Idea Share–Personalized Local Radio With SocialRadio.org

The evolutionary “-tion’s” of audio and music delivery in 2012 are focused around personalization, curation and localization with a happy ending of monetization. And how to do all four at once….without losing ratings.

The folks at www.SocialRadio.org have created a player and platform that allows your personalities to create and curate personalized radio stations a la Pandora. Tools like this are a tough pill for a radio operator to swallow because frankly it’s viewed as a “cannibalization tool” by the majority of ratings-only focused managers. Alternative Contraband sees it differently, as a complementary tool. The bottom line is that radio Program Directors (and their management team) need to continue the evolution toward being full media brands and not just terrestrial radio products. Instead of thinking like your are creating tools that will deny you time spent listening or tune in occasions, think of it as expanding your audio empire and capturing more hours of their time. If you get a listener to spend 7 hours with your terrestrial signal (and chances are you’re not going to get any more unless you give away $1,000,000) and create a personalized tool that allows them to spend another 7 hours per week with your complementary web platforms, that’s expanding your empire, not cannibalizing your terrestrial signal. And your sales department will have more assets to sell.

Regardless of the cannibalization theory, SocialRadio.org has put together an audio player that can be personalized and optimized by their favorite radio station and its talent. Alternative Contraband recently spoke with SocialRadio.org’s Director Of Sales, Carl Magnuson about their concept and player, telling us, ”There are multiple ways to  deliver the personalization. We can have channels that are created based on the listener’s feedback. So if the listener wants to create a custom channel, they  can go through and pick ten or fifteen or twenty artists and then we will just build them a channel  based on that. Then they can pick their favorite DJ at the station.  They can also change channels. They can rate stuff.”

The backbone of SocialRadio.Org’s thinking (and radio fans will undoubtedly agree) is that a curated playlist from a trusted person, namely your station’s air personalities will be much better programmed and received by a listener than the genome-like software created playlist “programmed” by Pandora. Magnuson and his team are currently attempting to prove that with an experiment that takes a Pandora playlist along side a playlist personally hand picked by former KBZT/San Diego Program Director Garret Michaels. Check the playlist comparison and vote here http://djsvsrobots.com/ The results will be available in September, but the hedge is that the human curated playlist will win (and Michael’s playlist is much better, we think you’ll agree) bolstering SocialRadio.Org’s platform to help you begin to fight back against the Pandora’s of the world.

There are several other benefits from utilizing SocialRadio.org’s platform including tremendous amounts of data from song likes and dislikes to learning more about the consumer behavior of each participant allowing for more personalized commercial stopsets. How intuitive would it be for this platform to feed you spots knowing you want to paint your house, buy a grill and get your kid braces. That’s a lot better than another Geico spot.

For the full meal deal you can chew on their product here http://socialradio.org/default.aspx

What are your thoughts on Social Radio’s platform? Join the conversation here