I was sent a link to this video where the question of why is asked and how important it is to selling. This instantly got me thinking about how to apply it more in Radio.
The excellent book by David Lloyd speaks more about the words to use when talking on the radio including the powerful ‘you’ but this got me thinking about the whole way you come at something to talk about on the radio.
I have some personal experience of offering up a travel insulated mug as a prize which is branded with the station name and so normally whenever I spoke about this competition I spoke about the name and ‘mechanism’ of the competition and the prize was almost an afterthought (it is only a travel mug after all!).
But using the question ‘why’ spins the wording and technique completely. I now promote the benefits of having an insulated mug through a variety of stories or dream up scenarios where it might help the listener to use one. That then leads onto telling them how one could be theirs.
As with most bits of advice this is not rocket science and you may well do this every day of the week but I thought it worth talking about. Hope it helps you in the future.
A lot of users of Myriad Playout are volunteers and only visit the studio when presenting a show so do work at home beforehand.
One job which can be done at home is tagging up songs and idents for importing into Myriad Playout when at the studio.
The application I use and recommend is from Charlie Davy called My Library. I have made a small video to show you how it simple and quick to tag up songs.
Some more thoughts I have been having about what Radio can learn from podcasts.
One thing I find useful about podcasts are their show notes. These are often links directly to the stories and/or website mentioned, equipment talked about and sponsors of that podcast plus a rundown of topics is sometimes included. The big benefit of this is whilst the show is on I am often walking to/from work and don’t have a means of writing things down but I don’t have to – often the links are “in the show notes”.
Now I am thinking primarily of BBC Local Radio here but commercial radio could use it with their sponsors to help engagement. Wouldn’t it be much better for them on air instead of reading out website addresses they just say “for the website links head to the programme page on our website”. This doesn’t need to be confined to website links as it can contain contact details and more specific details of requests/appeals plus a photo or two. BBC Local is tending to rely on Facebook to give this info and added edge simply because it is simpler to achieve. I shall simpler to achieve as I believe the ‘ibroadcast’ system is capable to adding notes to show (let me know in the comments if this is true)
These show notes could also have timecode in them allowing the listener to be able to jump to that particular point when the interview begun. I often see tweets from presenters saying “Great having x on the show today – listen again on the iPlayer (scroll to 47:30 in)” or those tweets come from guests on the show. This would enable more SEO for the BBC Website plus those appearing and enable better sharing of content via social media. It would also help if in the future you wanted to ‘atomise’ the content and use it in a similar way to the way NPR do for their NPR One App.
Podcasts can do it. Here for example I will link to the in point in my podcast, Desert Island Geek, where I spoke to Christian Payne AKA @documentally about how he ended up being a sheep farmer for 6 years. I can then link or embed the player to an earlier part of that same podcast where he spoke about his book choice to read during his time on the island.
Along similiar lines the URLs of the individual shows should be improved to be, for example, www.bbc.co.uk/essex/monk should get me to the Dave Monk show on BBC Essex and his latest programme should be front and centre with listen live if he happens to be on air at the time.
Please let me know your thoughts on my thoughts in the comments below.
I’m a big podcast listener and have been since the early days. Throughout my time as a listener I have always been on the lookout for how Radio can learn from podcasts/podcasters.
A good few of my podcasts come from the Relay.FM network which is run by Myke Hurley in the UK and Steven Hackett from the US. As an aside Myke in 2015 gave up his job in banking to go full time podcasting and earns more money now. One of his podcast, The Pen Addict, recently did a kickstarter campaign to fund Myke’s travel to Atlanta to visit a Pen Convention. It was at this convention that he would also finally meet, face to face, his co-presenter on the podcast having only spoken via Skype or in a text chat room. The kickstarter campaign got funded and Myke got on the plane to Atlanta and they recorded an episode of the show in person plus for those who contributed a video of the meeting and convention was recorded and sent to them.
It got me thinking – could a radio station ever do this or a breakfast show?
Imagine there was an event happening within the stations TSA that the listeners wanted to go to but couldn’t afford to. Would it be crazy to ask the listeners on air to call and pledge money to enable the station to attend on their behalf?
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