SMS interaction and radio stations

Link: Finding Community On The Radio Dial.

Paul Adams (via Seth) wonders "why radio stations can’t ping you by sms or even phone when they play a song you request.

I’ve been following this story across the various blogs and decided to respond after reading Christopher Carfi’s note above.  It’s quite simple: Radio Stations are broadcast focused.  They do a wicked job of one-to-many, but an absolutely ridiculous job of one-to-one. 

Witness the regional radio station here in the UK that runs its entire SMS service via a Nokia 6210 taped to the desk of the producer. Seriously. I kid you not.

Witness another that has all its texts forwarded from its shortcode to an "info@" email address that no one bothers to check.  You can rest assured there’s no data mining going on there. At all.

Witness the UK radio station, which will remain nameless, that signs you up to their ‘free’ ringtone service (you get one free, then start having to pay automatically every week) when you text the DJ with a request.

How do they get away with this? Well. I and a room full of people at this conference stared at the guy from the service provider as he explained that technically, as far as the DPA is concerned, they had given permission to receive a reply text.

So technically they could be sent a free ringtone.

And thus, with a few short skips and jumps, they could technically have been said to have agreed to opt in to pay something like £2.50 a week.  But you can opt out without paying if you’re quick enough, which no one generally is.

This is generally the extent to which radio stations do "one to one" marketing.

Or, witness the radio stations in Canada who don’t get text.  They’ve no idea why to bother with it.  One of my colleagues was actually met with a load of blank faces when he explained that text could really help implement a two-way immediate method of communication between the radio station and the audience.  Their boss asked "Why would we want to do that?"  This was 2 weeks ago. 

Here’s another perspective: Whenever we run an interactive service featuring text messaging, we insist that the client responds individually or globally to every message.  That is to either say "thank you" manually or at least acknowledge the incoming message with a text reply, even if it costs more and ‘doesn’t fit the model’, as the biz dev guys usually comment.

Why do this?  Well, for a start, the consumer has typically PAID money to respond to your call to action, whether it’s a vote or song request.  You must demonstrate respect for the value of the sender’s text. 

Hour after hour, the radio stations here are constantly promoting their text lines.  "Send me a text if you’d like to hear something played."

"Tell me what you’re doing tonight and we’ll spin a tune for you."

"Yeah, right", I say to myself, "I never heard you even read out a message from anyone Mr DJ, let alone play a song, particularly when you’re only a talking voice with no ability to change the playlist."

Unfortunately people do text.  Into the ether.  Never get a reply.  Not even a "Sorry, we’re really jammed today, but that’s a super song request. Great song! Rgds. Mr DJ".

You have to wonder what that’s doing to the relationship between the consumer and the radio station.  They pick up their phone to respond to the call to action and the radio station effectively ignores the text.

Unless the station has implemented a wickedly cool jukebox style system as per the one I recently blogged about.

Anyway there are one or two exceptions of course.  Not least Whole Wheat Radio as mentioned by Chrisopher (linked in his blog above). 

Most stations haven’t a clue.  Does this matter? Ultimately, probably not, especially when more and more people are beginning to program their own entertainment.