• Getting Them to Listen is Not Enough!
• Using Conflict to Create More Compelling Content
• Getting More Out of Brainstorming Sessions
• Conducting More Productive Meetings
• How To Create An Air Coaching Plan for 2004
• Does Your Morning Show Content Make the Grade
• Making time to Praise
• My morning show could be much more compelling
• 10 Steps to more effective radio air check and critique sessions
• Changing Air Personality Performance Behavior
• Improving the Creative Process at your Radio Station
• Air Talent Coaching Tactics that get results
• The Difference Between Speaking and Being Heard.
• The Morning Show as Improv
• American Culture Post 9/11
• Coaching Air Personality Development
• Building Better Time Spent Listening
• How to Increase Audience Passion for Your Radio Station
• Techniques for Managing Air Personalities New to Radio
• Maximizing News On a Music Radio Station

When radio was in its youth all it needed to do to be successful was to get people to listen. Not anymore. We now live in a world of constant communication. Every waking second of every day is spent being exposed to information and reacting to it. Cell phones, pagers, text messaging, e-mail and the Internet have all gone from being convenient to essential to all of our lives. And all of these communications devices can easily be used while listening to radio. This bombardment of communication competes for the primary attention span of radio listeners today. The result is an ever-evolving, multi-tasking radio listener forced to make decisions as to what information to take in and what to shut out.

Converting cume to average quarter hour listening requires more than just a passive ear listening to the radio. In order to build strong time spent listening, the audience must not only be listening, but actually hearing what is being said on the radio. So much of what happens in radio today is perceived by listeners as portrayed in the old Gary Larson cartoon, What Dogs Hear. In the cartoon the dog’s master is lecturing the dog in plain English, but the dog only hears “Blah, blah, blah, Sparky.” If the content doesn’t matter to the listeners, they shut it out and it becomes nothing more than white noise: Blah, blah, blah, listener.

The key to getting listeners to hear any message is relevance. If it is relevant to who they are, they will pay attention. If it isn’t they won’t. Len Ellis works for the prestigious marketing firm Wunderman, whose clients include Coca Cola, Kraft, Microsoft and Toys R Us. Ellis says, “Customers define relevance – plain and simple. It is their need of the moment. If I’m hungry and I’m walking down the street and I see a restaurant, well, that restaurant is now relevant to me.” To illustrate Ellis’ point, a recent study was conducted on television advertising. After the respondents had viewed television commercials, they were asked what brand they had just seen advertised. If they could not identify the brand, they were asked to identify the product being advertised. Only 9% could name either.

The first step to getting listeners to hear what you have to say on the radio is to analyze your content for listener relevance. Topical material tends to be some of the most powerful radio content because it is relevant to the lives of listeners. It is much easier to get listeners to pay attention to material involving something they are already thinking about in their own lives.

Unfortunately, much of what we talk about or do on the radio lacks listener relevance. Analyze the content on any underperforming radio show or radio station and you will most assuredly find too much irrelevant material.

One of the root causes of irrelevant content is the implied historical radio content legacy. Included in that legacy are content elements that have been passed down from generation to generation of radio personalities. Among these are celebrity birthdays, almanac information, stupid criminal stories, offbeat facts, weird surveys and many others. While these elements often can be made relevant to listeners in their presentation, they are not, in their literal form, relevant to today’s radio listener. The birthdays of a handful of radio listeners are only relevant to the handful of birthday boys and girls and their friends and family. The fact that the Panama Canal was completed on this date in 1914 will only be relevant to the most serious history buffs in the audience. A story about a criminal in another state who locks his keys in the escape car and gets caught, while mildly entertaining, is not all that relevant to anyone’s real world.

If you want to get people to hear what you are saying on the radio, you must take an outside view of your radio content selections. If you are involved with a morning show, for example, ask yourself every day, “What are our listeners thinking about and what will they be talking about today?” On some days this process is easy. On average days it isn’t. So, don’t overlook the obvious because the little, obvious things in listeners’ lives are much more relevant than most wacky Internet stories. Obvious concepts such as the weather, things that happen to kids in school, things that happen to people at work, things that happen to people while shopping, etc., provide the foundation for content that is much more relevant to listeners.

How you treat your content also plays a major role in whether your audience just listens to it or hears it. Whether it is just on the air or gets into their heads depends greatly on the content set up. Program Directors have long known that the audience’s attention to the radio is highest at the end of a song in anticipation of what is next. That is why they insist the call letters happen at that point. Human beings, in general, pay greater attention at the end of one idea and the beginning of the next. If you want the greatest number of listeners to pay attention to a new idea, start each one with a strong, listener-focused “headline.”

There are several effective tactics to help you improve your content set-ups.

1. The first is through a marketing concept called “you” orientation. There is no more powerful word than the word “you” when trying to communicate with people. If you want to test this concept, just go into any public place and say, “Hey, you!” Inevitably, when you do this, everyone will turn around because they all will think you are talking to them. When you put the word “you” in your set-ups you trigger that same reaction with your listeners.
2. The second tactic to help improve your set-ups is drawn from comedy. This is particularly effective for self-generated material. Comedians find the entry point for their material through the vehicle, “You know how when….” The words you use to complete this sentence become the listener-focused set-up. Here is an example using the recent brutal weather in the Midwest and East. “You know how when it snows more than a foot, only a select few people are really fit enough to lift a shovel full of the stuff, but we do it whether we’re physically capable of it or not?” At the end of the exercise you can remove the “you know how when” and just use the rest of the sentence as your set-up.
3. A third tactic to use for set-ups is common experiences. Effective communication is dependant upon mutual understanding. Finding the commonality in your idea and the listeners’ experiences builds an emotional bridge between you and them. When you are working on set-ups for your material, ask yourself this: what in this story or idea have the greatest number of listeners experienced; what can they most relate to? Get the answer to those questions in the first sentence. For example, if your set was about who was going to the Super Bowl this year, the common experiences might be losing a bet, having your home team finally win the big one, being a rabid sports fan, etc. Set-ups born out of this kind of thinking also help turn listening into hearing because they tap into listeners’ emotions and emotion is the key to memory.

The Arbitron term time spent listening is kind of a misnomer. What you are really trying to achieve is time spent hearing. And, there are no quicker, easier or cheaper ways to turn listening into hearing than to add more content that is relevant to your audience and stronger listener-focused set-ups.