As an industry professional, I am amazed at how urban stations are SO very interested in securing the station’s ratings success yet they ignore their websites? The website is a great ancillary product and an opportunity to garner loyalty, new listeners and increased awareness which all translate into… um, RATINGS! There are so many avenues urban radio could use with their websites to turn surfers into supporters and at the same time generate additional revenue but these avenues are just ignored. Seems we’d rather depend on systems like Arbitron then moan and groan when they implement PPM, which many experts say we don’t understand either, however, when it comes to websites…. I JUST don’t get it?
To that end, I have concluded the problem is that many urban stations hire Internet experts who don’t know anything about urban radio or the opposite. They are hiring young Internet people who know about websites and traffic but have no concept or clue of how urban radio works or they are hiring old radio people who don’t know how the Internet works and are merely seeking a check. It is time that urban radio looks at someone in the middle. Yes, that is me. I must admit, I’d love to take an urban station with low Internet ratings and show them how they can turn their site into, not only, additional revenue but increased awareness and branding. I went to a station in Atlanta (one of the LOWEST ranked urban radio website markets) and I offered them some ideas on how to build their site. I told them I would work with them as a consultant and they were very interested but they implemented a couple of my ideas sans my entire plan (and me) (Oops!) and it didn’t work. STOP… THEIF! This station ranks 1,200,114. That number is slightly off on purpose but it’s close. That means there are over one million two hundred websites of more interest to surfers.
For the life of me, I have never understood why my own people CONSISTENTLY sit back and wait for things to happen instead of making them happen, even in an innovative field like communications (radio). Why is everybody so scared to implement new ideas? Perhaps it’s because there are no innovative people in urban radio? I’m going to really cover this issue in 08…
