Radio...The Original Social Network

I had dinner last night with my good friend Michael Walter, who is affectionately known as Fin…short for Dolphin. Fin recently returned to Cincinnati after a brief stint with Clear Channel in Atlanta to become the new Program Director for Cumulus Radio’s Rock 96. He has the mouth-watering challenge of taking on the station where he once was the PD…Clear Channel’s heritage rocker WEBN.

As someone who has always loved local radio, it’s exciting to see a company like Cumulus bringing back an “old radio guy” like Fin. It’s ironic that Fin’s return to his old stomping grounds coincides with the recent announcement that Clear Channel will need to divest itself of several properties in Cincinnati because of anti-trust issues. With Clear Channel having dominated Cincinnati’s radio market for more than a decade, it will be interesting and, dare I say, refreshing to see the competitive landscape change so dramatically.

My hope is that Fin and others like him will bring back the thing that always made radio special: its local-ness. Before the web and the advent of social networking through Facebook, etc. al. local radio stations were the original social networks on a market by market basis. People had favorite stations and tuned in for much more than music…they tuned into the personalities, the contests and the activities that defined radio stations. Radio formats became social networks. Sadly, much of that magic was lost during the post de-regulation years when rapid consolidation led to homogenization. Radio slowly lost the one thing that defined it for many years: its link to the community.

But I see a revival on the horizon. Radio is in a unique position to exploit the marketing community’s insatiable appetite to better “engage” consumers. Satellite radio is failing because it isn’t local…and therefore, not very interesting. Television faces tremendous challenges as DVRs and on-line video continue to chip away at attention-strapped consumers. Newspaper is in a fight for its existence as younger, digitally savvy consumers abandon the traditional form of news for the immediate on-line version.

To me, it’s all very exciting stuff as all traditional (i.e. off-line) media must adhere to the oft-repeated axiom: “adapt or die.” I don’t expect any of the traditional media to die, but it will be fun to watch them re-cast themselves to a marketing industry that is rapidly rejecting the status quo.

The opportunity for local radio, in this brave new media world, is to return to its roots and exploit the very qualities that make it a unique medium: immediacy, personality and, above all, local relevance.

I think it was Bette Davis who said: “You better strap yourself in, it’s going to be bumpy ride.”

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