As we turn the page on another Thanksgiving holiday in America, the front page tells us that Fidel Castro has died.  That’s reason for partying in the streets in the Cuban-American communities.  One news account referred to it as “Christmas coming early.”

I wonder if Fidel Castro was a grateful man.  Curious idea, don’tcha think?

We don’t usually associate dictators with gratitude.  No, they are the quintessential takers.  The news stories used words like oppression, control, and force.  And yet we associate being grateful with giving.

The same is true for our radio stations.

Is your station a giver or a taker?

I know radio stations where the only time one hears certain voices is when they are asking for money.  Their airwaves are filled with commands “do this” and “do that”, treating listeners like the proverbial dog on a leash.

But I know stations that are “givers”.  I know of a station that has a strategic initiative to connect listeners to local charities.  I know of a station that was on the ground offering bottled water and other help during a local disaster.  I know of a station that gives the opportunity to pray with listeners in need at each station event.

“The human spirit senses and feeds on a giving spirit… Think about what Jesus taught – half the time people didn’t know what he was talking about, but they listened attentively.  Jesus was giving – feeding them.  Not taking.  It is at a spirit (heart) level – he wasn’t just giving information.”
~John Maxwell

One of my heroes is a fellow by the name of Billy Howell, who runs an automobile dealership in the Atlanta area.  Although we’ve never met Billy is one of my heroes because he is a giver.  He partners each year with my friends at The Fish Atlanta to bless those who are struggling.  Just last week Billy and his company granted a Christmas Wish to fly a soldier and his family home to Atlanta prior to his deployment to Afghanistan.

“The best ministry we can offer on God’s behalf isn’t to explain our theology.  It’s to extend our generosity.  Because that’s what our heavenly Father did for us.  And that’s what he’s asked us to do as well.”
~Andy Stanley

Oh, and by the way, the stories of giving you share make wonderful gifts for your listeners

That’s the announcement that came over the airport PA.  But the announcement seems self-evident, doesn’t it?

Atlanta is in the eastern time zone.

Unless…

…you’re not from Atlanta.

And most of the 250,000 travelers per day through the world’s busiest airport are NOT from Atlanta.

Almost everyone has to catch another flight.  So time matters.

The seemingly self-evident becomes vital with a simple change of perspective.

Your listener has a perspective. Great stations learn it.

“Did you call out my daughter’s name?  A friend told me to call.  I’ve never listened to your station before.”

I’m told there is a newspaper with a remarkable circulation rate – 100%.  Yep!  Everyone in town reads it.  The country wisdom of the publisher describes it in three words:

Names, Names, Names

He says that every Tom, Dick, and Harry, and every Donald and Hillary read his newspaper because they want to see if their name was in it. (“Made to Stick”, by Chip and Dean Heath)

What if your station was littered with the names and voices of your listeners?  A community of sounds, maybe introducing traffic, weather, birthdays, anniversaries, or lost dogs, and ultimately creating word-of-mouth.

What if the very design of your station revealed your listeners?

The power of a name was evident in social media when Starbucks recently offered a $5 eGift card to those who would “@tweetacoffee to” the Twitter handle of a friend.  “This can be between the closest of friends, the most distant of colleagues, or even between people who have not even had the chance to meet yet in person, but have connected in some way on Twitter.  We love the possibilities that the Twitter community can unlock to share acts of kindness with one another.”

What if…

…in a world of cookie cutter formats programmed remotely by people who couldn’t even locate your city on a map, the most effective viral marketing tool was simply the power of a name.

Interesting, isn’t it?

Five million fans lined the streets of Chicago to celebrate the Cubs’ World Series championship!  That’s almost double the number that actually attended a Cubs’ game at Wrigley Field this season.  What’s that about?

It seems that the idea of being a Cubs’ fan actually transcends being a Cubs’ fan.

“When you have a story that’s larger and more interesting than your product or service – or you – other people and companies will want to incorporate your story into theirs to share the halo effect.  Supporters beat customers every time.  But gaining supporters starts with having a story worth supporting.”
~Blake Mycoskie, “Start Something that Matters”

Too often, however, our radio stations are more like versions of the game day accounts that dissect OPS (on base plus slugging percentage), WAR (wins above replacement), and BAFM (batting average during a full moon).

But that is not what motivated 5 million to line the streets of Chicago to honor their Cubbies!

On the brick wall at Wrigley Field fans wrote tributes to family members that didn’t live to see the Cubs win the World Series.

“My grandpa was a Cubs’ fan, my dad was too, and me and my brother…”

Last I checked no one wrote anything on that wall about Dexter Fowler’s stolen base percentage, Jon Lester’s strikeout to walk ratio, or Aroldis Chapman’s velocity.

Why then do we insist on diminishing our stations to nothing more than a Christian music version of Spotify, stripping our stations of the very values worthy of creating five millions fans willing to line the streets of Chicago?  My friend Mike looks out his office window to bemoan a parking lot void of any car with a station bumper sticker.  I regularly walk through stations where I hear no employee, supposedly the most passionate of fans, actually listening to the station.

Here’s my challenge to you…

Listen to your station for the next thirty minutes.

What do you hear that transcends batting average and on base percentage?

What do you hear that is a mirror reflecting back the very identity of your listener?

What do you hear that could motivate millions to line the streets and write tributes in chalk to the ones they love?

It’s baseball’s biggest stage.  These games mean it all.  The dream of every kid who’s ever hit a baseball in his back yard.  And yet, at this penultimate moment in a millionaire player’s career they are willing to stop the game.  And hold a cheap handwritten cardboard sign.

What’s going on here?

“Major League Baseball, Stand Up To Cancer and MasterCard conducted a special in-game moment, with players, umpires, coaches and fans all pausing to hold up placards with the names of loved ones affected by cancer.”
~MLB.com

If we view it through the filter of what is has to do with baseball it makes absolutely no sense.  But if we view it through the filter of who were are as a community – as a family, we see that it is more important than just a game.

This campaign’s viral marketing taps into beliefs and values that just so happens to be at the heart of your radio station: celebrating family and friends, and reaching out to help others.  Beliefs and Values is not about sounding religious, it’s about connecting to things that really matter.

While the other radio stations are talking about what matters to them, maybe we can be talking about what matters to our listeners.

“There’s singing at people,
There’s singing to people,

There’s singing about how you feel…
Then, there’s singing about how THEY feel”
~Tim McGraw

This week’s Frost Advisory is authored by my colleague T.J. Holland, a very smart fellow indeed.

“When nobody is effectively ‘in charge’, you’re bound to get more people arguing over how things should be done.”
~Dean Burnett PhD.

You may have come to expect (and accept) that every election cycle will bring more and more mudslinging.  Yet this cycle, it seems the slung mud is inside the parties nearly as much as at the opposition party.  This sort of circular firing squad mentality is becoming part of the process as well.  Almost everyday there is a series of leaked documents that expose the internal espionage inside the parties.

Thankfully, WikiLeaks hasn’t released private messages within our own organizations.

Does your workplace suffer from your own form of infighting?  This is more than a programming versus sales discussion.

It’s about separate camps forming within because of lack of vision and leaders that unite.

Infighting is part of a larger type of group psychology.  Dean Burnett commented on political infighting in his recent article in The Guardian, “Why Political Parties Fall Apart:  the Psychology of Infighting.”

Are the current crop of politicians sufficiently capable “leaders”? A reliance on presentation and spin may mean they have an easier ride from most voters, but these qualities don’t automatically make you a strong leader.  In times of uncertainty (which seems to be 24/7 at the moment) a strong leader is very important for group unity.

It’s not surprising that curbing disunity comes down to leadership that is engaged.

How often do we spin poor ratings or a lackluster fundraising effort with spin instead of addressing the underlying issues behind the results?   The conversations after the explanation usually aren’t about how everyone bought into it.

Do we accept the results of a poor internal employee survey as a need for more self-awareness and change, or do simply send out a memo to the team letting them know “they’ve been heard” (or worse, conducting a “witch hunt” to find the dissenters)?  Does this lack of directness bring unity or division from those who are targeted?

After hearing breaks that consistently miss the opportunity to connect emotionally, do we take the time to coach up talent or do we shoulder shrug and complain about not having enough hours in a day to get the job done?  Your talent ends up alienated and silos are built.  It’s better to catch them doing something right and point that out.  That’s an easy first step.

It’s so easy to throw the word around, yet it’s really a challenge to a lead.  Be in charge, as your strong leadership will be the difference between a united workplace, or overseeing a group even Julian Assange would shake his head at.

Reckon’ it’s happened to us all.

I have Facebook friends whose political rants make me want to hit them with a baseball bat.  Metaphorically, of course.

My friend Randy’s FB tirades are the most extreme left-wing drivel you can imagine.  My friend Gort, a self-described liberal, has totally blocked his rants and hides under the bed when he calls.  And they are best friends!

My friend Cooper is as right-wing as a one-legged chicken.  He can’t even mention Hillary’s name without the liberal (pardon the expression) use of expletives.  #@#$#@%$@.

Their diametrically opposed views are so categorically biased you’d think that Hillary and Donald were worthy of challenging Mother Theresa on sainthood.

What can we programmers learn from this silly little journey into social media mud rucking?

A better way to spend our time than a Facebook rant, I’d say.

What if it was the other way around?

What if everything we heard was something we knew was true in our hearts?  What if every time they spoke we felt like they had been talking directly to us?  What if we consistently heard things that affirmed our identify, encouraged us in our daily challenges, and gave us a glimpse at the best version of ourselves?

“The people we surround ourselves with either raise or lower our standards.  They either help us become the best-version-of-ourselves or become lesser versions of ourselves.  We all need people in our lives who raise our standards, who remind us of our eternal purpose, and challenge us to become the best version-of-ourselves.”
~John Maxwell

What if those things of value came from our favorite radio station?

My friends at KLTY in Dallas are giving $500 to listeners to help a friend.  Even though the listener also receives $500, that is not the part that is resonating.  They’ve tapped into their listeners’ value system that helping a friend is a meaningful thing to do.

KLTY is helping their listeners become a better version of themselves.

Or, we could just post another rant on Facebook!

It’s an interesting idea.

Andy Andrews says, “Don’t believe everything you think.  What you think is what you know.  And wisdom goes beyond what you know.”

They say that there really are no marital problems, only people problems that two imperfect people bring into a marriage.

After more than 40 years in radio I’ve come to realize that there really are no programming problems; only problems that people bring into programming discussions.

They seem to fall into these key areas:

1. Insecurity.  Often it is the “Peter Principle”, those that are successful at a lower level but then promoted to their own level of incompetency where they remain.  These are those who don’t know, know they don’t know, but work tirelessly to not be found out.  Oh, the stories I could tell.
2. Experience (or lack of).  These people learned programming principles decades ago and are threatened by new concepts.  They tend to divert back to what they did in “the old days” because it is comfortable.  Unfortunately it is also forever their frame of reference.
3. Work ethic.  When someone touts a programming philosophy that ultimately means they don’t have to work as hard, I know it’s not a real philosophy.  The best work we do is always the hardest work we do.

“People are more comfortable with old problems than they are with new solutions.”
~John Maxwell

Does any of this sound like your radio station?  I’d love to hear from you.  Confidential, of course.

Some have called the him a xenophobe. *I had to look it up, too.  Others say he’s the one to make America great again.

One perspective cites her “command of the issues, resilience and long record of public service” (USA Today editorial board),

…while another says, “wherever (she) goes, issues of ethnics and improprieties are not far behind.” Mike Pence

Perspective.

What’s your listeners’ perspective?  Not about politics, per se, but about life?

I once asked a candidate for program director how he knew what his listeners cared about.  I’ll never forget his answer.

“It’s simple.  I just walk in the control room.  Every person on the air lives it.”

In a format where the music is unfamiliar the ability to connect to the listeners’ perspective is a critical step in building a relationship.

“We buy what we buy to remind ourselves – and tell the world around us – who we are… We’re attracted to reflections of ourselves… Win the heart and the mind will follow.”
~Roy Williams

*A person with an extreme dislike or fear of foreigners, their customs, their religion.

It’s here.  Likely the most eyeballs ever staring at the two presidential candidates, and they with the highest negative ratings ever.

It’s a made for TV reality show for better or for worse.

What can our stations learn from these unusual times?

Basic Trout and Reis positioning suggests attaching your product or service to what is on everyone’s mind.  That common ground thing, don’tchaknow?  Then connect what’s on everyone’s mind to the benefits of your brand.

As the headlines focus more and more on discouragement, there is another choice.