Kick-Ass Audio Breaks

There are several kinds of content you can do on your show.  All of it signals to your audience that you understand what’s important to them and each of them has a strategic purpose.  Pop culture says you’re tapped into whatever is hot right now.  Personal stories give you an efficient vehicle to define yourself to listeners in a way where they see themselves.  Lifestyle content communicates that you understand what they’re going through. One of my favorite features of all time is called The Bus Stop, done by Michael Chew, at MORE-FM (WBEB), Philadelphia.  Michael was home early enough in the day to greet his kids as they returned from school on the bus.  We hatched the idea that he’d asked the kids, as they got off the bus, about their day.  Maybe it was because they were going to be on the radio or because they knew Michael as he was their neighbor, but what the kids offered was almost always very entertaining, and tapped into the lifestyle of the adult woman listening to the station who also had kids and encountered the same conversation when she got home.

Last week brought the Las Vegas shootings and for many programs, a total overhaul of their Monday show plan.  Imagine this – you wake up and find out that dozens of people are killed at an outdoor concert while you were sleeping.  What do listeners want you to do on your show that day?  Consider their needs.  They wake up and start scrolling for information.  Some turn on the TV, others go online, your fans turn you on.  Some shows will bark that “balance is needed” on days like this (“we’ll do it twice an hour!”).  Others say “we’re the escape” (as if by 7am they get in the car and they’re over it and know you’re the escape so they come to you), which is flawed thinking because people don’t choose you in their head, they come to you in their heart, to connect.  The audience wants information, they want your take, they want you to reflect the emotions they’re feeling, and they want to be brought into the story.  What factors into the decision is how we’re used.  Listeners come, stay for ten minutes, then leave.  So if you didn’t do a big story like this in that time, you didn’t do it at all, hence a disconnect.  Two Men and a Mom (Kyle, Bryan, and Sarah) at WRAL-FM, Raleigh trashed their game plan that day and worked furiously to find people who were there – people who could offer up a first person experience to the story.  Here are two interviews they did that day (and played a lot) to prove they were totally in sync with where their audience was in that moment.  (If you want to know how they found these two people, reach out to me.)