start as an on-air personality when I was 15 years old, because I deliberately erased a reel-to-reel tape with a voice track on it so that the station would have no choice but to put me on the radio LIVE that morning to do a Top 40 countdown show.  (To my friend Tarzan Dan, who recorded that voice track nearly 30 years ago now, my apologies. I don’t think I ever mentioned it to you until just now.)

Radio stations have two sets of customers: their advertising clients who pay for 30 and 60-second chunks of airtime, and the listeners.  The more listeners there are, the more the station can charge the advertisers.  Pretty simple.  Since the relationship works that way, it would make sense that radio stations would do everything they can to stroke the listeners and keep them coming back.

For some reason, radio decided once upon a time that wasn’t important anymore.

Ever try to call a radio station on a Saturday night or early Sunday morning to make a request, and found that the lines are all busy?

It’s not because lots of people are calling, or the DJ has a bunch of other listeners on hold. No one is calling.  The lines are blocked (or “busied out” as we used to call it), and I’d bet my last year’s salary that there’s no one in the building.  The DJ you were trying to call? Someplace far away from the radio station, because in that scenario they’re likely recorded; you’re listening to the computer play back a series of audio files that was programmed days ago.

Feel a little ripped off?  You should.  As far as I’m concerned, it’s one of the main reasons that the radio industry is under constant threat from new technologies; because it seems to me that as an industry, radio doesn’t really care about their relationships with the listeners anymore.  I have worked for programmers who seem to feel that as long as there’s something coming out of the speakers, their obligation to the listener is complete.

(Don’t even get me started about the place I worked where, when the morning news person couldn’t make it in, someone came at 4:30am to record the newscasts for the rest of the morning show.  Yup, the 8:30 news, recorded at 4:30 in the morning.  It happens.)

Radio stations started voice tracking for a simple reason: If a station plays 10 minutes of commercials and 45 minutes of music an hour, that leaves 5 minutes for the DJ to fill with talk.  So the station could pay him his massive salary to come in and do a six-hour shift, or they could have him record the 30 minutes of talking he’ll do in the six hours, and pay some kid seven bucks an hour to play the pieces in the right places.

Twitter and Facebook are, in my opinion, the first legitimate threats to terrestrial radio.  MUCH bigger than satellite radio, or even Internet radio with wi-fi chips going in cars.

Why?  Simple.

Let’s say a fire breaks out downtown at lunch.  The newspaper won’t have it until tomorrow.  IF the TV station decides to cut into whatever show happens to be running at the time, they have to find an anchor, find a reporter, get ‘em dressed, miked, to the scene or anchor desk, prepare the graphics, blah blah blah.  A radio DJ can go on RIGHT NOW and tell you it’s happening as soon as she finds out.

For decades, radio was able to hang its hat on being the fastest medium out there.

Then came Facebook, then Twitter.  And radio has never tried to find a way to leverage or compete with the power of a medium that is even more immediate.  It’s almost as if radio has shrugged its shoulders, shifted its eyes around and started saying “Sure, we’re not the fastest anymore, but uh… we’re… um… we’re the fastest one that plays music!”

The only thing radio has going for it now, is the words coming out of the mouths of the people who come on between the songs.  But for more than 20 years now, radio stations have been trying to cut back on talk.  I’m sure there’s a station in your town that touts “More Music, Less Talk”.  Problem is that radio people are usually too vapid to figure out that now, with iPods and Internet radio, their “More Music, Less Talk” slogan translates as “We play the music that we believe you’re too stupid to find for yourself!  AND we do it without some pesky human trying to make a connection with you!”

As a medium, Twitter and Facebook will now beat radio every time, because Twitter and Facebook offer me real-time connection with actual human beings who want to have conversations with me.  People LOVE talking to each other.  Listeners got tired of the talking on the radio because most of it was stupid, boring, and wasn’t designed to make a connection with the listener.

And THAT is what Social Media can learn from radio.  Because on 9/11, radio WAS Social Media.  It was radio stations giving up the airwaves to nameless, faceless non-celebrities so they could connect with other nameless, faceless non-celebrities.  Sometime afterward, stations stopped caring and went back to “More Of What We Decided You Should Like, And Less Human Contact”.

If you’re a rock and roll fan, go back in your favorite station’s Facebook page, their Twitter feed or the blogs on their website and see how long it took for them to tell you that the world’s most infamous saxophone player, Clarence Clemons, was dead.  My guess is you’ll find they didn’t say a word until the Monday following his death on the Saturday night.  Because in some cities there was, very possibly, no one in the building in between.

Tell a radio station they should take out the phone lines that run into the studio and they’d recoil in horror.  They’d stress how important it is to talk to the audience, and that it’s so important they need a $13,000 gadget that will put edited versions of those recorded calls on the air within moments of them happening.  The line blinks to let the DJ know there’s a call, and there’s a flurry of activity to make sure we talk to that one person, and hopefully use the call on the air if it’s funny or interesting enough, because “it’s important we let the listeners know we’re accessible, and that we care.”  But tweet your favorite DJ or try to engage them in a conversation on Facebook, and prepare for the crickets.  (Maybe it’s because you don’t need a $13,000 gadget to talk to someone on Twitter.)

There you go, Social Media.  There, somewhere in all that ranting and raving, are the lessons you can learn from radio.  In short, have as little in common with radio as possible and you’ll do just fine.

Found a tool that allows you to Auto-DM followers on Twitter?  Found a cool app that allows you to schedule a Status Update for a later time?  Congratulations!  You just became a person who is killing social media.  You just turned into what radio would call a Voicetracker.  Got a Facebook page that you use once a week to tell your “likers” about this week’s specials?  Way to go.  You matter even less.

Because without connections to other humans, without conversations that leave us room to care about each other, Social Media is just another medium.

Please, Social Media, don’t abandon the conversation like radio has done.