Among the best: WRVA/Richmond.  It’s got everything a listener or potential advertiser might need, all in one place — including direct phone numbers and email addresses for every programming, news and sales staffer.  That list includes not only PD Jimmy Barrett, but OM Dave Symonds, as well.  And it’s all just one click off the home page.  This is clearly an organization that’s proud of what it does and welcomes interaction with its customers and community.

How does your Contact page compare?

“If you have an answer to the question, ‘Who are you like?,’ you have a problem. — Merlin Media CEO Randy Michaels 

“Personal branding is not about fabricating a persona; strong personal brands are based in authenticity. You can’t start building your brand until you understand who you are, what you want and what makes you exceptional. What are your superpowers? What do others think about you? Don’t create an image; be yourself — your best self. As writer/aviator Anne Morrow Lindbergh once said, ‘The most exhausting thing you can be is inauthentic.’”  – from TheLadders.com career website

1. Pick a group/person that resonates with your audience:  Patriots fans, the embattled mayor, wives, Democrats, Newt…

2. Post the question on Facebook a few hours before the show to start the ball rolling and create a stack of responses to use between calls.

3. Tease the segment aggressively so listeners can be thinking of clever lines.

4. Have fun with it.

One caveat: This schtick is close to burnt.  Use it soon.

As a power user of streaming, I agree with all of his observations. While many of the problems are out of a PD’s control, a good programmer can eliminate this one:

“Streaming more has made me very conscious, by the way, that six- and seven-minute stopsets very much still exist. And because some owners have made a greater recent effort to cover them with music (many Clear Channel stations) or at least fill them with real spots (simulcast with the FM signal or otherwise), one becomes very conscious of those streaming stopsets that are still cobbled together from hardsell PSAs, multiple morning show promos, and inducements to buy stream-only advertising.

“It often seems to be the case that the longer a station’s stopset, the less likely it will be covered in a listenable way online.”

When is the last time you listened closely to your stream?  Is it studded with stale promos, spots that play back-to-back-to-back, and dead air?

Based on my experience, it might well be.

IDEA: Do you have an APD, or an up-and-coming staffer who wants to learn the art of programming?  Put that person in charge of your stream. Let her own it, and hold her responsible for how it sounds and performs.

If you haven’t seen it, watch it right now.  If you are responsible for audio content creation in any way — news director, program director, podcaster — this could be the most valuable nine minutes of your day.  The lesson is simple: Writing is the be-all and end-all of great content.  This is an especially timely lesson in this day of limited resources. The words matter more than staff size, more than budget, more than the length of the newscasts, more than access to actualities. More than anything.

One great news writer can be a difference-maker.

I experienced this firsthand at WGST/Atlanta where I was lucky enough to work with David Hull, a former CNN Radio anchor with a gift  for  tight copy that was at once both conversational and near-poetic.   His newscasts were very often the highlight of our morning drive show.  I don’t have any David Hull audio handy, but here’s another powerful example of the power of pen and microphone

For our imaging and VO friends.

“Research indicates that our brains are wired to prefer [female voices] to male ones; that’s the reason robotic voices, like those in GPS devices, tend to be female. (This probably has an evolutionary explanation: fetuses in the womb, identifying with their caretaker, can distinguish their mother’s voice from others, a study published in the journal Psychological Science found.)

When it comes to credibility, however, research into the perceived believability of a voice — an important quality for the omniscient narrator of a trailer, as well as the spokesman or -woman for any product, which is the function a trailer serves — tells a different story.

“On average both males and females trust male voices more,” said Clifford Nass, a professor of communications at Stanford, noting some gender disparity exists in that women don’t distrust female voices as much as men distrust them. In one study conducted at Stanford two versions of the same video of a woman were presented to subjects: one had the low frequencies of the woman’s voice increased and the high frequencies reduced, the other vice versa. Consistently subjects perceived the deep voice to be smarter, more authoritative and more trustworthy.”

Read more HERE.

Thoughts?  I used a woman as our secondary imaging voice at WGST/Atlanta, and I thought she added a lot — youth, sexiness, energy.  The Clark Howard Show uses a female voice who has a very different effect, sort of motherly and reassuring.

“Radio has got to become more of an engagement vehicle. Engagement is critical for advertisers today. A lot of people listen to radio in the background and it’s not intrusive, and it’s not engaging. It is more passive. How do you make radio more engaging? So, I think return of investment proof and engagement proof is critical. If you can prove that, they will be buying radio all day long.”

No format is better positioned for engagement than spoken-word.  Is your show and/or station making the most of this advantage?

“If you’re chasing after positive reviews, demographic trends or a lucrative box office, Gervais said, ‘you’ve already failed.” But, he added, “if your only ambition is to get something off your chest and render it exactly as you wanted it, then you’re bulletproof.’”

That advice applies to radio personalities perhaps more than any other type of entertainer.

Read the entire NYT  piece HERE.

Attendance:  Organizers Al Peterson, Erica Farber and Don Anthony put the number at 300. That’s probably right.  About 50 of the attendees were guests of The Dave Ramsey Show, which uses TMC to hold its own affiliates meeting. (More brilliance from a smart organization that has the financial resources to put good ideas into action.)

I’m guessing there were maybe 30-40 PDs at the event, along with a smattering of working hosts and aspiring talkers.

The syndicators have clearly cut back their commitment to these meetings, both in terms of sponsorship and staff.

Cumulus was heavily represented by programming people, network staffers and CEO Lew Dickey.  Conversely, very few Clear Channel employees were in attendance.

Mood:  I expected more fear and anger given that the event was held in the wake of yet another wave of lay-offs at Clear Channel and Cumulus.  Instead, I felt more of a “glad to be alive” vibe from the attendees.  They aren’t happy about what’s happening and are clearly concerned about the future of radio.  But they seem to have reached a Zen-like state.

Highlights:  Dave Ramsey’s on-stage interview with Lew Dickey was valuable for the insight it provided on Dickey.  Ramsey tried to humanize Dickey by teasing out childhood stories and lifestyle nuggets.  But most of the talk after the interview was about Dickey’s repeated shots at Citadel (“We bought it off the trash heap”) and gratuitous smack at Mel Karmazin’s Sirius/XM.

I do admire Dickey’s honesty and consistency.  He again made it clear that for Cumulus managers it is, indeed, the Atlanta way or the highway.  Said Dickey: “If you cash our checks, you run (our) plays.”   Dickey also offered some tough-love advice for programming types:  Learn about the business of radio, and don’t reflexively criticize big-picture management decisions that you don’t really understand.

Lots of folks hung around til midday Saturday to hear Randy Michaels and Water Sabo talk about their Merlin Media adventures.  But that was kinda disappointing.  There were some funny lines, but not a whole lot of insight.  Jack Swanson provided the session’s highlight.  After hearing Randy and Walter hold forth on their vision for a new generation of all-news radio stations, Swanson took the mic to ask, “If you two cowboys fuck this up, is that going to accelerate our decline into syndication hell?”

Michaels, tacitly acknowledging that Merlin’s New York and Chicago stations are struggling, responded: “We’re not going to fuck it up – at least not for much longer.”

The Sessions:  You’ve been there, slipped out of that.

Kudos to Al, Erica and Don for having the courage to produce this event in the midst of unprecedented industry upheaval.  It was a high-risk undertaking.

Will there be a 2012 TMC?  We’ll see.  As one senior group exec told me, “This business is going to experience cataclysmic downsizing in the coming year.  Who knows how many news/talk PDs jobs will still exist next year?”

In the meantime, take Randy Michaels’ advice: “Go where the wind is blowing the business, and have fun along the way.”

For more tidbits from the TMC, check out my Tweets from the event, which you can see at TalkFrontier.com

Don't be him. Be you.

In the days since Apple founder Steve Jobs’ death, I’ve been trying to put words to the lessons he offers for talk radio hosts.  I can’t say it any better than Nilofer Merchant did in the Harvard Business Review.  Bottom line:  To thine own self be true.  Attempting to please or imitate others leads to mediocrity.

Says Merchant: “When we define ourselves by what others want, we are trying to kiss a moving butt. To live in a box defined by someone else is to deny our uniqueness. Each of us is standing in a spot no one else occupies. That unique perspective is born of our accumulated experience, perspective, and our vision. When we deny these things, we deny that which only we can bring to the situation, our onlyness. And that is surely not the way the world is made better.”

Read the full post here.