Radio Beware

The end is nigh for the newspaper business.

If that photo (unapologetically stolen from SAI) doesn't sum it up, then nothing will.

Radio, look at this and see your potential future. If you insist on thinking you're in the broadcasting business and you think your FCC license and your transmitter are your greatest assets, then look to the newspaper industry to see your future in 3 years.

Realize you're in the audio content business. If you understand that your greatest assets are people who excel at educating, informing and entertaining an audience with just their mind and their voice then you'll move forward. Sitting back and trying to wait out the changing world will work as well for you as it did for the newspaper guys.

The business won't be the same. Broadcasting will be just one channel of distribution (an increasingly irrelevant channel). Your monetization models will change (more performance based ads and sponsorships). The industry might be smaller in terms of gross receipts but larger in terms of profits. The style of programming will change (it will be shorter and micro-chunked to facilitate P2P viral distribution). You'll have much less control over how your media is consumed but far better data about who is consuming it and why they listen.

But if you think your stick and your signal are your primary competitive advantages then you're doomed.

Edit: Just a quick follow up. Tribune is cutting 80 newsroom jobs.

Sharing and Forwarding

Everybody has a viral marketing plan, yet almost no products have significant viral growth. Why?

Seth Godin wrote a great piece on viral ideas. When Yahoo! acquired Yoyodyne (Seth's company) back in 1998 Seth did some talks for the production team. While I never had the pleasure of working with Seth directly, much of what he said in those talks has made its way into the Foneshow product.

We've worked hard to make Foneshows as viral as we can. Any user can forward any show to any other cell phone by simply pressing the 9 key. The person who has a show forwarded to them gets a message that their friend sent them a show (and the show name and length). They can listen right from their cell phone (usually just by hitting send). If they like it, they can subscribe from their handset with a single key press (without having to go to our website). Of course we didn't do enough to tell users about this feature until someone kicked us in the butt (thanks Jason, have fun in the Bay Area). Sometimes you're too close to the trees...

Also, go read our post on friction. If there's any significant friction, then your viral plans are dead.