This Mother’s Day, perhaps we can apply some lessons we’ve learned from Mom to how we program our radio stations.

Maybe Mom would have us…

Just play the music your listeners love.  Don’t play music they don’t love.

Talk to your listeners like a friend, not like a stranger.

Act like you enjoy being with your listeners.  Maybe then they’ll enjoy being with you.

Give your listeners presents and throw a party for them and have them invite all their friends.  They’ll feel special.

If you have to tell you listeners bad news, hold their hand, and tell them how sorry you are.

If you should take your listeners somewhere they’ve never been, surround them with familiar things to make them feel safe.  And don’t leave them alone.

Don’t waste your listeners’ time with things they don’t enjoy.  Get to the point, make the interruptions brief, and quickly return to the main reason they listen.

Flush.  Be vigilant about getting the bad stuff off your radio station and replacing it with good stuff.

I can’t think of anyone who loved my mother that I don’t also love.  Love what is important to your listeners.

Twitter.com/Marlins

(Inspired by the poem “All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten” by Robert Fulghum)

It’s a curious thing.

We work in a format that is inherently significant.  And yet we seem to strive to make it superficial.

Instead of being about the most important things in one’s life, we make it about songs I don’t know by artists I’ve never heard of.  We seem to brush by what our listeners already care about to focus on something they don’t care about.

Perhaps we can learn something from the richest company in the world.

Apple’s brilliant new campaign “Focus on what you love” uses Beliefs and Values to communicate a simple feature of the iPhone 7.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waTteMeg4Ag

Apple gets it.

Start here.  Focus on what your listeners love.

They’ve been called the Seven Words of Death for any organization.

The first cousin to “We’ve never done it that way before” is “that doesn’t sound like us.”

I heard one general manager actually admit that he didn’t want to do a certain programming initiative because it would sound better than anything on his station.  Needless to say he got his wish; his station didn’t get better.

John Maxwell identified several reasons people use to resist change.  These three are the ones I encounter most at radio stations:

• Routine makes people comfortable.  Since many people are habit prone anything that threatens their habits, they resist.
• People are simply satisfied with the old ways and don’t want to change.
• People resist change when they are threatened with the loss of something that is valuable to them.

It’s one thing when you see fear of change from disc jockey who is lazy and simply wants to repeat the schtick from his previous gig (and format), it’s another thing altogether when you see fear of change from the leader.

We all know of radio stations that sound basically the same as they did ten years ago, seeing their success through the rear view mirror.  They believe they are successful because of the list of things they have done..  They forget that once those things were innovative and distinctive.  They are the sitting ducks when new competition arrives.

“If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post.  If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution.  Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post.”
~G. K. Chesterton

Leaders, what is something your station has never done that is distinctive and would help build a bond between you and your listeners?

Go do that.

You know the story.

108 years without a World Series championship.  The lovable losers.  The “Friendly Confines” of a ballpark named after a chewing gum magnate. “Let’s Play Two” and “Holy Cow!”

When the Chicago Cubs recently received their World Series rings they did something remarkable.  Instead of inviting the typical three piece suit sponsors and local aldermen, the Cubs invited just regular ole fans to award their rings.

There was “the father whose kids all have Cub-themed names.  A cancer survivor.  A season ticket holder who saved the paper after Ernie Banks’ debut and later got him to sign it.

Calling it ‘the memory of a lifetime,’ president of baseball operations Crane Kenney said involving the fans in the ceremony was the team’s way of saying thank you for never giving up, despite the Cubs giving them ample opportunity to do so.”
~USA Today Sports

The winners were selected from more than 1,500 video nominations on Twitter using the #CubsRingBearer hashtag, which was shared more than 10,000 times overall.

How does your station make your fans feel like stars?  How do you give them an experience they’ll share with their friends?

All those times you’ve had an artist in the studio have you ever considered inviting your station’s biggest fans to sit right there next to you?  #onceinalifetime

Of those dozens of concerts your station sponsors every year, have you ever considered choosing one of your biggest fans to introduce the band?  Or to sit on stage?  Or on the front row?  Or the video board?  Or be on the post-concert show?

Have you considered inviting your most viral social media fans to join you in a pre-concert all-you-can-tweet seats so they can share about their special experience with thousands of their friends?

I reckon that 108 years of not winning gives you plenty of time to think about how to really appreciate your fans.

I arrived at Easter Sunday church during a torrential Florida downpour.  Streets were flooding and the church parking lot looked like it could host a water ski tournament.

As I jumped out of my car and headed for the church building I was greeted by a friendly young man in rain gear carrying an umbrella.  He greeted me with a paradoxical sunny disposition and walked me from my car to the covered walk way.  He then ran off to greet the next apprehensive still-dry visitor.

No message from the pulpit that Easter morning could have conveyed their welcome attitude as much as the selfless act from the man with the umbrella.

“To move an audience, especially a diverse audience, from where they are to where you want them to be requires common ground.  If you want me to follow you on a journey, you have to come get me.  The journey must begin where I am, not where you are or where you think I should be.”
~Andy Stanley

To grow you must leave the comfort of your station, run out to the new listener with an umbrella and say, “Welcome!”; meet them where they are, understand their interests and values, and communicate to them in their language.  Sounds easy, doesn’t it?  But more often than not we simply aren’t willing to get wet.

John Maxwell said, “People will not always remember what you said.  They will not always remember what you did.  But they will always remember how you made them feel.”

We added a new jingle package and our ratings went up!

We ran that new promotion and our ratings went down.

I know of a general manager that wanted to change the shifts of the deejays based upon weekly or monthly ratings.  I’M NOT MAKING THIS UP, as Dave Barry would say.

Our minds crave simplicity.  We crave the Silver Bullet.

“People are drawn to black and white opinions because they are simple, not because they are true.  Truth demands serious effort and thought.”
~Donald Miller

Correlation v. causation

“Every time we see a link between an event or action with another, what comes to mind is that the event or action has caused the other.”

That’s causation.

On the other hand “correlation is an action or occurrence that can be linked to another,” but “linking one thing with another does not always prove that the result has been caused by the other.”
www.differencebetween.net

Our desire for simplicity drives us to conclude that one thing causes another simply because they occurred at the same time.

Our biases cause us to value things we know, mostly things inside the radio station, and to undervalue what we don’t know, mostly things outside the station.

Successful radio stations strive not for answers that are simple, but answers that are true.

But, darn it, that demands effort and thought.

Baseball fans get mushy about this kind of thing.  “Why Time Begins on Opening Day” is actually the actual name of an actual baseball book.  Best seller, don’tcha know.

It’s that ‘winter is over’ thing.  It’s that ‘hope springs eternal’ thing.  It’s that ‘we’re all young again’ thing.

“You look forward to it like a birthday party when you’re a kid.  You think something wonderful is going to happen.”
~Joe DiMaggio

There is a programming lesson for us here.

Ballparks on Opening Day are filled with people who may not attend another game all season.  The ceremonies include the introduction of players, the first pitch by a local politician, and a humongous American flag held up by the Boy Scouts or Junior ROTC.  In other words, one doesn’t have to know anything about baseball to have a good time.

Today is Opening Day for your station – for someone.  Most listening don’t know any more about your station than those Opening Day fans know about the ballplayers.

Andy Stanley poses three ideas that I think every radio station should ponder:

1. Assume guests are in the room.
2. What do they hear?
3. What do they experience?

My friend Brant Hansen thinks about stuff like this.  That’s why he’s created a video and online guide for new listeners.  He wants to make it easier for a new listener to become a fan.

Time may begin on Opening Day, but what teams really want is for fans to come back again and again.

Robert Osborne passed away last month.  One could say he was just a senior citizen who did nothing more than fill the time between old black and white movies.  They would be wrong.

“It’s always the personality between the content that makes the experience of the brand larger than its parts.  True in radio.  True on Turner Classic Movies: TCM”
~Mark Ramsey

The upcoming annual TCM Classic Film Festival in Los Angeles is dedicated to him.  Proof of the power of personality.  Proof of the power of an experience.

“I get stopped on the street all the time,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 2014.  “People say: ‘You got me through cancer last year.  You got me past unemployment.  You take me away from my troubles.’  Exactly what movies did in the ’30s and ’40s.”

“Mr. Osborne appealed as much to moviemakers as he did to moviegoers… He got us excited and reawakened to the greatest stories ever told with the most charismatic stars in the world.”
~Stephen Spielberg

You have a choice.  Your radio station can be nothing more than generic liners and promos delivered by passionless deejays, or it could be what Mr. Spielberg infers, a compelling design of interesting people sharing a passion for the things your listeners love.

“A concert isn’t merely about the music, is it?  And a restaurant isn’t about the food.  It’s about joy and connection and excitement.”
~Seth Godin

At TCM Bob Osborne was about what their fans were passionate about.  The personalities on your radio station should be, too.

“Why can’t there be a TV show that the whole family can sit down and enjoy together?”

Melissa Gilbert, who you know as Half-pint on “Little House on the Prairie,” responds to that question on NBC’s 90th anniversary special by saying, “Have you watched ‘This Is Us’?”

“I didn’t watch the show when it first came on air… but I kept hearing about it,” said the note from my talented friend Sara Carnes of The Fish in Cleveland.

“I heard ladies at work talking in the bathroom about what happened the night before, I saw screen shots on Snapchat from my friends talking it, Facebook posts, etc… people (mostly women) just raving about how incredible this show was they were watching.  Finally, after a few months I told me husband…  Ok, everyone is talking about how awesome this show is we gotta watch it.  Well… we sat down and watched one episode and couldn’t stop.”

Methinks there is a programming lesson for us here.

“Recognizable and relatable characters.”  [Your listeners should be able to relate to your on-air talent.  Not just passively consume, but relate.  What if “Me, too!,” was the listener’s reaction to every break?]

“Hope is a good thing… No matter how often these characters get rocked or how dark some of the story turns are, there’s still that strong element of hope that’s an essential part of this show’s DNA – a reassuring sense of inextinguishable optimism during difficult times.”

“United we watch: …At a time when the country feels divided, this feels like the type of network show of yore that we watched together.
~”10 Reasons Why ‘This Is Us’ Has Emerged as a Hit for NBC,” by Mark Dawidziak, The Plain Dealer

“Wow, every single one of these reasons relates to us in what we do at the station too.  This is how we win,” Sara says.

“This is us!” could be what your listeners say about your station!

It’s the simplest idea.  But it is an idea missing from every bad radio station.

TODAY

No one reads yesterday’s news.  No one watches yesterday’s game.  No one talks about yesterday’s plans.  (Even when we talk about what happened yesterday we talk about it from the 24 hours later perspective of today).

But here’s the catch;  TODAY has to be designed in.  TODAY doesn’t happen by accident.  In fact, the generic – any time, any place – is precisely what happens by accident.

My talented friend Keith Stevens of KTIS recently said to me, “I can’t track today.  The sun is out!”  That perspective comes from Keith’s understanding of TODAY… that when the sun comes out during a frigid Minnesota winter it changes how people feel, and he wants his station to reflect that.

Today creates common ground.  It is the neighborhood that allows us to be neighbors.