One thing radio people are really good at is kidding themselves. I hear these faulty perceptions a lot:

1. The competitor beating you in the ratings isn’t really that good, but just got lucky and was in the right place at the right time. PPM/Arbitron diaries/Nielson placement or selection just fell their way.

or…

2. They’re living off their reputation, and don’t deserve the ratings they have anymore.

or…

3. The only reason the competition is rated higher than you was because they did a lot of marketing and you didn’t. If you had their marketing budget or promotional budget, you’d be beating them.

These excuses are convenient, but the truth is nobody falls UP.

It’s easy to fall down in the ratings. Just stop working hard, take your Listenership for granted, get away from what was working for you, or become a caricature of yourself.

But you have to earn up. Going up takes work. And focus. And being willing to change what doesn’t work anymore.

Hint: Sometimes, that means getting help.

Think about how often you’ve heard someone say that a performer, during a concert, looked RIGHT AT him (or her). This is not an accident. One of the biggest singers of the seventies told me once that he purposely, at some point in his performance, looked at all 9 “zones” of the venue: Left, Center, Right. Upper, middle, and lower seats in each direction.

He didn’t do them in that order; it was random, but this enabled every single person in the audience to think that they made eye contact at some point.

The truth was, because of the lighting, he couldn’t really see anybody very well. But the illusion was powerful.

It’s the same way in radio, except we have to make contact verbally. To accomplish this, you have to say something that is shared – something that your listener can totally identify with.

This means you can’t simply grab something from a prep sheet or Facebook or a website and basically just read it to me. You have to make it personal.

In every city, there’s a small number of jocks – maybe only 2 or 3 – that really make contact on a daily basis. You can always find them at the very top of the ratings.

The benefit of coaching is that there are very specific techniques that can help you get the hang of this in a pretty short amount of time. If you’re not getting that in-house, reach out.

A good portion of today’s radio listeners – and just about all of the next generation of listeners – want their audio media to adopt the style of social media.

Well, that’s not exactly possible. For one thing, radio is still the biggest social media phenomenon in history. Bigger than Facebook, bigger than Twitter, more social than TV or movies.

If you need proof, think about this: there are millions of people who don’t have Facebook or Instagram or Twitter accounts, but there is no one who hasn’t listened to radio. You don’t have to read it, you don’t have to post anything, and there’s just “like” (it’s on) or “unlike” (turn it off). It’s simple and pure, IF you sound like right now instead of like 1994.

So here’s how you still sound valid without coming across like children to your core demo, or like old geezers with bad hairpieces to your younger listeners:

Instead of announcing, just think about sharing.

Instead of presenting, try inviting.

Stop ‘selling’ things on the air. No one is buying.

You can either be my friend, riding in the car with me (or at my desk at work), or you can be the audio equivalent of pop-up ads on a website.

Choose wisely. The clock is ticking.

If you need help, well…I assume that’s why you’re reading this. There are people here that you can call. If you’ve never worked with a great Consultant or a truly focused Talent Coach, you’re just driving a car with no air conditioning and manual windows.

I think you deserve better than that.

This tip was originally one that I used in doing, then coaching, team shows. But it actually applies to any on-air conversation, like a contest winner call, for instance.

Here’s the key to having it all unfold the right way:

It’s like playing “leapfrog” as a child. Each thing said by you or the other person should move the subject forward – just like one person leapfrogs the other in the kids’ game.

Add to this the mentality of the 2 most basic Rules of Improv. They are:

1. YES.

2. “and…”

1. The answer to any premise is always “Yes.” (This doesn’t have to be spoken. It can simply be understood. The buy-in is what matters.)

2. Then you add your point, moving things along. For example, in Improv, if you say “I’m trying to grow a third arm,” I should answer with something like “Cool…!” then add something like “It’d be great if you could grow it out of the back of your neck. Then you could drive and scratch your back at the same time.”

The “Yes, and…” principle guarantees momentum. You’re constantly adding something, rather than simply agreeing with what was just said, or repeating it in slightly different words. (Remember, true momentum isn’t about pace. It’s about always moving forward, and in as straight a line as possible.)

You can apply this to solo work, too. Try to never let it bog down or repeat yourself. Once you master this, you make everyone else sound like they’re just rambling or babbling.

I once put up a sign on the Control Room door that said:

“I just got into town. I got into the car, turned the radio on, and hit the ‘scan’ button. It landed on your station. I don’t know what station it is, what the format is, what the dial position is, or who you are. You have thirty seconds.” (Now, PPM is showing that it’s more like TEN seconds.)

I base everything I coach on “first time” listening. If I just tuned in for the first time, can I get what’s going on here? Are you making references to things that I don’t understand, since I’m not a regular listener to the show?

All too often, the Air Talent assumes that the Listener has been there for a few minutes, or that “everyone knows” what he or she is talking about. I call this “The Eminent Danger of the Assumption.”

Reset the stage for the Listener. Don’t assume anything. Remember, I just tuned in.

Think of what was originally called the “Fox Block” – the little box in the corner of the screen when you watch a football game that tells you the teams, the score, the time left on the clock. (It’s now standard on every network.) Radio doesn’t have the visual tool that television does, so we have to do it verbally.

As you listen to an aircheck with your Talent, if you hear the “assumption” mentality, simply stop the audio and ask, “Who is this? What station am I listening to? What’s going on here?” The Talent will get it immediately, and start to police himself. Plus, he’ll start to ask those questions when he hears a competitor, and think that they’re lame for not knowing what he knows. That builds confidence.

Lately, I hear a lot of people doing things on the air that frankly, they’re not very good at. Traffic reporters trying to be personalities”. People trying to tell stories, even though they never seem to have an ending – or sometimes even a decent beginning. Jocks putting their hard-to-understand, marble-mouthed children on the air thinking that it’s “cute”.

It’s easy to think that being good at one thing means that you’re automatically going to be good at other things. But of course that’s not always the case. (Michael Jordan trying to play baseball comes to mind. Not pretty. His Airness became His Waving A Bat At The Air-ness.)

Here’s the way it works in radio, my friend: No one tunes in to hear you do your 5th best thing. Or even your 3rd.

Often, my early work with a talent is simply about shoring up fundamental stuff that may need work, that you may have never learned, or that you were taught wrong. But after that initial stage, I think the next job as a talent coach is to identify your biggest strengths – just one or two things – and then whittle it down to where that’s all you do.

So if you genuinely want to be a great air talent, start by asking yourself these two questions, in this order:

1. What am I good at?
2. Really?

Be honest. If you don’t know the answer to those questions – and most people don’t – you need a coach.

One of the things about coaching that I love the most is getting to work with young talents. Since there’s virtually no meaningful training anymore, it’s great to have a chance to head them off at the pass before they turn into faceless, shouting, liner-reading robots, and help them find ways to sound truly unique.

To a degree, it’s a “throwback” thing from radio’s past, but that’s like saying that a radio station’s iPhone app is a throwback to the transistor radios that people had 50 years ago. It’s the same, but totally different.

Recently, in a session recap, I wrote this to a promising young talent:

Real people just talk. They get excited, they get intimate, they get loud, they get quiet—but they don’t have that pukey “shouting-at-the-listener” delivery that everyone goes into when you ask them to do an impression of a deejay.

One thing that’ll really help you get your arms around this is to not try and cram too many words into a song intro. MATCH the tempo and the mood of the song. If it’s 100 beats a minute, you should start at that speed. If it’s faster, start faster. If it’s slower, start slower. But don’t go 300 miles an hour over a medium or slow song, because that makes you sound like you aren’t even listening to the song. In effect, it sends the message that the music we play is just a series of music beds for you to talk over—the opposite of seamlessly fitting into and being part OF the song as you talk.

You want to “ride” the song like a surfer riding a wave.

Surf’s up, Dudes. Let’s go have some fun!

This is the real quest, the Holy Grail of how to stand out in the sea of noise across the radio dial:

Find the simplest way to say something so it can’t be misunderstood.

I guarantee that if you do that the best, people will listen to you.

By and large, the person who really nails it – meaning that he or she says the one thought about something that other people pick up on – is the person who stands out.

The more wordy it gets, the less effective it is.

Some of this is about understanding the concept of using different “camera angles” from which to talk about things. Some of it is simply the art – and I do mean art – of being concise. And some of it is having a really rich vocabulary – finding the perfect words to hammer home a point.

After all, English is a strange language. We have so many words that mean roughly the same thing, that conversation is largely a matter of circling the subject with words until we all agree on what’s inside the circle.

Here’s the totally self-serving part: I can help you with this. Your PD may not know how, or may understand it, but can’t teach it. Your consultant may know how, but how often do you get to see him (or her)?

Regular coaching sessions with someone who isn’t your boss can steer you away from just doing what you think is expected of you, and turn you into someone whose thoughts are actually valued by the Listener.

As a matter of fact, your thought might be the one the Listener uses as his own opinion that day.

When you make someone else look good, magical things happen.

Here’s a good technique that keeps you from sounding generic. If you want to talk about something that isn’t local, unless it’s a giant national headline, it’s likely that you’ll get a “who cares?” reaction in the mind of the Listener.

So whenever I hear a Talent struggle with this, I ask, “How do I get there from here?”

Usually, this happens because the Talent is staring through the wrong end of the binoculars and looking to find things that are “interesting” instead of things that are actually relevant.

But suppose you have chosen something relevant, but it’s just not local. Here’s how you get there from here: Compare whatever it is you’re talking about to something that is local. Now you’ve tethered it to my life by referencing something familiar – something that I know about – that’s right here, in this city today, instead of just abruptly bringing up a story from somewhere else.

Example (from a Dallas perspective):

“Imagine walking into that Comerica bank on Lemmon Avenue, and the first thing you hear is “Everybody on the floor! This is a robbery!” That’s what happened to this girl in St. Louis yesterday…” Now you tell me all about what that poor girl went through, and because I can visualize it better, I’ll be more apt to listen.

If you can’t get there from here, don’t go there.

Thoroughness – a valuable quality in almost every job – is actually not the best thing for radio. Trying to do every thing every time is almost a disease. Let’s call it Radio Tourette Syndrome.

For example, the giving of three surrounding cities’ temperatures, then “and in downtown Candyland, it’s 82” to close the weather forecast. As a listener, I only care about MY area. You’d be better off with one satellite city mention, then the main one. Rotate the surrounding cities one at a time, and you get rid of the “laundry list” thing that other stations do. It doesn’t take long for the listener to at least subconsciously notice that you’re not still rattling out more numbers.

It’s the same with everything, really…

Giving the Artist and Title every time gets old. We’re friends and entertainers, not musicologists.

Giving every possible facet of a contest every time you talk about it just makes you sound like either (1) you can’t shut up, or (2) someone is holding a gun to your head making you do it.

Oh, and that ‘deejay thing’ of purposely “hitting the post” (talking right up to the start of the vocal) every time just makes people want to duct tape your mouth shut after a while. (And it makes Pandora look really good.)

The real point is that trying to be too “thorough” is the enemy of editing. What you gain in Information you lose in Momentum. Take that thought and run with it in every phase of your station possible.