Building Connections With Listeners

“It’s about connections. I want to connect with people; I want to make people think “Yeah, that’s how I feel.” And if I can do that, that’s an accomplishment." - Carole King

Want to know about one of the most important changes in programming? It’s that it’s no longer “good enough” to have simple announcers trying to be funny or entertaining, or, on the other hand, simply doing the “that was/this is” thing. People want to be more involved in radio, to be more than a passive listener, and that happens when you connect with them.

OK, most people can agree with that – we need to connect with our listeners in order to develop a deeper relationship with them. But what does that mean strategically? It means we have to have a new strategy, one where “show prep” doesn’t mean a prep sheet or what we heard on another station, but instead starts with the listener and works backwards.

Traditionally we’ve built a target listener of some kind, and then we look for things that will interest them for content. Unfortunately most of the people doing this aren’t in the target, so they begin filtering what they think the target will want to hear. We’re trying to relate, but we’ve avoided the most important step – asking the listeners what they’re interested in.

Interesting, isn’t it? We rightly spend money on perceptual research, or at least we used to, and we spend money on music research to know their favorite songs. But we spend almost no time or money finding out about the person that is the listener. We’re still relatively shallow in our understanding of what the listener is actually interested in, so it’s difficult to connect with them.

How is your air staff handling show prep? How do they understand the listener enough to connect? Or is it just business as usual, with USA Today and some prep sheet from somewhere else, keeping up a wall between you and your listeners?