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Mike Stiles
13 Ways to Use Imagery to Sell Radio Spots
Much of the social content advice you’ll get as a radio station will be about attracting listeners or servicing existing listeners with new and engaging features that will deepen their relationships with your brand. That’s all well and good. In fact, it’s better than well and good…it’s critical.
Pinterest: Oh God Not Another One!
So we start out with a rather unique concept that took off like a rocket, Facebook. With over 800 million users globally, it is still without question the biggest dog in the pound. And with an IPO expected this week, the sudden creation of numerous millionaires will probably remind us all of the power of a brilliant idea well executed.
7 Steps To A Social Partnership
Radio has always done partnerships very well. The idea of teaming up with a client to make a promotion happen is nothing alien to us at all. We’ve always understood that providing a client with involvement that takes them above and beyond a standard spot schedule creates a premium marketing vehicle for them, and usually serves to deepen and strengthen the relationship between that client and the radio station.
Even If You're Still In...You're Not In Radio
It’s getting hard to be a purist. We all know them; the vaunted champions of pushing an audio signal out of a tall stick to a limited area. I’ll bet some reading this blog right now remember getting physically excited, adrenaline racing, because they were able to pick up a Detroit AM in Charlotte in the middle of the night.
How To Get Mentioned on Twitter
Ever wonder what the most successful brands are doing that warrants their getting mentioned on Twitter? Yeah, me too. I’m always interested in what strikes a cord with followers, whether it’s of information or entertainment value.
Facebookers WILL Rally Around Your Product
(by Mike Stiles) Every once in awhile, the breaks fall your way. And when it comes to what makes people on Facebook connect with one another and become “friends,” radio gets a break. Turns out music is one of the things that actually influences people to come together if they share the same taste in it, at least to some degree.
How to Make Your Station Famous in 2012
(by Mike Stiles) Want your station to be famous in 2012? Then my advice is to gauge what “worked” in the viral social network world in 2011 and learn some content lessons from it. These things were liked, shared, commented on, and spread for a reason. They hit a nerve, struck a funny bone, made people feel something, made them want to connect with others around it. Now THAT’S good content.
How Mobile Are You?
(by Mike Stiles) Some of you are old enough to remember when the transistor radio first came onto the scene. Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask those of you who are to admit it. But it was the beginning of an unprecedented explosion of radio usage. It changed everything. Gone were the Norman Rockwell days of children lying on their stomachs in living rooms, chins in their hands, staring at the glowing radio dial. Gone in fact, were the days of being tethered to the car.
10 Ways to Captivate On-Air and Online
(Mike Stiles) You’re at war for people’s attention. And in a world where both the number of messages and the speed at which those messages come at people has skyrocketed, waging that war has gotten nothing but harder. If your business relies on attracting, interesting, and holding an audience (and it does), then your very survival hinges on your ability to not only create content that truly connects with them, but to do it again and again…daily.
You Know Your PPM, but How’s Your Klout?
(by Mike Stiles) If there’s one thing radio managers and staffs love, it’s finding out who the winners and losers are. Every month, radio brain trusts huddle excitedly over a hot monitor, waiting for their numbers to come in so that they’ll know…well, I’m not exactly sure what we’re supposed to learn from them anymore. But do you know your Klout score? If you’re active to any degree on the social networks, you’ve been assigned an ever-changing numeric score between 1 and 100 that lets everybody know how influential you are in your field of expertise.
What Do Your Listeners Really Care About?
(by Mike Stiles) You’ve heard it time and time again (mostly probably from me), now that relevant, engaging, entertaining and/or informative posts are the only path to showing up on users’ News Feeds so you can be seen, content is king now more than ever. You are simply dead meat without it. And you can’t get by with filler this time…it’s got to be good or it’s not going anywhere.
To Google+ or Not to Google+?
(Mike Stiles) In a long awaited move, Google+, the social networking site aiming to take on Facebook and rock its world, now allows branded pages for businesses, organizations, artists, and yes, radio stations. There was never a doubt brands were interested in trying out Google’s venture, even having to be told by the company to stop making regular profile pages, because brand pages were coming. Well ta da, they’re here.
So…How Many Channels do You Have?
(Mike Stiles) Let’s talk about content. Yours. For many of you, your content consists of music (that you picked out for listeners), commercials, and a jock giving call letters, time and temp. Others of you feature compelling talk hosts, either piped in or local. All of this goes out under your brand via 2 outlets, your broadcast tower and your Internet stream.
Facebook Numbers, What’s It To Ya?
(by Mike Stiles) Radio managers love numbers these days. Oh who are we kidding? If numbers had legs, radio managers would take them out dancing, buy them the most expensive wine, put them in the front row of a Tony Bennett show and propose by the end of the night. I’m talking pure love and co-dependence here.
What A Rocker Thinks About Social
(Mike Stiles) Adam Duritz of Counting Crows is many things. Apart from the crafter of hits like “Mr. Jones” and much loved movie music like“Accidentally in Love,” Duritz is a full-blown social marketing thought-leader. I had the chance to catch Adam this week giving a presentation at the Pivot Conference, part of Social Week in NYC. His session was called “The Audience Imperative: a New Relationship Between Artists and Fans.”
Here’s What’s Going to Happen to Radio
(by Mike Stiles) I put off writing this particular blog for a while. I suppose I was waiting to be wrong, or looking for a development that would change my mind. But gazing into radio’s future as things stand now, I’m pretty confident this is where we’re headed. As always, there are choices: adapt and evolve to put yourself in the best position possible, or cling to old technologies & old business models, hoping the whole “Internet thing” goes away.
6 Things Radio Can Learn from Food Trucks
(by Mike Stiles) If you haven’t experienced the food truck phenomenon in your city, you probably soon will. Here’s how they operate. They paint colorful trucks. They come up with unique menu items. They find a place to park, tweet & post their location, and serve the long lines that pour out of offices. The next day, they go somewhere else and do it again.
WXYZ Radio Station – This is Your Life!
(by Mike Stiles) While personal Facebook pages have just gone through a tsunami of change, many of which affect the way brand marketers (like your radio station) approach their social marketing strategies, what has so far remained unchanged are the brand Pages themselves. I wouldn’t count on them not changing. In fact, I’d bet the FarmVille on it. We haven’t heard anything specific or official from our friends at Facebook yet, but based on some reading between the lines, brand Pages will be undergoing a titanic shift not unlike what the personal profile pages just went through.
Do What Bowie Said And Face the Changes
(by Mike Stiles) Without fail, every time Facebook changes the way it looks or the way you use it, people get on and howl about it. By doing so, they’re implicitly saying Facebook should not innovate, improve, advance, evolve…none of that. And to do so represents some kind of “mistreatment” of Facebook users. I can only assume these same people are staunchly opposed to Disney World adding any new attractions.
Is Your Content Worthless?
(by Mike Stiles) Let me as you a hard question. Is your content worth anything? Are you okay? I know it can be harshly unsettling to get hit point blank with a question like that. But seriously, have you ever thought about whether the content you’re putting out on your radio station is really worth anything?
Social Marketers Making the Same Mistake as Radio?
(by Mike Stiles) I recently came across a study mentioned on Ad Age, a review of the 300 top brand pages on Facebook, that showed the engagement of leading brands is down 22%. Some brands do better than others of course, but that was the net result. As a reminder, engagement is not about how many fans you have or how many you can collect. It’s about how, and how often, the fans you do have are interacting with the content you’re putting out.
A Digital Leader: WTOP-FM DC
(by Mike Stiles) Just as you begin to wonder if radio’s ever going to be allowed by its current owners and managers to evolve into future business models, along comes a beacon of hope, proving that innovation, risk, foresightedness, ambition, nimbleness, and creativity are still alive and kicking inside our industry. Hubbard’s WTOP-FM, Washington (103.5) made the decision they were going to be more than a radio station.
Create A Mob Mentality With Your Social Media
(by Mike Stiles) On July 4 in a suburb of Cleveland, about 1,000 teens showed up and starting fighting at a fireworks celebration. They organized over the social networks. In London, rioting and looting has been escalating all week, blamed in part on Twitter, texting and instant messages. The National Retail Federation says 10% of the companies they surveyed were recently targeted by groups of thieves who planned and organized on the social networks.
Do You Have Fickle Facebook Friends?
(by Mike Stiles) I read a statistic recently that alarmed but didn’t surprise me. Only about 2% of Fans return to a Facebook Page after they “Like” it. 2%! What if a friend told you they liked you, but then they never called, never visited, and never had any idea what was going on in your life? You wouldn’t feel like you had a very valuable friend would you?
Attention GM's: Post or Get off the Pot
(by Mike Stiles) You know your listeners listen to your station. You know your listeners are passionate about your station. And you know if you tell your listeners to "Like" you on Facebook they will. Everyone is migrating to digital for one reason or another. Despite recent stories about how people are deleting their Facebook accounts, there are still hundreds of millions of users, including many of your listeners. So, why is your General Manager refusing to pay attention to that free product. Blogger Mike Stiles asks and answers that question in his latest piece.
Increase Listener Participation And Client Involvement.
Location based challenges are a way for radio to restore the glory days of listener participation and client involvement. Remember when you could get your listeners to jump through hoops and create an attention-getting spectacle to win a prize? You still can. But I’m not talking about that small core of diehard players who always show up, willing to perform any zaniness you come up with to win…whatever. You know who they are, God bless ‘em. They sure do love you, but you have secret desires of seeing a lot more people than the “usuals” show up.
Facebook Video Calling: To Seize or Squander?
Facebook’s new Video Calling feature was announced with much fanfare this week. It allows for real-time, face-to-face video chats within the Facebook environment. Sure Skype has been around awhile and gained significant traction. But this incorporation of its video communication power into a social network that’s already an astonishing hub of interaction is worthy of the buzz it’s getting.
Using Images in Posts: Wow My Eyes
(by Mike Stiles) For years we’ve comforted ourselves in the knowledge that we deal in sound, so we don’t have to worry about imagery or putting out anything attractive to eyeballs. As long as your logo looked cool on your t-shirts, you were golden. Now, since we’re running station Facebook pages, we have to put some thought into drawing people in with pictures.
