From one of Dial Global’s “Simply About Music” (SAM) affiliates, courtesy of Beau Phillips:
There’s a SAM affiliate in Illinois that’s been with Dial Global for a couple years. Over the last year, the station had flattened out in the ratings. Earlier this year, we developed a plan to get some street buzz for the station. Like most stations they had no money for promotions. On Fridays instead of calling the station SAM, we rename it after a “facebook fan” that we select….its called FACEBOOK FAN FRIDAYS. We re-do new imaging for the station every Friday, calling it stuff like “Tina Smith-FM”. We run promos saying what we’re doing. We play up the fact that “all this great music is thanks to Tina”…and “if you see Tina today, thank her.” Turns out people like to hear their name on the radio ALL DAY, and end up telling their friends. The station’s Facebook friends have gone from a few hundred to a few thousand. And for whatever reasons, the ratings doubled in the last book. I’ve given this idea to other SAM’s, along with producing generic Facebook fan imaging for them.
Interesting tactic that’s less about gathering Facebook fans and more about generating some excitement and word-of-mouth out in audience-land.
Now if the station has a mechanism to “can” that word-of-mouth and make the whole process easier to share and communicate to friends (exactly the purpose of social media), you have a great opportunity to power the ability of an audience to share themselves with each other in your presence.
That, my friends, is called “branding.”
Will this branding yield ratings like it seemed to do in this case?
Try it and find out.
Here’s one of D-G’s sample promos:
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Comments