Kick-Ass Audio Breaks

It’s not a revolutionary observation to note the true power of social media.  I post something clever, fun, personal, or heartwarming.  You like or comment on it.  I keep checking on reactions.  And feel like a super star as it grows in popularity.  Rinse and repeat!  Radio is the same way.  We spent last week at many of the shows I coach elevating listeners for what they do for their communities.  Our mission, in the face of 9/11, the worst thing that happened to America in our lifetime, was to show the best in people.  We actively searched for regular listeners who have causes important to them and profile them on the show.  Our week wasn’t necessarily dedicated to first responders.  And we didn’t want to do all the low-hanging fruit asking listeners where they were when 9/11 hit (all of it twenty year old content).  Our mission was to be about now and to control how listeners felt about our show by highlighting regular listeners who make the community better (local content!).  Elevating these people made them more popular, which happened to us, too.  Here are Tony and Kris, WIVK, Knoxille, with one conversation they had which accomplished all of those strategic goals with our 9/11 content.

One of your main goals as a talent is to bond with the audience.  How do we do this?  By showing those parts of your life to the audience where they say you are just like them.  Humans are very tribal.  We are all in search for people just like us. It’s those common bonds where we find comfort and the best chance to connect with other people to form a relationship.  Logan and Sadie, WINK-FM, Ft. Myers, FL had a feast of content with Logan’s son going off to college for the first time.  In those conversations, Logan proved he was just like the station demo (40 year old women who were also shipping their kids off to college or could relate to the experience because they had it).  Besides telling the story and airing similar stories from fans, we also must do the content in unique ways.  Which is why Logan got his son, Gabe, on and had a mom in the building ask him questions that moms would be curious about with a kid leaving the house for college for the first time.  The execution of this content gets us four images:  how fun the show is, how relatable the talent are, how vulnerable the show can be in revealing itself, and how different we do our content.