In the last tip, we took a look at setting a standard – a high one – for callers. It’s only fitting that a caller has to EARN his or her being on the air, and if you settle for average or typical calls, that’s just adding more water to the Kool-Aid. It won’t help the taste.

So okay, the goal is to create a stronger “caller culture”. The easiest starting place is the one people seem to just take for granted: Contest calls.

Here’s what needs to be addressed:

We don’t treat people like humans.
We turn people into numbers. “You’re caller number 12.” (I always hope someone will say “Oh, yeah? Well you’re idiot disc jockey number 2.”)

Groundhog Day in Loserville.
“Aww…well that’s not right, but thanks for trying.” Over and over again, until, like the Bataan Death March, we finally hear a winner. Honestly, about the third time I hear this, I just start to feel sorry for the hopeful people who called in, only to be disappointed. Why design a contest that airs tons of wrong guesses? The Secret Sound or the Scrambled Song contests were cute, once, but so was Brylcreem (a sludge-like goo used to slick back a guy’s hair in the 1950s).

The Rules…oh Lord, the rules.
“First, go to the southwest corner at the top of the twenty-story City Hall building, and jump. On the way down, wave at the clown in the 12th floor window, then flip your body around and upside down. If you’re the lucky person who lands with the most discernible body parts inside the chalk circle that we’ve drawn on the sidewalk, the surviving members of your family are automatically entered into a drawing to win 4 half-day passes to the Crazy Goat Park in Neptune, South Dakota!” (Bellybutton lint and ejected fluids do not count as official body parts. Go to our Facebook page for other restrictions.)

Start tomorrow with simpler contests, straightforwardly won by people with names, with genuine happiness in promoting it, doing it, and being honestly happy for the winner. That’ll guarantee you some really great phone callers.

Note: This tip is written specifically for music stations.  But the “quality control” goal should be in every Talk show, too.

It’s not a “bad” idea per se to supplement the Content that you create with a phone call or two from listeners.  But it’s not an automatic “must have” ingredient, either.  And it can become a “crutch” pretty easily.

Here’s the most important ingredient in putting them on the air:

NO “B” or “C”-level calls allowed.  None.  Only “A”-level callers with something that actually contributes a thought that moves the subject forward, gives it a different slant, or provides some sort of “resolution” should make it onto the air.  The minute you accept less, you dive head first into the generic “topics and phone calls” pool that already has too many people in it.

I’ve done and coached shows that hardly ever ran calls, and I’ve done and coached shows that were – at times – very phone call intensive.  But the “A”-level rule always applies.  Great radio is made up of COMPELLING moments.  If a call doesn’t provide that, it doesn’t deserve being aired.

This leads back to something I say a lot:  Do a SHOW.  It may seem counter-intuitive, but when you don’t NEED calls, that’s when you not only get more of them, but you get better ones, too.

Getting great phone callers isn’t an accident.  It’s a plan.  In a future tip, I’ll give you another peek into how that works.

In the last tip, I spoke about a magic key to getting to the top level as a talent – the ability to edit yourself even as you’re speaking.

What I purposely didn’t say is that in over 20 years of coaching somewhere around 1700 air talents, I’ve never seen anyone who was just “born” with this.  It always requires coaching or mentoring in some form.

So let’s deal with the elephant in the room: most air talents detest going into an aircheck session with the PD. Period.
And that’s because there’s a big difference between “critique” and “coaching.”

There is no such thing as “constructive criticism.”  That’s just criticism.

Unlike an aircheck session, which seems to always be about finding something wrong, coaching is about three main things:

1. Shoring up weaknesses and losing bad habits.  (The Fundamentals.)
2. Finding what each talent’s biggest strengths are.  (They may not know.)
3. Gradually stripping AWAY the things a talent doesn’t do well, so that eventually, ALL YOU DO IS WHAT YOU’RE REALLY GOOD AT.

You want to be Michael Jordan playing basketball, not Michael Jordan playing baseball.  A good coach would have told him to stick with what he did best and add a couple more years to his legacy, instead of becoming just a source of amusement playing a game he wasn’t good at.

There’s this dual process that goes on in every great talent’s head…

Part 1 is being right here, right in THIS MOMENT, as it pertains to Performing.

Part 2 is being right here, right in this moment, as it pertains to EDITING – “How would I edit this?  Is this the right place to get out?”

That part – the part of you that, even as you’re doing the break, is weighing and measuring “how much is too much?” – is the sense you want to develop.

You can always tell when something really worked on the air:  it doesn’t need any editing to make a promo out of it.

THAT’S when you know you’ve struck gold.

We hear about them hundreds of times a month:

Online streaming.
Radio station smartphone apps.
Podcasts.

Let’s take a look at these, one at a time…

Have you ever LISTENED to your online streaming?  Often, it’s just awful.  And often, it’s okay quality, but crashes and goes to dead air after a few minutes.  And you can’t expect one of the multi-station streaming sites to care about your audio like you do… or like you should.

Make sure your phone app works.  TEST it.  You’d be surprised at how many don’t work well at all.  An app that fails, then requires a reset, gets ONE more try – maybe.  Then I never try it again; you had your chance.

Podcasts:  Check your audio.  “It’s only a podcast” doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t deliver a truly quality product.  People EXPECT it.

Before you plug your online streaming, your phone app, or your podcast again on the air, make sure that it works effortlessly and consistently.  If I go to it and it’s subpar, your credibility in even PROMOTING it is gone.

These past few weeks, I’ve tried to do “reset” tips – things that will get you grounded in “the firmament” of what it’s going to take in terms of technique and overall Strategy in order to fight off the inevitable technology and lifestyle changes that will challenge radio in both the present and the near future.

AM radios are already disappearing from cars.  But in a couple of years, ALL radio may be gone, replace by apps on a screen where the radio used to be.

So remember this – it’s still only about three things:

1. Weigh in on what’s already on the listener’s mind, or…
2. Bring to the listener’s attention something that he/she needs to know about, but may not have heard yet.  And…
3. Do it in STYLE.  YOUR style; not anyone else’s.

If you trim your focus down to these primary goals, you really can’t go wrong.  You’ll always be relevant, and you’ll be unique.

Last week, I did a “refresher” tip about the two most important basic ingredients – sounding real, and making sure you’re ALWAYS talking about something that’s relevant to the Listener’s life.

This time around, I want to deal with formatic basics, using a specific example: repeating things in the same ORDER over and over again.

I hear this all the time – the jock opens up with the name of the station, the artist, then the song title.  Next break, name of the station, artist, then title – just like the last break.  (This can happen with anything.  Always giving a time check or your name last, repeatedly saying “Good morning” break after break, etc.)

So here’s the deal:  You want to think like a baseball pitcher.  Never throw exactly the same pitch twice in a row.  Even if a pitcher has a 100-mile-an-hour fastball, about the second or third time he throws it at the same velocity in the same location, a major league batter is gonna send it toward the general area of Jupiter.

I DO believe that you should always say the name of the station first – it puts the “label” right out front, and you might as well get in the practice you’ll need to tell Echo or Siri to play it from now on, anyway – but even then, your inflection and pace should differ every time.  (A great way to accomplish this is to simply match the tempo or emotional vibe of the song you’re talking over or coming out of.  From there, you can change gears if you need to, but this will start you off right in the pocket.)  Then you add to that PURPOSELY switching around the order of things, or just the NUMBER of things you do, and you’ve got it.

In the bigger picture, every time you fall into habits – which will automatically take away at least a small element of surprise – you’re just treading water.  Brain mapping technology shows that even just a TINY difference makes it received as NEW information.  That’s what makes the brain NOTICE it, instead of becoming numb to it.

In Sports, there’s a thing called “paralysis by analysis.”  It refers to your mind getting too cluttered to allow you to perform well.

In radio, whether you’re a new talent trying to find your way, or a veteran talent trying to update your skills to stay viable, it’s really easy to get too many thoughts in your head.  (In my coaching, each session almost always boils down to just one main thing, then MAYBE one other little thought to just let percolate until the next time we talk.  But no more than that.)

So let’s give you a shot in the arm today by getting back to the two biggest “basics”…

1. The strength of your Content will determine how relevant you are.
   If what you’re talking about isn’t something that’s relevant to my life and interests, then as a listener, I’m not going to pay much attention to what you have to say.  As a matter of fact, I may just hit the button and move on to something else, not even remembering who you are or what station I just heard.
2. Your coming across as a real person instead of just “a disc jockey” will determine how engaging you are.
   “Personality” isn’t usually about inventing some false front or alter ego.  It’s about selecting the best VERSION of yourself to put on the air, so hopefully, I’ll want to come back and hear you again, or listen longer.  This involves some upper level voice acting skills and quite a few specific techniques.  It rarely ever just comes naturally.

If you really cultivate these two most important basic areas, your ceiling is unlimited.

You would think that TV and Radio are like brothers or cousins, each putting out their product with an all-encompassing view of what the experience is like from the viewer’s or listener’s perspective.

And you would be wrong.

In reality, TV doesn’t care enough (if at all) about SOUND.  In my experience of coaching many television air talents, it’s pretty much all about what it LOOKS like.  The end result is usually a bunch of talking heads reading words from teleprompters that real people would never say in an actual conversation.  (“The alleged suspect was apprehended” instead of “they caught the guy.”)  But the time they could use to rewrite it gets spent on their hair and makeup.

Radio, for the most part, doesn’t care enough about the PICTURES it’s creating.  Sure, the best talents are all about “word pictures,” but way too often nowadays, in the era of voice-trackers that don’t even live in the market the station is in, they just put a “smile” in their delivery and read things.  Ick.

If TV personalities thought more about the WORDS they’re saying, they’d be more three-dimensional.  And if radio personalities thought more about creating a PICTURE in the listener’s mind instead of just giving information, they’d draw that listener closer every single day.

Just because you’re ON doesn’t mean that people are actually paying attention to you.  You EARN that.  Or not.  Your choice.

In the last tip, I talked about a couple of challenges in being TOO “up” all the time on the air.  (Being told to “have more energy” is usually the cause of this.)

Just fyi, the “example” in the tip wasn’t really any specific morning team; it was drawn from several different teams I’ve coached.  (But it’s always interesting to see which of the people I work with will THINK that a tip was written about them.)

Here’s the follow-up. In just one or two sessions, this “shot from a cannon, everything at one constant energy level” thing almost always changes.

The biggest factor in trying to help anyone improve is the natural resistance to change.  But there’s nothing to fear if the motive behind it is simply to help you sound more three-dimensional and natural on the air.  The era of “presenting” and “announcing” is GONE.  The world is too full of shouting, noisy hype to believe anything done with that approach anymore.

In every way you can think of, make things more HUMAN.  Being a constant piston-engine, frantically energetic noise doesn’t REVEAL anything about you. And let’s be clear: the listener has to LIKE you, or he/she won’t listen.  There are too many other places to turn for information and entertainment to think that your station is going to succeed without being Personality-driven.

Radio will need to up our game to be valid as technology continues to change the landscape in terms of what the listener’s options are. But we’re still first in line for the listener’s time – IF we have Personality.