Everyone is Now an Internet Radio Expert
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Relative to the internet, it's amazing how quickly the number of radio experts has grown. Everywhere you turn, someone new is giving directions on how to make money in radio, on-air and online.
Maybe a handful of people have spent over a decade in converging radio and online, so this proliferation of experts is a setup for one big scam. The time and money lost chasing ill-conceived concepts from these new "experts" won't be realized for another couple of years. By that time the radio industry will be chasing a new set of experts, all long on talk and short on true experience.
Take iPhone apps, please. We have a few radio industry experts who swear they are the future. Consider, relative to radio, that an "app" is nothing more than a fancy bookmark.
If you're going to get listeners to join your station through an internet stream, you need more at your station than what an app's icon delivers. What's to gain by going through the time and expense of creating your own station app? An additional thousand people, total? Then, there's programming erosion caused by promoting something like this to tens of thousands of people who don't (and won't ever) care.
You also have to accept that very few radio stations have a commanding market presence; that's a requirement for driving a high enough percentage of locals to load an app.
I've been closely tied to the internet radio industry since 1996. In all that time I'm not aware of anyone frequently featured on panels at radio conventions who has pulled off anything of note, with the exception of researcher Gordon Borrell, internet-whiz Daniel Anstandig, or entrepreneur Kurt Hanson. Most speakers talk a great line, but none has delivered a concept you can consider groundbreaking. (Folks in the business know my contributions.)
Those few times a new concept is introduced, it's met with radio industry apathy. (One exception, HipCricket.)
We now have a mad rush to use social networks. Listener control of radio programming also seems a topic du jour, but both are nothing more than that. We've Twittered, Facebooked, and crowd-sourced the radio industry into thinking that just mentioning any of these will elevate poor revenue and correct sloppy habits. The same reaction-based response caused radio to impload online after Mark Cuban's introduction of Broadcast.com. Execs bought the sizzle, without looking at how much steak it took to feed the people needed to keep a web site's content fresh. Ready. Fire. Aim.
Social networks can be used as a communicative tool. However, to make social networking economically viable requires many hours of work - much more "many" than any station or group has in resources. Talk about social networks with new radio industry experts and they make it seem like success is as simple as turning on a light switch.
Experts. The next round of them will be telling everyone in radio how to manage analytics and metrics. Free, available, and extremely easy to use at the introductory level, the metrics that tie an advertiser's broadcast campaign into an online response are equally easy to talk about. Only, analytics and metrics are like chess; a minute to understand, a lifetime to master. Not many people in the radio industry understand how deep these numbers go, but that won't stop many of them from becoming experts in analytics. (Few will have experience managing billions of impressions. Few will know how to compile spreadsheets, or what data must be used that's not an "impression," "stream start," or "time spent listening" number.)
Having been a thespian for much of my life, I equate radio industry internet experts with actors on stage. If an actor gets to a line they forget, it's best to just make up the words. Nobody in the audience knows what you're supposed to say anyway!
That's how many of today's radio industry internet experts are surviving.
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