Authentic Buzz

I headed off to the North West last week to spend a day with the BBC Radio Manchester team to talk to them about some of the new media things that they’re already doing and to make some suggestions about some new ideas they could easily implement at the station. Being up that way also meant I could catch up with my student radio buddy, Richard Clarke, and watch him present EMAP’s big network show out of Key 103, In Demand.

With the clients I’ve worked with, I always try and spend as much time as I can with the team in the place they actually work. That way you get a better idea about how they interact with their colleagues, what their workload is like and what kind of tools they have at their disposal. I also think you get a better idea of their attitude towards new ideas when you interrupt them in the middle of their day job.

BBC Radio Manchester’s a great station that’s been through some big changes over the past two years. It’s in a competitive market with a new launch last year - XFM Manchester - and a new launch this year - Rock Talk – a station demographically targeted at BBC Radio Manchester’s core audience.

Like many organisations they understand that their sector and the demands from their audiences are changing. This is something that’s a challenge to deal with when you still have to do the traditional day job and budgets that doesn’t see much of an increase.

John Ryan, the Editor there (pictured), was interested in how they can harness new web applications to enhance what they do, better serve their listeners and promote the station to listeners who might enjoy it if they tuned in.

Already though, the station is doing some interesting things to communicate with listeners on different platforms. The new music show, for instance, has a MySpace page with over 2000 friends. Now, if you’re on the leading edge, it’s quite easy to dismiss MySpace, but it’s still the place for music fans and bands and in this example it’s a great way to reach a non-traditional audience for the station. They also use it to its full by updating the bands using the bulletins each week with what’s on the show.

Promoting specific content to individual communities interested in part of what you do is very sensible for a radio station. If enacted properly it can help grow the hours of some of your lightest listeners. The MySpace site also acts as a reach builder by connecting to listeners through their interests and then encouraging them to trial something that you know they already like.

The BBC’s also in the process of trialling a blogging platform – the BBC Blog Network. BBC Manchester has taken a slightly different tack to the rest of the network and made the focus of their blog links to Manchester’s other bloggers. Again, it’s a great way to reach out to the community and also a good way to get links back to the BBC. I had a good talk with one of the organisers (and frequent blogger) Richard Fair, about opportunities for the development of the project.

I also had some good discussions with some of the programming teams about the nature of interaction, how it’s changing and what technology could do to help improvement the relationships between listener and the station. People often forget that radio stations are the old masters at communities and interaction, the insight that they have puts them in a strong position as new platforms develop.