Monthly Archives: December 2008

Seth Godin on radio’s future

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Mark Ramsey has posted audio (and partial transcript) of an interview with marketing maven Seth Godin, on the future of radio. This is an update to an earlier interview. These three nuggets sloshed out of my pan:

“So if you’re an advertiser and you have a choice between reaching a ton of people who couldn’t care less, and so you have to talk really fast, yell, and make obscene promises on the radio to get them to show up at your dealership, or reach a smaller group of people about something that they’re very interested in a very connected way, in the long run advertisers are going to come back to the smaller, more tightly knit group.”

“Everything radio has done has been about leveraging a rare piece of spectrum, and the thing we have to acknowledge is that spectrum isn’t rare anymore. So the one asset you built your whole organization on is going away really fast and instead of putting your head in the sand and complaining about that, take advantage of the momentum so that when it does finally disappear, you have something else.”

“Consider the FCC’s ruling recently about the white space spectrum. What white space spectrum is going to mean is that in five years every car sold is going to have an infinite number of radio stations on it. Not 100 or 1,000 but more radio stations than you could listen to in your lifetime, and if that’s true, tell me again why you’re going to win?”

As I ponder these points, I’m listening to the very eclectic music mix on the Coffee Zone iPod. On the way to work, I’ll be live streaming Pandora from the iPhone.

Website make-over

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We relaunched our corporate website today. Same content, just a fresh coat of digital paint provided by Caffeinated Studio in Dallas. Much thanks to Trent, Brad and Rob for the design and to Joel, Phil and Andy for all the under the hood stuff.

We’ll be fixing broken links and such for days but it’s it good to have finally thrown the switch. We ripped off the previous design from GE back when a company website wasn’t all that big a deal (“Yeah, sure, go ahead. As long as it doesn’t cost much.”)

Today our company has lots of web pages “out there.” Internet, intranet, extranet, blogs, etc etc. Thousands of pages. This “Internet thing” has caught on and I no longer have to sell the idea of the web et al. Even blogs and podcasts have become part of our company culture.

I used to say I was an EMT frantically giving CPR to the Internet patient in the back of the ambulance as it meandered toward the hospital. Today, our online patient is feeling much better. Drinking apple juice and watching Oprah. I’m so glad to see him feeling better.

“10 Survival Tools for the Digital Age”

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Professor Kristin Cherry teaches a beginning Radio course at Central Methodist University in Fayette, MO, and was kind enough to invite me come talk about… radio. I didn’t know what to say about “radio” so I made a list (“10 Survival Tools for the Digital Age”) of things I was pretty sure they already knew about. They didn’t. [Just click a slide to see the next one] The photo below was taken just as my presentation peaked.

I don’t have the opportunity to spend a lot of time around young people but I’ve come to believe they are no more web savvy than the population at large. They’re great at texting and know the ends and outs of Facebook… but very few are creating media or exploring.

In my group of about 25 students, only one had uploaded a video to YouTube and that was for a class assignment. Twitter, UStream, flickr? Never heard of them.

I tried to convey the idea that these –and similar tools– will be useful no matter what they do after college. What I forgot (it was a very long time ago) was that they had very little interest in next semester, let alone The Rest of Their Lives.

The instructors (and the administration!) were incredibly gracious hosts and the campus is really pretty. As always, I got much more out of this experience than the students. More on that in a future post. [Wikipedia entry for “film strip”]