The concert ends and the applause begins. The applause gets louder and louder, and then it happens. One person stands.

I’ve never started a standing ovation in my life but I’ve been a part of dozens.

“People like me do things like this… Normalization creates culture, and culture drives our choices, which leads to more normalization.”

Seth Godin

If you want your listeners to engage in something, create a tangible way for them to see how people like them do things like this.

Whether with online music research (Google shows how many have seen your review), a station promotion (the Ice Bucket challenge became a social media phenomenon) or a fundraiser (Facebook helps you to share your cause with others), success involves normalization.

People are searching. Many feel bombarded with negativity and bickering, particularly in the media. I know people who have turned off TV news and avoid rants on social media. As a result people are literally searching for something good.

Every year Google compiles a list of the most searched for words of the year. In 2018 more than ever the world searched for good.

The Christmas season brings out the best in our format. More people tune in than at any other time of the year, some stations topping a million listeners per week, once unthinkable in our format.

I know stations that do their best work in connecting on big tent values (those that resonate with new listeners as much as with regular fans) with stories of hope, forgiveness, and fresh starts. Over the last several weeks we’ve heard some amazing stories and songs.

I heard how Pamela and her daughter were helped to move out of the homeless shelter and start a new life!

I heard Craig’s story of being able to hear for the first time because of a caring surgeon.

I heard the story of the man who decorated his house with Christmas lights knowing that his son wouldn’t live to see Christmas. When his neighbors found out they joined in and decorated their houses months early.  

Stories and songs.

Is there a connection between Christmas and your station’s strategy?  No, I didn’t say Christmas MUSIC.  I said Christmas.

They say there are more “religious” radio stations in the United States than any other format category.  They also say that those religious stations have fewer listeners than any other.  Ouch!

Many Christian radio stations could best be described as “A bunch of stuff all on one station,” consisting of a little of this and a little of that with little connection to the WHY.

On last week’s show I shared the experience of driving with my friend Mike when he declared,  “My GPS is broken!  It only tells me where I’ve been, not where I’m going.”

Making programming decisions based solely upon ratings is like driving with a GPS that shows only where you’ve been.  

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“My GPS is broken,” my friend Mike said to me.  “It only tells me where I’ve been, not where I’m going.”

The ratings arrive.  Our emotions react.  There is running up and down the hallways and gnashing of teeth!  DO SOMETHING!

I’ve heard some pretty wacky ways that people have reacted to ratings.  Moving the deejays’ shifts around, playing music from another format, and implementing no talk segues to sound more generic.  I’M NOT MAKING THIS UP, as Dave Barry would say.

Making programming decisions based solely upon ratings is like driving with a GPS that shows only where you’ve been.

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“It is what you make it,” was my dad’s advice at various milestones in my life.

There was a time in my career when I considered a radio station no more than the sum total of the things that it did; the deejays, the music, the jingles, the contests.  Like a sport being nothing more than the players, the uniforms, the goal posts or bases.

If that were true, then places like Cooperstown, New York, or Canton, Ohio, wouldn’t be shrines since they are not even home to the big league players and teams they eulogize.

It’s hard to remember how we thought about coffee before Starbucks, or personal computers and digital devices before Apple.  What they focused on changed the way we think of them.

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This week’s Frost Advisory is a departure from my regular thoughts on how to make your radio station really swell.  Instead I’d like to take this moment during Thanksgiving week to encourage you in the important work you’re doing at your station.

I’m told that the word “encouragement” means literally to pour courage into.  This word appears over 100 times in the New Testament.

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As I write this week’s Frost Advisory the recount is still going on in Florida where I live.  Well, we have to be famous for something other than alligators, octogenerians, and college football.

We’re less bad than the other guys.

In the last presidential election I heard “Haven’t we taken this ‘anyone can grow up and be president thing too far?'”  Both major candidates had the lowest favorability ratings in history.

“I don’t like either one,” was a common refrain, “so I’m not going to vote.”

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(In case you missed them, here are Part 1 and Part 2.)

Remember when you first began to get curious about what was coming out of the radio?

He was a freshman in high school when he realized that he listened to the radio differently than most people.  While his friends turned up the volume for the music he turned it UP when the disc jockey talked.  He began to notice there were different kinds of personalities (“he’s the funny one”) and even talent levels (“he can talk really fast right up till they start singing,” long before he knew what hitting a post meant.)  Even in his pre-pubescence he sensed that the voices booming in from Chicago were better than the ones from Buffalo Gap.

That 14-year-old John Frost didn’t know what he didn’t know.  Then he began to realize that he didn’t know.  Noel Burch described this process as “The Hierarchy of Competence.”

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