I was reared as a traditional media guy and have always had tons of respect for mass communication.
At Otterbein, I was a part of WOBN Westerville and had a blast doing promotions and being on air. The station pushed out to a small broadcast radius of about 5 miles around Westerville. We always joked about the range of the tower.
But, surprisingly, my old jam band and talk radio show would get regular callers, requesting songs, and sharing commentary on the concerts and summer festivals and even local bands. The signal reached thousands of people in that short range, and that type of power always fascinated me.
That was 2000. Napster was thriving and still free. Forums were becoming popular. MySpace was a still dream. Since then, the Interwebz has changed, and along with it, the rules of how media works.
Picking on Dave & Jimmy (with love)
I’m a fan of Dave & Jimmy’s Morning Zoo on WNCI, but I’ve noticed that as popular as the show is across the Midwest, they have a strangely limited footprint on the web. It’s disjointed and unorganized, and I feel like there are opportunities being sorely missed. It’s actually been driving me nuts for weeks now, so I want to help…
23 Ideas to Help WNCI’s Morning Zoo with Dave & Jimmy Get Better at Using Social Media
- Start using a robust listening system. For a brand with an audience the size of yours, this is critical. 80% of using the social web is listening to the conversations and content around your brand. There are probably bloggers talking about you. Do you know who they are? Do you know how many people they reach in their sphere on influence? You should. There are hundreds of tools out there, but be careful. Not all monitoring systems are created equal. Locally, you might want to check out Spiderfly. I like it a lot and recommend it to my clients. (Not an affiliate link.)
- Build up your personal profiles on Facebook. Especially you, Dave. Jimmy – there’s a DJ Jimmy Jam, but it’s not you. Kelsey – you’re doing it right. I love the photos, but add a little more personal content. You all have such an advantage here because tens of thousands of people already feel like they “know” you. At least let them know you can “see” them.
- If you’re going to use Twitter for your show, you should always acknowledge fans that Tweet on the show. Social media is about having conversations. Tap into the short dialog your fans are trying to have with you. On some level, getting a response from one of you might just make their day.
- Start your own personal Twitter profiles. You’re all strong human brands, and your show is a combination of those brands. You might try something like @Dave_MorningZoo or @Kelsey_MorningZoo. Remember, the show is not talking to people – each of you are talking to people.
- Ask questions to get the opinion of your listeners using social media. On Twitter, have them respond and use a hash tag (maybe something like #daveandjimmy). Hash tags on Twitter help keep conversations related to a certain topic in one bucket. Who knows, one day you might even become a trending topic.
- Please stop mentioning the phrase: “We should blog about this on Facebook!” about every 5 minutes. It sounds unnatural, and no one really talks about Facebook like that.
- Use Hootsuite to manage your show’s Twitter accounts. As a backup, use Seesmic. These tools will help you bucket groups of people, track hits on links and many other metrics. This will let you know how many people you are reaching and how they engage with you.
- Start a YouTube channel. If you have one, I can’t seem to find it by searching.
- Most of the videos I find about The Morning Zoo are generated by other people. Here’s another entertaining example. This could become a huge opportunity for a contest if you put a strategy behind it. Empower your fan base to create their own video content about your show. Then, give them the spotlight. Promote it on air, and ask fans to upload their videos to YouTube and then drop a link on your Facebook page. Then you could favorite those videos on both YouTube and Facbook, and pick a winner. Either way, all that content will aggregate into your social web footprint.
- There are also more video sharing sites out there, aside from YouTube. Each one has a slightly different functionality and audience segment. Set up a publishing tool like TubeMougl to make it easier to be everywhere at once. You can also track reach and views using this tool.
- Build a real strategy for your Facebook Fan Page. You could focus it on gathering insights from your listeners, promoting events and even selling Sucko CDs and downloads. You could also use it as a tool to help your philanthropic efforts. After you have the plan, add custom tabs that help you engage and convert your fan base into taking some type of action. Things to look into might be pulling in YouTube content, pushing out polls and maybe even a contact form that shoots to jimmy@daveandjimmy.com.
- Here’s the thing about your Facebook Fan Page. You have awesome levels of engagement with little to no effort. For every post you make, 5-15 fans comment back on average. The problem is that no one from your team responds. No one is paying attention to your fans and they want to talk to you. That’s a BIG missed opportunity to leverage the serendipity of using social media.
- Work on increasing your Facebook fan base. You only have 2,021 fans, as of today. You’re a radio show, for God’s sake, and you’ve done that with little to no effort. Promote your page on the show every day. Sink a little bit of budget into Facbook advertising and target your desired markets and demographics with “Become a Fan” banner ads. You have the potential to jump your page to tens of thousands of fans in a really short period of time.
- Pull in dynamic content from your Facebook page and a YouTube channel on your homepage so that site visitors have more to experience, will stay longer and will come back daily. I see the Twitter stream there today, but it’s buried on the busy page.
- Another local solution you might try out is TurnSocial. It’s a slick little social media toolbar for your site that will help with number 14. (Not an affiliate link.)
- You might want to work with a professional SEO consultant on developing a better keyword strategy. (That last link is my buddy, Dave. He’s the best in town. Not an affiliate link.)
- Get some branded and consistent visual design on your social media outposts like Twitter, YouTube and even Facebook. It’s not expensive for custom designs, and you want your connections to have a show-branded experience when they visit.
- Make your website less cluttered on the homepage. This is a personal pet peeve of mine. I know you need to fit a lot in, but it’s noisy and hard to navigate.
- Ask your listeners to visit rating sites like City Search and Yelp and write reviews of the Morning Zoo. You guys have a few now, but with some effort and direction, there could be hundreds of people willing to sing praises about your show (I’m one, but you haven’t asked yet). Once again, you have the power and reach of a traditional broadcast medium at your fingertips. All you need to do is use it to direct your listeners online and give them something to do.
- WNCI is on iHeart Radio. You promote it on your site. Promote it on the air, as well.
- Start a Flickr account if you haven’t already done so, and upload images from the studio and events. Next, encourage your fans to upload their own photos from events. A few fans already have. Reach out and acknowledge them. Empower them to do more.
- Lots of people blog about The Morning Zoo. Are you reaching out to them to thank them for helping to promote the show? Are you commenting on their blog posts? You should be.
- Start a collaborative blog about the show. Maybe the content strategy is what happens behind the scenes when the commercials are playing. That would be interesting and if each of you could write just once a week, it would make it much less time-consuming for one person. Locally, there’s a good tool to help you do that. (Not an affiliate link.)
There you go. Some free ideas that I hope are helpful. Thanks for all the years of great mornings with the Zoo.
@nateriggs
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