Station Experiments in Social Media

On the last full day of the IMA Public Media 2007 conference, there was a session on station experiments in social media, moderated by Jake Shaprio from Public Radio Exchange, and including:

• Daniel Ash from Chicago Public Radio (not this Daniel Ash)
• Julia Schrenkler from Minnesota Public Radio and American Public Media
• Ken Freedman from WFMU

Shapiro kicked off the panel by arguing that while “social media” should seem to be a perfect fit with the mission of public broadcasting, the public broadcast sector as a whole has not been at the forefront of social media technologies.

Where there should be a solid opportunity to join the two, based on architectures of participation, authenticity, transparency, motives other than the profit, and a drive for relevance, instead there seems to be a significant reluctance, or mistrust, or perhaps just a time lag.

These panelists will talk about what their stations are doing in the social media space - experiments in the sense that no one sees these projects as settled, final answers, but as steps in a given direction which others might learn from.

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DCMA, KEXP, and Streaming Goodness

(Yes, I’m still catching up on blogging my notes from the IMA Public Media 2007 conference. Almost done. )

One of the sessions on Friday was about music rights. The panel was moderated by Bruce Warren from WXPN, and panelists included:

• Steve Altman, Senior Vice President, Business Affairs, CPB
• Neal Jackson, Vice President for Legal Affairs, NPR
• Tom Mara, Executive Director, KEXP

Not to sound like a total fanboy, but KEXP rocks. In addition to a wide variety of full-song podcasts (as opposed to 1 minute or less samples of songs), they offer a 14-day archive of everything that goes out on the air, an uncompressed stream (1.4Mbps, CD-Quality), a mobile stream (highly compressed, but I can listed from my cell phone), and real-time playlists of everything DJs play. (They don’t have pre-planned playlists, but literally generate the playlist in real time).

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Music Discovery

(So I’m a bit behind in writing up these entries. Never could get the hang of the unfiltered liveblog. The session wasn’t this morning, but last Friday. Unfortunately, I’m not sure the intervening time to reflect has improved my notes).

One of this morning’s sessions at Public Media 2007 was on music discovery: “how has the internet changed the process of music discovery for listeners.”

Panelists included Geoff Mayfield (Director of Charts and Senior Analyst, Billboard), Pinky Gonzales (Echo Music), and Ben Roe (RoeDeo Productions), as well as Bruce Warren (Assistant General Manager for Programming, WXPN) who ran the panel.

The panel started with a piece from “On the Media” about WBEZ’s decision to drop Jazz programming, and the fact that even many of the jazz aficionados they surveyed who admitted they didn’t actually listen to jazz on the radio.

This set the context for the conversation: what has replaced the radio as a mechanism for discovering new music?

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Wordpress as a gateway drug, and other miscellaneous notes

[I'm just going to keep adding to this one throughout the conference]

Gather.com’s new community, designed to create a national debate in preperation for the upcoming electrion: createdebate.gather.com

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Friday am update - according to the conference wiki (and this post on the conference blog), the sessions from the main hall are being webcast:

• Live Audio Stream (MP3)
• Live Video Stream (WMV)

Thanks to the StreamGuys!

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Brendan Greeley from Radio Open Source describes using WordPress as a kind of gateway drug.

Companies in the long term may need more flexibility or more community-based functionality that WordPress easily provides, but WordPress gets them a pretty signficant bump in the right direction.

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Earlier conversation this morning about user generated content- more about that later - lead me to this principle: become a user first, before you become a provider.

It ought to be like Covey’s fifth habit - Seek first to understand, and then to be understood. You shouldn’t try to create a blogging platform for your station, show, company, band, etc., unless you’ve spent at least some time reading blogs.

Before you go build another YouTube clone, make sure the business stakeholders funding and asking for the project have actually seen user contributed video and the features of several other UGC based sites.

Observe the community before participating in it.

This shouldn’t be a barrier to innovation, of course, but if you’re trying to “get a piece of the action” on some existing trend, make sure you understand it from the inside before you try to replicate it.

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One good measure of a CMS is how well the data in your CMS plays with other applications. How easy is it for you to produce new formats when they arise?

Should I burn my feeds?

There was a great session on Wednesday at the IMA Public Media 2007 conference on RSS, which included Rick Klau from FeedBurner.

I’ve been checking them out for a while now, and trying to decide whether I should “burn” my feeds.

Honestly, I’m not sure what’s holding me back, but I find myself reluctant to do so.

Is it just my “I want control” mentality, which says that handing my feeds over to a third party means I will somehow have less control?

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