Socialising your audio

Social audio is important to radio’s future.
Comment from Steve Ahern.

 

I’ve been banging on about it for a while: live radio audio needs to be much more social media friendly and searchable.

The time for social audio is upon us.

Podcasts have put pre-produced long-form audio back into the mainstream, with Serial, Game Changers Radio and Pheobe’s Fall just some examples of the power of social media to amplify audiences for well produced online audio.

Grant Broadcasters has just announced a partnership with Audio Boom. Aussie podcast platform Whooshkaa recently launched. There’s a lot happening in this space.

But what about the many hours of live to air spontaneous audio we produce every day on live radio?

Several new products have come onto the market in the past couple of years, making it easier to quickly clip and share live radio and generate parallel interactions with your audio on air and on social media moments after it goes to air

Rewind Radio was a pioneer of the audio sharing concept, as was Omny (both companies are radioinfo advertisers), with both services providing different methods to allow broadcasters to quickly clip and share their audio while on air. Both products are ‘always listening’ and make your live broadcast audio available to clip just seconds after it has gone to air.

Some stations give listeners the ability to create clips themselves (eg. 2SER below), while others use the new products in-house to fast track their social media sharing. Both methods improve workflow and allow your listeners to do your promotion for you.
 


 
I have been teaching these improved workflow tricks to stations across Asia recently with good results.

Tweets and facebook posts from listeners who created clips of on-air content just moments after they went to air range from, ‘hey mum listen to me on the the radio this morning,’ to ‘can you believe what this guy said…’

The radio industry has been very good at using social media for pre and post show marketing and sharing, but we need to get better at using social audio as well as we use talkback: instant, fast, democratic. These new products help to do that.

In markets where copyright issues may block the full use of social audio strategies, broadcasters may need to include ‘catch up’ audio services in their next negotiations with music collecting societies, as is already in progress in many countries.

At tomorrow’s CRA Conference, expect to hear more about podcasts, and expect a big announcement from a little network about how it plans to use another new product in this field of social audio sharing.

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Steve Ahern is the founding editor of radioinfo and manager of Ahern Media & Training and IMBA.

Putting his money where his mouth is, Steve is also an investor in RewindRadio Pty Ltd.

 

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