Do your emails include a sig line? Probably. And I bet your email signature line looks something like this:
Laura Smith, General Manager
Acme Radio Group
Sunnyville, Texas
WSXY 100.1 – WERT 92.5 – WVBV 102.5
Here’s the thing: Every email you send is a chance to insert a little ad into your recipient’s email inbox. And because it’s part of your email signature it won’t be seen as spam!
Here are a couple of better signatures:
Laura Smith, General Manager
Acme Radio Group
If you’re on your computer, you can listen to our award-winning stations right now! Click a link and listen live:
WSXY 100.1 for Country: http://www.wsxy.com
WERT 92.5 for Oldies: http://www.wert.com
WVBV 102.5 for Jazz: http://www.wvbv.com
and
Laura Smith, General Manager
Acme Radio Group
Look for WSXY, WERT and WVBV at the Sunnyville Community Center June 10 at our 7th annual Indoor Family Adventure Party! Click here for the schedule: http://www.schedule.org
and
Thomas Ganes
Program Director, WERT 92.5
Want a good laugh? Listen to the WERT Clean Joke of the Day every weekday morning at 7:15. You can also get it on the WERT Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/wert
Twitter and Facebook allow you to pop into your listeners’ online lives when you want. It’s true! If someone joins your radio station Facebook fan page, or follows you on Twitter, anything you type is inserted into their personal news stream.
So don’t blow it.
I follow many radio stations on Twitter, and tweets like this one leave me dumbfounded. It’s a real tweet, but the station and jock names have been changed:
Jack in the Morning is back! Carl Adams is in for Art Williams rest of this week from 10am-12pm on K-107. Join Bill Peters today for the 5 at 5!
Hundreds of K-107’s listeners have said, “Yes! Please enter my life stream through Twitter/Facebook!” — and the best it can deliver is a DJ schedule.
Here’s a better tweet:
JACK: I’m back Wed. with the craziest lost luggage story ever. Tune in at 7:15 and share YOUR vacation/travel nightmare. Trust me…you won’t want to miss this!
1) Instead of a robotweet from the station, the update was sent by Jack (even if it was really sent by Jack’s producer).
2) Jack has given the station’s followers a pretty compelling reason to tune in. Everyone’s had a vacation nightmare and, more importantly, if I enjoy Jack’s show and like his stories I’m going to tune into to hear what he has to share.
Like a radio show, Facebook and Twitter are personal forms of communication.
I just read a great post by Jaye Albright on contests that award a prize to the “Nth” caller. In a nutshell, Jaye says:
- Being the 9th caller is fun…for the disc jockey.
- Eight other people “lose” because they learn on the way to #9 that they were “the wrong caller”.
- Everyone else “wins” a busy signal.
- We’re likely not doing these contests because listeners like them but because radio’s always done them!
- Historically, the best radio contests reinforce the station’s brand image or key unique selling positioning points.
This is not to say contests shouldn’t be played. As Jaye reminds us: Only a very small percentage of your audience will participate in a contest so you want to make sure you are offering entertainment value to keep those who are not playing the game entertained.
This can be as simple as an identify-the-song-clip contest, or some compelling trivia. Another thought: Don’t ask for a caller. Instead, why not reward someone who phones in with a request or compliment. Example:
Caller: “I just wanted to say we love your station. You guys always play the best music and we’re jamming to you right now out at North Side Park!”
You: “That’s awesome! For everybody out at North Side Park, I’m gonna play one of the best summer time songs ever. And since you were kind enough to call in, I’d love for you to be my guest at Saturday’s monster truck show. Would you like a pair of tickets?”
Caller: “That would be great!”
You: “Then enjoy the monster truck show and enjoy this song for everybody at North Side Park…”
One other thought: Use prizes to reward those who’ve given you permission to interrupt their lives — email club members, text club members, Facebook group fans, etc. These listeners are very interested in what your station is doing so perhaps they should be rewarded first.
Dan O’Day wrote a short but sweet little blog post about silly little radio ideas that turned out to be, well, wonderful:
We plan and produce and exhaust ourselves in an effort to do something wonderful on-air…
…and then it’s the casual ad lib that our listeners rave to us about.
Years ago Jeff Kaiser shared with me a wonderfully silly radio idea that his station, KGBI, was doing:
A daily Surf Report.
KGBI is in Grand Island, Nebraska. Which is at least 1,000 miles from any ocean. But Jeff would present the Missouri River Surf Report, using information reported in the local newspaper about the river’s daily depth, high water, currents, etc. Using the theme music from Hawaii 5-0 underneath. And the report was SPONSORED (by a local bar).
Now that’s radio.
What accident or offbeat comment turned into a regular feature on your show?
A station in Orlando has launched Careereoki. Listeners are invited to sing about their work skills and upload a video for a shot at a career makeover.
The contest has wrapped up. Click “comments” to read some good ideas.
Time for a little blog brainstorm experiment. I’m going to toss out a promotion idea and your job is to come up with the promotion details. Everyone who offers up a legitimate promotion is qualified to win a $20 Amazon.com gift certificate.
What we’re brainstorming: “Ugly Christmas Sweater contest”. Click the comment link below to post your idea. Email addresses are not displayed, but are required for entry in the contest. And since we’re experimenting, I’m not going to set a hard deadline — let’s just say this contest will wrap up in a week or two.
I personally have witnessed two “winning key” contests that didn’t go as planned. This mishap didn’t happen to a radio station, but it’s more proof that “winning key” promotions just aren’t worth it. At the end of any big contest you want your qualifiers — your listeners — to feel they had a fair shot at winning the grand prize, with no shadow of a doubt.
A Detroit radio station has apologized after a disk jockey advertised a contest to determine when Britney Spears would commit suicide. “When will Britney end it?” listeners were asked on the Web and the Tuesday night radio show hosted by DJ Big Boy on Channel 955, according to a story in the Detroit News. “If you can guess the exact day that Britney dies, whether it’s from drugs or however she dies, if you’re right, we’ll give you a thousand bucks,” the News quoted DJ Big Boy as saying. More from FoxNews.com.
Male drivers in Shirley, New York, paid $5 for a topless car wash — but didn’t exactly get what they were expecting. Young women held up signs along a busy road advertising the car wash and told the drivers where to go. But hidden behind a big tarp were shirtless male firefighters who were washing the cars. Female drivers enjoyed the gag, though some male drivers felt they were getting burned. All the money went to local charities.
We say: Put your morning show stunt guy out one morning and have the the first ever “Jock Show Topless Car Wash.” Or turn it into a fun Saturday live stuntraiser at a busy intersection. Make sure you donate all the proceeds to charity. (Line up a charity in advance, but be sure they’re in on the joke.)
Much of the U.S. is suffering through terrible heat. Have fun with it by giving away a prize every time one of your CDs “melts”. Use a digital editor to slow down the back end of some songs and then take the tenth caller when listeners hear them melting.
Here’s a fun idea one of our InterPrep subscribers sent us. Each week for four weeks the station would put a list on its website of five things to be photographed with or next to, like a famous statue, a well-known sign, in front of a local mall. The first person each week to email photos of his or herself with those five things received a $100 gift certificate to the mall (the one that was on the list each week). He said it was unique added value for the mall, and a nice way to draw people to the station website.
You could also tie in with a local tourism office and have listeners take their photos next to local tourist attractions. Or, if you have a chain of stores in town, say a muffler shop, the listeners could be required to have their photos taken in front of each location for a decent size gift certificate.
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