What Is Radio Industry Doing Online?
|
|
Radio executives need to spend more time at their web sites. This observation is made after viewing station sites from the following radio groups: Clear Channel, Cumulus, Entercom, CBS Radio, Greater Media, Susquehanna, and Cox Radio.
While the move is to make your web site easier to navigate, free of clutter, and stocked with usable information, the seven station web sites, below, show how radio is, to varying degrees, going in the other direction. It's not always following its charted course, relative to HD Radio, either.
Since quality web site design is a subjective call, I've placed snapshots of the sites below for you to look at. Click on each to go see for yourself if these are functional designs or chest-thumping online diatribes. Travel to each and judge for yourself whether these are befitting an industry that is supposed to be in the business of helping other businesses promote themselves.
Because each radio group uses a template site design, what follows is a fair representation of each group's online presence across all of their station's sites. (An exception would be the Cumulus KIOL web site, which is about as ambiguous as you can get and not easily made into a template.) I've kept the format to rock music for all, to simplify the comparison.
As you're viewing each, notice the lack of anything related to HD Radio on all but two web sites. It makes you wonder just how committed the radio industry is to pushing HD, or how much faith it has in the ability of the internet to advertise its presence.
Entercom - WAAF - Boston, MA
Greater Media - WRIF - Detroit, MI
Cox Radio - Krater 96 - Honolulu, HI
Clear Channel - WMMS - Cleveland, OH
Cumulus - KIOL - Houston, TX
|
CBS Radio
X107.5
Las Vegas, NV
Susquehanna
101 the Fox
Kansas City
|
From: Mel T.
Great post today about the web site designs.
As to the KIOL site, which is in flash.....it is my understanding
that yahoo and google do not do a very good job at indexing sites
that have a flash home page.
Thus KOIL is pretty much invisible to anyone doing an online search
for ROCK music in houston.
From: Mike M.
Agree with your diagnosis of chest thumping. Seems that the same
disease that radio programming suffers from has transferred to
the website.
Most music formatted stations talk at the listener/audience
rather than engage in a dialogue. They are missing the
opportunity to converse and interact with their audience.
Where are the listener forums, air staff blogs, etc?
Each of these stations could have been the 'myspace' in their market.
|
|
|
About
Contact
Indie Artists
Radio Stations
Audience Data
Privacy
|
|
|
|
|
|
