Mobile Radio Simplified. Accessible. Relevant.

Against a lot of advice as well as my own desire to make CelleCast a neutral media channel where different views can be presented, I want to speak up in open advocacy for the people of Iran in their struggle for liberty. And I want to relate it to the theme of the Fourth Speaker in our presentation of the power of mobile media. First of all, let me say that what I see going on is extraordinary. I am the kind of guy that gets all choked up when I read and hear stories relating to our own American revolution. The risk, the bravery, the principles at work in the character of our founding generation here in America stirs emotions like little else. Quite often I wonder and actively seek out modern manifestations of that same type of character playing out today. Unfortunately it is hard to find in our own country anymore. Most Americans today are under a spell of complacency/entitlement/fatalism, accepting a continually growing corporate state. Something our founders would not tolerate. That we would endure intense hardship to make the world a better place for future generations is a vanishing virtue here. But in Iran, the hardship of the people under the shadow of the clerics oppression has brought out that virtue. Back in June when the protests began, I expected the resistance to subside within two weeks. Like many, I turned my twitter icon green and in August turned it back. Then I kept hearing more reports. Resistance from a people with little resource, no weapons, and an unsympathetic US state department. What is this? What drives them? How can we help them? Could we not do for them what the French did for us 235 years ago? I heard amazing stories. I heard that Iranian people from all generations were hitting the streets at risk of arrest, property confiscation, and being cannon fodder for the Basij. Older Iranians would actually make themselves human shields to protect the younger ones from being shot (opposite of what terrorists do in FORCING others to shield them). The protests have continued into a near permanent state now, and I am getting emotional over this every time I think about it. Our twitter icon has been a permanent green for a while now, with our call-to-action number on it. But what else can we do?

One of our founding principles of CelleCast is to empower people with a way to speak out in situations where tyrants suppress the the voice of the people. What a perfect example we have in Iran. Iran has an educated population and a culture that predates muslim extremism, yet a completely ideological islamic government that controls the media and actively suppresses any and all dissent. Unless you have been completely asleep politically for the last year, you are aware that the people there are using social media to get around these barriers. This is critical. No dictatorial authority can stand without control of the media, and the new social media revolution is all about circumventing top down control and getting raw content out from the shadows where people can consume and process it themselves. Blogs are getting out written accounts, bypassing newspapers. Cell phones and digital cameras are getting out video accounts, bypassing television. AND cellecasting CAN get out audio accounts, bypassing radio.

Why CelleCasting?
The value of cellecasting for the people of Iran is that they create audio reports from any phone, which get published immediately and can be plugged into any site and copied by various bloggers and media outlets. Users simply need to be able to dial a phone number to publish what they witness. This empowers EVERYBODY. During peaks in the demonstrations, the regime blocks the internet, cell data channels and routinely confiscates recording equipment from people in the streets. With cellecasting, every last phone is a recording device! Creative workarounds have been deployed to protect protesters identities as they are exposed as active users of social media. What better protection could there be for the leaders than every last person being seen as equally dangerous? I am Spartacus!!! The biggest barrier we have right now in making this start to flow is awareness.

Talk Radio Opportunity
Just about any organization out there with a conscience (with the exception of the Obama administration) has at least started to openly condemn the violent, oppressive crackdowns in Iran. Once our own president finally gets involved, and starts working to bring more pressure on the government there, lots of play-it-safe people will start to come out of the woodwork and stand with us for the people. Please don’t wait til then. Please go on the air and help us promote the power of cellecasting to the people of Iran. Tell your listeners to send cellegrams to their families in Iran.. to email them our dedicated number, and record an episode for the effort that we can post on our audio tweet program.

When we started CelleCast in 2007 we knew right from the beginning that there were two essentials to making mobile phone radio work for the industry. Not that these two stood alone, but we felt, and have been thoroughly vindicated, that without these there isn’t a rats chance in a beauty contest of success in bringing a significant radio audience over to new mobile devices. Once I cover these two self-evident points for reference sake, I’ll get into how the train got derailed for all of us by those who ignored them.

Behold:

1. Universal Simplicity

Radio works because it is easy, and will remain ubiquitous until it gets complicated (hence, the unintended consequences with satellite and HD). You turn it on, you scan through stations, you find what you want to listen to, and make presets of your favorites so you can avoid commercials, etc. Not only is it second nature for you, you also expect it to be easy for everyone else around you. The universality of people who are comfortable with it makes the simplicity means something. Even complex things are made simple on an individual basis with acclimation and repetition, but the list of things in media life that everyone ‘gets’ is still limited to the things that have been around a while. Without this, the media is not sharable. There is no community without sharing. Hearing radio over a mobile phone is sharable only to a very small niche community when an iPhone app is required. Hearing it only when an sms text message is received also creates limitations that violates the Universal Simplicity standard. This is something radio people get that cloistered new media geeks tend to dismiss.

2. On Demand, Personalized Delivery

This is an essential because frankly there is no reason for anyone (producers and listeners alike) to break from the status quo unless, in addition to the simplicity standard above, other compelling benefits cannot be ignored. What new media brings to the table for radio going mobile is portability and personalization. These are the same qualities mobile breakthroughs also bring to apps and the mobile web, BTW. When listeners can truly just push a button and hear a personalized playlist of programs auto-queued to play only the most recent unheard episodes, then the listener is in control in a similar manner that they are also getting accustomed to with DVR’s for TV.

Falling Short

Now, hopefully you are aware of the essential value of each of the above as pre-requisites toward a wonderful revolution in mobile radio. So why are we not much closer to seeing this transformation toward personalized radio come to pass? If you think it is the technology, you would be incorrect. I submit to you that it is actually the misstep of technology misapplied. Other ‘features’ (aka shiny objects) were regarded more highly than the core essentials of simplicity and personalization. Because too few have sought to hold to these as standards, what has suffered unfairly is the perceived viability of mobile radio personalization itself. Now, I am tired of that. Not just as a believer/innovator seeking to equip the industry for positive change, but also personally after seeing inferior tools dressed up with confusing rhetoric misguide people. Because of this, the promise of radio personalization has been broken, and the reality of it, postponed.

Cases in point: Foneshow.com and lexy.com. I am not in the habit of calling out competitors like this, and I have been able to resist the temptation up to this point. What breaks my silence now is the dread that the ideas behind what all three of us and others have been promising would be passed by due to poor representation. To see these venture funded companies, who have clearly undermined both the simplicity and on-demand standards they falsely claimed to champion, fade in listenership while claiming to represent mobile radio on-demand, is a tragedy to me. To be funded and not to have transformed the industry is an abject failure. I’ll give them credit for getting funded while we have yet to be in that club, but from my perspective today, I’m glad the failed examples are clearing out to make space. As long as the credibility of personalized radio can avoid too much damage now, we’ll be able to make our case while waiting for the right investor to emerge.

How have they violated the core essentials? To put it simply, they claim too much control over the experience, destroying simplicity. (I’ll give lexy more credit for putting their call-in number back on their pages, but for a while it was gone.) The approach they and others have taken is that the user would be enamored with text messaging to the point of accepting it as a gateway to access the audio. When we saw that as the core of Foneshow’s model in 2007, we didn’t even want to list them as a competitor on a product level. If you are making demands of the listener where they don’t get the audio without waiting for a text, then how is that on-demand? Who is making the demands? Imagine if your AM radio was similarly anal. You turn on the power and before any sound comes out, you have to enter your mobile phone number and wait for a screen to come up where you have to tap on a blue 10 digit number. Would you consider that consumer friendly or even good engineering?

One deal-breaking major fallout from this approach is that the content they are aggregating and delivering comes from radio shows that have no decent way to easily promote their content via the call-in based medium. We give each program partner a unique direct dial access number and program page. They can link to us from their site and get more SEO value. They can promote their cellecast number on the air and get direct call ins to THEIR show with ZERO barriers. Now, this is not a competitive pitch here although it sounds like it. To me, it is just bottom line common sense to make it easy for your partners to promote themselves in the context of universal simplicity in personalized mobile radio.

The bottom line problem here is that the biggest barrier for mobile phone radio is already the mainstream perception that it is too complicated to bother with. It doesn’t help that many of the companies trying to solve the perception problem are actually contributing to it. They just make it harder for those of us trying to help.

In the next installment, I will deal with some of the many promising possibilities for on-demand, personalized mobile radio. The standards above are not constraining, but in the long run, the key to radio liberalization and audio-based social media.

Personalization of media programming lies at the heart of the new media revolution. If it was only about the explosion of variety in content and format choices, the net result of all this change would just be about how overwhelmed we are with all the new choices in content and formats. Ok, so we are largely overwhelmed, so what does that mean? It means we are still in the beginning of the revolution. We are just beginning to consider how much control we as individuals need over our media consumption, versus how much we are happy to continue to hand over to media producers.

I am finally starting a new series of posts about media personalization as it relates to Talk radio. It’s about time. What finally got me started on this after I have threatened to start on the topic for a while now, was the kind invitation from Al Peterson to publish my thoughts first for his newsletter. So my first installment here on the Fourth Speaker is a reprint of Al’s weekly Newsletter, which you should subscribe to.
 
 

Radio Personalization - Possible with Mobile, but in demand?

With the incredibly fast pace of change occurring in the world of technology and media today, it is necessary to take a look not only at cumulative data on where today’s radio audience is and is going, but also to reflect on some of the ‘what ifs’, and ‘why nots’ and ’why not yets’ surrounding the changes. The level of intrigue surrounding new media is equaled only by the claims many on my side of the table have made. As far as those claims go, and speaking for the sane faction on “my side of the table” (although the fact that a ‘table’ even exists is a hindrance for the radio industry), I want to apologize for those who have predicted the demise of radio by 2010. They don’t speak for even a quarter of us who have been approaching the industry with ideas and products we believe will help radio’s staying power through the personal media revolution.

Today I want to speak specifically about the one item of change I have been pushing for and am willing to admit I have been partially wrong about. That is, the listeners personal quest for programming personalization. In short, my conclusion is that it is not as big a deal to them (yet) as I had hoped. It is easy for technology innovators to make the leap from possibility to market demand, and we should be encouraged to continue making these leaps in that that is our strength — to see a possible future and place bets on it coming to pass. The pay-off is worth the risk. One key facet of my calculated bet with CelleCast is that some listeners, if given the chance, would prefer to be able to queue up their favorite talk radio programs into a playlist and always have the freshest episodes from each ready to auto-play when convenient. I never meant for this bet on an emerging demand for convenience to call into question the value of program directors, stations and streams, but in this age of media disruption, new technologies are often seen more as a challenge to the way things have always been done, versus by the merits they bring to the marketplace. I submit to you that we can only win by looking at both sides of the equation, or to put it in political strategic terms: Contribute to both campaigns, just in case the other guy wins. Therefore, with all that said so you know my heart is for the industry is in the right place, allow me to share my observations to date in my quest to promote my own vision for disruption.

One of the ways I have explained the idea of cellecasting to both customers and producers is that the listener becomes their own program director, deciding for themselves exactly what mix of programming they want to consume, even whether they want to tolerate commercial interruption or not. The idea that they would want to do this has a solid basis. DVR’s (TiVO) have become mainstream practice for television consumption, giving people near total control of how they consume TV. We all know what MP3 players, file sharing and Pandora are doing to music side of radio, allowing listeners to personalize consumption, eliminate commercials and tap into the new inventory called the long tail. I have believed and still believe that talk radio listeners will at some point do the same, whether we like it or not. However, radio in its broadcast form, now having to exist among alternatives not previously available, is finding resiliency and learning to articulate its staying power in a changing environment. Paraphrasing Dave Van Dyke, who watches listener trends like no other: “Listenership in some segments of younger demographics is still strong, as more people are using radio as a way to discover new artists, ideas, etc.”. What I am seeing here is a welcome sign. Radio is declaring its particular strengths and demonstrating its staying power against a host of unproven radio alternatives/derivatives declaring themselves the new reality. The broader observation I have come away with at this juncture is that although self-service, personalized media alternatives still deserve ongoing attention, investment and market testing, there is a growing awareness that consumers are happy to let others (PD’s) program their media consumption for them, even with an alternatives in the palm of their hand.

The other important observation I have made in this tumultuous year, is where radio sits on the personalization landscape versus other forms of media. What we are finding is that radio, possibly through no fault of its own, is likely to be near or at the bottom of the list in demand for personalization. In terms of talk, one of my key advisors always reminds me that the Rush Limbaugh you turn on at midday is not all that different in content from the Hannity that follows immediately. No need to personalize if roughly the same content is ubiquitous. But the bigger reason for radio falling behind video and print is that radio is most naturally today’s background media. Personalization requires attention. Radio is perfect for when you are driving or otherwise multi-tasking. Video and print on the other hand, demand visual focus and thus foster a thirst for personalization. Plus, they are more conducive to hyperlinks.

Conclusion: When the demand for personalization in radio comes, let’s be ready.

I am watching a video from http://bb2009.uscannenberg.org/ that cuts off early and has no scrubber, so take my frustration into account as you read this.

Mobile Voices Part 1
A case study in new media beyond broadcast, the Mobile Voices project empowers first generation immigrants in Los Angeles to publish multimedia stories about their lives and communities directly from mobile phones. This panel will explore questions of media production through demonstrations of the Mobile Voices project by some of its participants.

Nothing wrong with the projects goals, but the net affect of these kinds of schemes is to ride on the wave of mobile technology seeming to create a new practical application for it, but in reality, they are simply using the public interest in mobile technology to draw attention to their cause. The way they are doing this simply does not scale. If they wanted it to scale, they would contact us and use our Field reporter toolset and create an audio community on the spot that could be pointed to, listened to, added to, etc.

Looks like there was some grant money that simply needed to be spent. Go USC!

In all seriousness, there is a real need to bridge the gap between capability and acceptance of mobile storytelling, and I can certainly report on how it has gone for us in enabling event-based cell phone citizen journalism. Currently, the lifecycle of these kinds of deals is very short. When we quickly put ours together for the Obama inauguration and the April 15th Tea Parties, there was tremendous interest but little follow-through. The practical tools for enabling citizen journalists to contribute is all there on our website, but without practical application of the technology from social organizers, the whole situation feels like an awkward junior high dance where we really want to dance and don’t mind saying so, but those who can use the service already have a well funded entourage in tow that has keeping appearances at the top of their priorities. Show me the platform! Where are the stories?

Now, I would still love to dance with USC and other organizations, but at this point of seeing way too much posturing in the various industries we have tried to work with, simply calling them out like this appears to be the next best approach. I could be wrong and we were simply not findable amidst a sea of choices or the desire for video and pictures nullifies our otherwise highly elegant, easy to use, audio only solution. But it certainly seems to me that dialoging with a young, hungry and community minded startup like CelleCast is a highly effective way to move forward in mainstreaming audio social media. everyone has a story, and we want to continue to empower people to tell it right over thier phones, have it publish immediately on a branded project program page, as well as spread via Twitter. All the parts are there.

Always open to feedback,

Andrew Deal

I am inspired to throw in a quick note today after watching this video on Mark Ramsey’s blog about what agencies think about radio today.

A couple of the points I especially liked were the references to windshield brands and the effective opportunities ahead as radio goes interactive. We have been looking at developing local advertising at this stage and proving this concept as valuable. National initiatives for large scale deployment have been a tough road, but we think we can get more marketing interest thrrough local tests like this.

More information to come. Contact me to discuss what we can do now for your brand in a local market.

As phones get smarter, they are inevitably going to overcome the propensity toward being proprietary in what they deliver. In short, standards are better.

So if you have a blackberry and want to access the best variety in personalized radio on demand on your phone, it is better to choose a service that also works well on iPhones, Android, razr’s and everything else. Why? Services that are accessible to all are more like real radio in that they are more promotable by the radio industry, which leads to better support, format compliance and more.

Now, the way mobile application providers like us achieve this is to make our mobile apps web based. This makes it easy for you to obtain access to the shows over a familiar interface, whether you have an icon to click on, or whether you just type CELLECAST.COM into your phones browser and bookmark it.

Once you do this, you will be able to access and interact with over 50 programs in our network via direct dial, build a playlist, monitor what is fresh to you, and track your usage.

Give it a shot and let us know how it behaves in your Blackberry. We have ben hearing good things so far!

Really nice events and milestones are coming and going quickly these days, and the blog is suffering when things get busy. Twittering has also been a fine alternative for getting the word out on events and such. You can and should always get the latest here:
http://twitter.com/cellecast

But here are the recent highlights you should know about…

Our quasi-hidden little demo page now says…

CelleCast Partner Dev created this field report in preparation for 5 minute pitch for tonight. Imagine the ways cellecasting can change the way you think about audio media.
I’ll be giving a live plug for CelleCast in the next hour, and I’ll let the tool itself do the talking, asking…
When was the last time you heard a startup pitch where every last person in the room was able to take a device out of their pocket and immediately use the product?

I was interviewed yesterday on Sun’s BTR show called Socially Speaking. It went for a while and we got pretty deep into the uses of cellecasting for business as well as for radio. I got into the value comparison of current vs live, which is something i want to expand upon soon.

Finally, I got a write up in Radio and Records recently which was excellent. If you got a copy, please read it and let me know what you thought of it.

Thanks.

Although not overtly political, our blog is all about our efforts in enabling passionate voices that are crying out to reach people in new and exciting ways. Therefore, with all the Tea Party business going on and the rising groundswell of a new protesting generation, we feel it is a good time to introduce the new CelleCast citizen reporting tools we have been working on this year. The Tea Party movement is young and full of new passionate voices looking for ways to empower ordinary people to speak their mind and be heard.

Largely dismissed by the mainstream media, this movement is organizing mostly online through Twitter, Facebook and new video sites like PJTV. Talk Radio is playing a strong role as well, and altogether, there will be over 500 Tea Party protest rallies tomorrow nationwide. The need for tools that can go into the hands of people and turn them into reporters as well as simply giving them a way to vent is obvious. Talk Radio can only receive one screened caller at a time, and by my estimation, there are thousands more than don’t just want to blog or write tweets, etc. They want to speak. They want to be heard, and there is a heightened sense of frustration that they are being ignored by a disconnected elite class at the top.

Enter CelleCast.

Starting tomorrow, what we specifically have to offer is the ability for people standing in the crowd to be able to call in and record field reports on what they are seeing happen at their local Tea Party. We looked for a good partner to work with in this effort, and discovered that Pajamas Media was making headway in its call for citizen reporters. Well it was natural, and it was overnight, but we joined forces with them to enable their still growing list of hundreds of citizen reporters to post field reports using their cell phone. Check out the Tea Party Coverage Program on CelleCast.

Anyone from around the country will be able to hear the reports after a basic screening, and the best will be included on Pajamas Media comprehensive coverage. People calling in can also hear the reports and post audio comments to them as Talkbacks, which is similar to posting a comment on a blog post. All opinions are welcome. The posts will update various Twitter statii as well, making for a sort of audio petition ideally, pushed out in real time, but also retrievable and sharable in various ways. We are hoping the CelleCast contribution will help make a difference in terms of the people being heard, and that is reward enough. We are not taking sponsors for this program for tomorrow, as we feel that this is our chance to contribute to increasing the national dialog.

It is likely you have never called your House or Senate representatives before. One reason I believe you haven’t is you feel the call will likely be wasted on an intern answering who just looks for a category to drop your message into. Who knows if your opinion really even gets recorded at all?

To that end I suggest a whole new way of getting your voice heard.. not only by your representative, but by anyone else who you care to share it with. CelleCast Talkbacks create a permanent, subject sortable audio petition opportunity with each and every call. Since our listeners are already on the phone enjoying their own personalized radio playlist of news, talk and information, the ease of contributing is as familiar as pressing 3.

We believe we are at the beginning of a new movement of citizen empowerment in this country, and that this tool will help put passionate audio petitioning and citizen journalism into the palm of everyone’s hand.

Where will your Talkback’s go?
- To your Twitter status. (which can then forward to your Facebook status and FriendFeed)
- To your CelleCast profile page.
- To the CelleCast program page. (pending moderation)
- To government officials for particular petition programs coming soon on CelleCast.

We have more information on how to set up your CelleCast account with Twitter for audio tweets, with an additional section taking it a step further and becoming a field reporter. Check it out and enjoy.

So give your fingers a break and give your soul some real venting release with a Talkback today.

## End of Pitch ##

That is a phrase I have been using for a while and hearing as well from others in this space. I think it is important however to clarify the statement. It is easy to say in the way a politician says everything they say.. to get a majority of people to nod their heads. The full truth however is that Social Media has come to represent a collection of changes in media of which Radio’s early contribution represents just one aspect. The three legs of the stool are: User Generated Content (UGC) publishable and in response to other posts, media sourced from the many vs elite pros, and media sources organized in a personalized manner by the consumer. Unless I am missing something, that covers it. Of course to have any viability at all, these three have to work to support a living community, or else it is just lifeless academics.

I am not sure how others would break it down into components or whether they would even see the need to do so. To me the need arises when we begin to see just about any new innovation in media, or old as demonstrated by my headline, claim to be social media. Not unlike the term “radio”, “social media” is also beginning to suffer definition fatigue from the thousands of companies seeking authorship and/or leadership in this new landscape. Having a text messaging campaign where people reply to win a prize is not social media.

The more I think about it, to have pure social media, you need all three legs. Radio, as a step beyond newspapers’ letters to the editor, provided the first realtime feedback mechanism (UGC). With the aid of the ubiquitous and familiar telephone, talk radio hosts could pipe in the voices of select audience members and channel that back to the audience through the broadcast. These call in participants represented the whole audience to a degree, turning the monologue into a conversation. The second component where the audience voices self-published in their own right was not tenable. The third component of personalized organization of participant media — not applicable.

With the web came the ability and the need to have all three. Forums, Blogs, Facebook, You Tube and Twitter all have the open feedback mechanisms as a core components, and should pay tribute to some degree to radio for pioneering that into our media lifestyle. The second social media leg of sourcing from everyone is what is coming into more focus these days with Blogs, You Tube, Twitter, Facebook, and for radio, BlogTalk Radio. Now everyone can be a publisher. Whether we should be or not helps explain to some degree why Twitter is a rising star right now… Who has time to publish more than a quick snippet of information at a time anymore? And thirdly, since information is being produced on such adn expanded many-to-many scale, social media can’t exist sustainably without tools like RSS, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Friendfeed and others to help each of us on the consumer end of it all to organize the information from the people we want to hear from.

Now, with all that mostly self-evident stuff said, that doesn’t mean that I am a purist measuring all new social media innovations with a three part litmus test. There is a lot to be said for the majority of our media consumption to be entrusted to the professionals. My friends are good sources for where to meet for dinner and “what are you doing?” Lou Dobbs and other talk hosts are a better source for information on what I need to hold my elected officials accountable on. The local station is the best source for local news traffic and weather.

So the thing that really interests me and motivates me to write this post is.. where is the sweet spot between the social and professional sourcing of media? This second leg and the role of todays talk radio host is the big issue for us and our readers here. I believe this is where it is time not to follow but to lead. Take the 1-2 weeks to accept the 1st and 3rd components as a critical part of the future of all media, and spend the next few months actually getting strategic about it. As a show host, the second leg issue requires a personal grappling with the way you lead conversation, and the kind of brand your show will have. I decided a long time ago that our network would showcase the professionals vs the DIY crowd, but that our hosts in order to remain viable would need to encourage even more audience participation. If you are ignoring social media because you already have a big audience, that will only last a few more glorious years. What you need to do is to give your audience a voice, but still be the conversation leader. These are not just my ideas, but the convictions on which I have built CelleCast, making it program oriented, but also interactive and participatory for the audience with Talkbacks, CelleGrams and Audio Tweets. I look forward to combining these ideas with yours as we work with more stations this year.