Authentic Buzz

Recent news from Rolling Stone that they want to launch a social networking site. It seems everyone is after one, they see MySpace and think oooh, we’ll have some of that. It’s also now very easy to set one up as there are loads of off-the-shelf bits of software that you can install and integrate into your site.  However, unless your site is very very focused I see absolutely no point in doing it.

I think part of it is that there’s still a desire for website owners obsessing with having people come to their site to do everything. You can tell that the sales manager is in the background screaming “we need more page impressions!”. It’s the same in most media - “we need more spots” or “can we squeeze in another promotion?”. Money is of course hugely important, but these sales decisions need to be weighed up against the effect it has on the product and the relationship you have with your consumer.

I think the danger of trying to do too much is you dilute everything you’re about and it confuses the people who visit you as they’re turning up for a different reason.

If the thought behind creating a social network is a desire for them to get closer to their consumers then I think that’s an honourable aim. You just don’t need to do it yourself. There are some super-social networks - the Facebook’s and MySpace’s of the world - where lots of people virtually live. Surely there’s more value in connecting to them in their home environment rather then forcing them to come to yours. It’s a bit like saying our audience all like going to the local pub on the corner, so lets build a pub on a corner and maybe they’ll all come to us?

Naturally there are exceptions, the succesful sites are those who built tools that let users do something useful and different and then this collective act of doing something similar made the users coalesce into a growing community. The enabler for MySpace was new bands uploading music and for someone like Virgin Radio, their community has been built from people posting news stories/forum posts all connected through an establised VIP system that they sign up to all them to enter competitions/email the DJ and such.

I popped over to Virgin Radio last night and caught up with their new media supremo James Cridland. Virgin’s been the leader in radio online for a long time and much of that’s been based on constant innovation. However, in any organisation getting people to buy into the vision is vital and a key way of manging that is by demonstrating value to the staff, both your own and those in the wider company too. This, of course, is easier said than done and takes real focus for any new media team.

James has a great tool in his office to demonstrate value, he’s hung a large plasma screen above his team showing a number of different things. Half was taken up with recent activity by the users. If you got to virginradio.co.uk/interact you can see a scrolling activity wall with information about what the VIP’s (the station’s CRM’d users) have been doing. The office-version includes this ‘public’ information as well as more private data - like whose contacted the studio, entered competitions etc. He said this was brilliant to watch when their was a call to action on-air as instantly you got to see real-world responses. In a similar fashion the second section showed the current number of VIPs - a key target for any radio station.

The third section looks at the station’s streaming figures and shows the current number of streaming listeners. Cleverly it’s displayed alongside the official RAJAR listening figures for that hour, allowing them to show the percentage of listeners who are listening online right now.

Together, these features provide a great insight for the team showing instantly how their actions are being consumed by the audience and properly demonstrating the value of their contribution to the radio station.