Tech billionaire and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban says he is fed up with Facebook and will take his business elsewhere. He’s sick of getting hit with huge fees to send messages to his team’s fans and followers. - Mark Cuban: Facebook is Driving Away Brands - Starting With Mine

This article about Mark Cuban taking his brands away from Facebook sparked conversation around the radio station today. Should we be following Mark Cuban’s lead?

Short answer, Yes … and No.

A radio station is a community and our own sites should host the best content / most rich experience for listeners to participate in that community. We can’t make a new Facebook nor should we want to. What we can do is create customizable content on our sites that our fans can comment, prioritize, Like, share, and engage with on their terms. 

Here are some additional thoughts on how a radio station (mine included) can best use Facebook and other social media:

• First, “Relentlessly focus. Prune your message and your list and build a reputation that’s worth owning and an audience that cares.” - Seth Godin on Avoiding The Trap of Social Media Noise
• Also, there is wisdom in not putting all a brand’s eggs/stock/efforts into one platform (i.e. Mark Cuban: ”We won’t abandon Facebook, we will still use it, but our priority is to add followers that our brands can reach on non-Facebook platforms first.”).
• Most Importantly: Have a Digital Strategy and Digital Director for each brand to ensure we appropriately leverage both the social networks AND our own sites. While Program Directors are ultimately responsible for our respective radio stations, a Digital Director can bring day to day focus and direction to the content a station is pushing out across platforms.

In a recent blog from Mark Ramsey, he challenged radio broadcasters to think outside the hot clock:

In an on-demand world we don’t need to fill time.  We just need to fill demand.  Because time belongs to me, the consumer. That means more content, shorter content, easier to share content, fresh content.

Couldn’t agree more. So I asked my afternoon show host, Brant Hansen, to take the day off the radio. And create a compelling and shareable podcast instead. He did. He also wrote a blog and made a brief appearance on-air to address why he wasn’t doing his normal show. It created the desired buzz, is being shared, and has received a ton of positive feedback from listeners.

Here’s one such response from Cindy on Facebook: “I just heard the podcast all the way through and I enjoyed every aspect of it. It made me laugh and there were some profund moments that had me tearing up. To me, your experiment was a success.”

The experience was a success and thus we’re going to feature a “Best of” show on Fridays this summer while we create more “Brant Hansen Extra Special Bonus Radio Specials”. (We’re still working on the name.)

The goal is to create content that matters to our listeners even when that content doesn’t fit between two songs on the radio. I am a ratings whore and 100% agree with Fred Jacobs:

It is our jobs as programmers, consultants, and managers to work with shows and personalities to bring out their best, put them in a position to win, help them create the best radio they can, and provide enough time and patience to see results.  There’s is a balance of playing the PPM game but also doing radio that matters.

This is only the beginning. More to come and I welcome your comments on creative ideas you have for expanding the reach and shareability of radio.

The animated show, “Who’s S-S-Scared?”, was set around four kids, who solved mysteries, in a haunted house. It would become one of the biggest children’s television shows of all time. CBS Television Executive Fred Silverman, who developed the show to revitalize the children’s programming block on Saturday morning, had just one problem. The President of the network thought it was too frightening.

Fred jumped on a red-eye to meet with the producers of the show. On the flight, “Strangers in The Night” by Frank Sinatra comes on and when Fred hears the lyric “scooby-dooby-do…”, inspiration strikes. He has the solution. He’d move the kids’ dog to the front of the cast and call him, and by extension – the show, Scooby-Doo. The silly named dog added enough laughs to alleviate the fear-factor and the rest is history.

Amazing how refocusing one small thing changes everything.

When it comes to radio, even the most basic station “liner” can come alive when a jock finds a fresh way to present the content. Talent coach Tommy Kramer has a great tip on on how to accomplish this, here: Coaching Tip #61 - Camera Angles.