Mobile Radio Simplified. Accessible. Relevant.

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.

Something surprising is about to occur, but I say it is right on schedule. Apple’s iPhone is going down a few pegs in the intrigue market and the app craze will quickly wash into a memory similar to playing pogs and listening to Sugar Ray.

Why will the app craze dissipate? Because the same thing has happened on your desktop already. Installed apps, for a variety of obvious practical reasons, have given way to web apps. Web apps are accessible from any computer. They don’t care what version your OS is. The installation step gives way to a much easier registration step. The configuration and data status information is 100% portable. Think of your email. Where would you be if you could not access it from the web? That’s right, stuck to one PC. How 2004 is that?

Now, with the recent emergence of Android and Palm Pre as competing smartphones to the iPhone, what do all touch smartphone users have in common? The webkit safari browser.. that’s what. iPhone web apps already have had a few advantages over their native app counterparts, but now that the safari browser will be the common denominator among all phones, the scales are going to tip dramatically. Web apps as a sub project will give way to the mobile web app being the core business model. Look how this new real estate application is built around this concept.

Also, in case you are skeptical about all this, Verizon, who has been the odd carrier out in the non-blackberry smartphone world is about to enter in with bang. Droid phones are due out before Christmas with the new Android 2.0 OS. They are also slated to carry the Palm Pre by January. You would not believe the amount of iPhone users who are ready to switch to a new phone only because of how much they hate AT&T.

What this means for radio, is new opportunity that maybe, just maybe, they might not pass by this time. Radio’s long-held media advantage of wider and simpler accessibility is being challenged again and again, but this time and through 2010, the shift will be felt more dramatically. We have been telling radio leaders to partner with us to head off the challenge and bring in new tools to lead in opportunity. Start adapting now, without abandoning your core. We share your ‘accessibility first’ principle, so let’s get moving. The future still marches on.

We are ready to help now by developing your mobile website assets simply by repurposing what you have now on your current website. We can work with your webmasters and engineers in a seamless manner to get a winning strategy working. There are lots of new possibilities for audio as well with a combination of web based, telephony based and mobile streaming tools for mobile phones.

We leave you with a quick video about how the fast and versatile Safari browser works at different speeds for the iPhone, Palm Pre and T-Mobile G1.

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.

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.

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.

Smart strategies for how to not only survive in this controversial recession but thrive are the focus of more and more people these days. When things are going relatively well in an industry, there is a natural resistance to trying anything new. This is self-evident. Why do things differently when we are profitable? When things get tougher, especially ahead of the curve in an economic downturn like they have for radio in 2008, the pressure grows. In radio’s case, against the advice of just about every radio consultant I have talked to, the industry got even more resistant to innovation as profit margins shrank and radio stocks lost 85% of their value. The reasoning was that all remaining resources had to be spent on core operations.

Now that the recession is fully upon us, and there is no bailout in sight for radio, it is coming down to a simple choice: Innovate or Die. This blog has been focused on the premise that radio must innovate by going mobile since its inception (of course CelleCast has a stake in this). Our message has been respectful, and will remain so, but now that the heat of circumstance is turned up so high, it is not enough for radio executives to simply act like they are listening, and it is not enough to just engage in a few initiatives that repackage the exact same product. The gauntlet to innovate WELL lies before us, and there is no excuse for having delegated this burden to the ‘digital guy’ or following the path of least resistance.

The good news is that the recession and even a good portion of the supplemental uncertainty that accompanies President Obama’s redefinition of the economy opens the door for innovation that didn’t even make sense a year ago. I wouldn’t say this if there was no historical precedent. When we look back at the great depression, we find that a host of enduring innovations emerged. Of course many also failed. What I want to do in this article is point out a few characteristics where we see a sweet intersection of opportunity between the recession, radio and new mobile media trends. Draw your own conclusions, and reach out to those that can help you adopt recession friendly innovations.

First of all, during a recession, you have to position yourself as the ‘value leader’. We see many companies already doing this. A recent frozen pizza commercial compares their product to delivered pizza as equivalent in quality for a fraction of the cost. It is not just a pricing war tactic, it is an appeal to the consumer to rethink the value equation in their pizza habits in a world where everyone is re-examining their overall buying habits. Brands that succeed during this time have to become part of this re-evaluation process today’s consumer is undertaking. Radio, since it already free, has to create value for its audience in terms other than cost. For talk radio specifically, value is found in helping people find new ways for their voice to be heard politically, socially, etc. Having them take turns calling in for a chance to get past a call screener to be on the air is not a good value proposition. Of course there are other ways to establish the value position for radio, the key is that in this space you need to stand out as a value leader, not just be one of many responding to the need. Look at what Ed Shultz is doing is doing in this space for new advertisers as an example.

Secondly, you have to stand out as a relevant voice who understands current trends, how to set trends, and how the recession is forcing people to re-evaluate their adoption of new trends. This recession in particular intersects a particular set of new media trends relevant to radio, namely: Portability; Personalization; User generated content (UGC); Shareable content; Social Media; 3G Mobile Services; Advanced interaction; On-demand time-shifting; and Free telephony. I believe the recession is already starting to affect the trend equation here in two key ways:

1. Watch for gadget hype to sharply decline. People will prefer to find ways for their existing gadgets to do the job. (yes, their cell phones and VoIP lines, and web browsers)
2. The value of time. Frivolity is already becoming less a result of happenstance, and more a product of deliberate choice. It would be easier of course to just say that people have less time to waste, but that isn’t exactly true. It is more polarized. Some people have less, some people have more (like while unemployed), but everyone has less time tolerance for waste in being pitched to. I think the new radio winners will be ones that position themselves as the best in content and ad targeting, giving the consumer higher control in what is heard.
3. Commonality of Access. Recessions, as evidenced by the reports in online relationship sites registration spikes, have an effect on our value of connectedness. Families generally pull together, and social circles of higher trust are the ones we shift back into. I believe this will cause people who can’t convince their high trust friends and family to get on Facebook to connect in new ways that are more accessible. This applies to direct social media tools as well as to broadcast, etc.

Thridly, you have to be agile. Even on a company cultural level, statements like, “We’ll take that under advisement in our next meeting”, and then not getting back to the person will become less of a forgivable act. Or saying, “I am about 150 emails behind right now”, like I heard from a prominent digital radio executive, is not going to produce a pass from the shareholders. The opportunities in innovation are indeed going to be exploited with or without your participation and investment. New entrepreneurs ready to meet the needs of the public can go directly to them with podcasting, webcasting and cellecasting, but how much better will it be for radio if the industry is in the lead instead of remaining branded as innovation-resistant?

Finally, and this is a very specific value intersection of talk radio during a recession, you have to find ways to lead in rallying people politically. Whatever your politics are, there is no denying the fact that people on all sides feel less informed about the substance of today’s debated topics, and more caught up in personality wars in the media environment. In one sense people are empowered to opine in written form all over the web, and now they can post video on YouTube and elsewhere. But what is radio doing to collect contemporaneous audio commentary from the people? What is radio doing to give people access to raw audio (like Rush’s CPAC speech) that is at the center of today’s dramatic news cycle? What is radio doing to provide audio content elements for the Twitter timeline? It is not that radio shows need to polarize people into partisan entrenchments. The rallying can actually be around letting ideas be shared and aired out so we can come into a place of real national unity, government transparency, scientific debate, and long awaited accountability. There is a new market for this that radio can meet, and we look forward to partnering with it.

We leave you with a CNBC video link on innovation that features Mel Karmizan. The people in this video series have much greater wisdom to offer than I can provide here, but I hope you gained from my specific ideas on how radio can emerge as a winner during these challenging times.

We wanted to do our part to help the wireless nation celebrate and share their thoughts on the inauguration. So, at the last minute(last Thursday) we created the Inaugural ALL CALL Cellecast as a way for the millions attending to have handy access to on demand radio for the mobile phone. Of course it works fine for those elsewhere, but the point was to make a program that suits people on the ground who don’t have smart phones, nor time to sit still and read. Having a radio is such a good idea in a place crowded to the gills, but who would carry another device?

Well the experiment worked pretty well. One of our partners, Jon Elliott from Air America jumped on board and gave us a couple updates to it and some on-air promotions. We got great feedback from a lot of people saying that if we had only had more time to prepare, it could have grown into a big hit. Well, it was a medium hit, and doing it spawned us putting up our own official twitter page, and getting lots of followers right away. We met some great people this way. More than I normally do through my personal twitter account.

We also tied new program updates and talkbacks to twitter in a stronger way, leading us to further explore the concept of the audio tweet. Micro-podcasting is not just smaller audio bytes, but audio responses and mini-reports tied to others in a meaningful way. Our talkback tool is a perfect fit for this. I will blog ore about this soon and what it means to radio’s evolution. Suffice it to say the concept already has legs as far as we are concerned.

We also made our system so we can empower field reporters to post full-fledged episodes from their phones with a simple push of a button. No need to have a special code.. All they have to do is leave a talkback just like everyone else, but just choose a different sending option based on their account being tied to a program partner. It works great too! Afi Scruggs from Cleveland brought a busload of schoolchildren to the inauguration and posted some cool reports in an audio journal style that will mean much to her and the parents on the trip. Also, Marianne from Mass reported well as she, like many there, tried to get a good view on the mall.

We look forward to developing these event based cellecasts even further in the new year, and always welcome your feedback.

Oh yeah.. why the picture of the cat? I know it is completely irrelevant to the post. We really would hate to think that businesses across the country would ever have to knock on the door of government to prosper. I just got off track while searching trends on twitter and discovered the Obamacon. Fun stuff.

There is a reason the local news channels go into full tilt aggrandizement mode when the bad weather hits. Here in the Pacific Northwest, we are having a rare sub freezing weather week, and our local channel 8 News has branded it “Arctic Blast 2008″. Not that I blame them. My wife being a teacher and my kid being a student, we were watching the news with unusual interest last night to make sure our school was indeed closed like most of the rest of them this morning.

This makes me think of one of the more inspired reasons why we started CelleCast, which is to make notifications much easier for schools, corporations and more in times like these. Instead of watching crawlers on TV screens, waiting for your name to show up, what if any organization could push that information to your phone in a reliable manner? Well in 2009, watch for VMCast service to rollout, which will allow any group with a list of phone numbers to send important messages to their members. We think churches, schools and more organizations will turn to this service we offer, which will save consumers a lot of time and fuel, helping them to avoid wasted drives and more. The consumer will be in control of how the message is delivered.

Lately, I have been talking to our radio partners about our plans for 09, and although I cannot expound on them in detail, let’s just say that our plans have great confluence within the emerging new mobile app-scape.

Take a look at this post about Android apps and consider yourself put on notice that the future of mobile radio is not controlled by any means within the domain of Apple. No, not only is Android emerging, but we’ll also see Blackberrys and Intel MID devices competing to do pretty much the same thing.

Watch for us to be ready with radio apps for all devices, with the already developed phone app making cellecasting a compelling solution for every last phone on the planet for accessing news, talk, sports and all spoken word radio.

Since we first started to see the trends come together calling for the need for radio to go mobile, and to get “TiVO-ized”, we have been fighting for more than the success of our particular solution, but for the culture of radio and media in general to embrace new platform innovation. In the last two years, the big question was whether radio should fortify against new media innovations, or whether it should stake some claims in the new media frontier. The option of leading the culture into the future was not even discussed, which is a big reason radio has a perception problem to overcome.

Well, as predicted, we now see that any argument for taking the fortress approach is rapidly losing supporters, and in it’s place, radio leaders are beginning to look into complementary platforms as a way to future-proof the viability of radio. Actually, I state the latter not because we are seeing major movement in that direction as of yet, but because the language is shifting away from last years untenable arguments. For one thing, the fears of cannibalization are rapidly dissipating, as new digital distribution experiments are not drawing the ire of affiliates as first cautioned. Now, I don’t refer to radio’s slow turning toward new ideas as a slam in any way. Regular readers here know that our respect as newcomers to the radio industry is profound, and we have been outspoken against what I like to call the new media detractors of radio, who on one day slam radio as an industry, and on the other hold out their hand and expect to cut deals with networks in hopes of an eventual supplanting. This “podcast expo counter-culture” truly only deserves to remain in radio’s giant shadow.

But how will the radio industry venture into the new without diminishing it’s successful core position in the minds of the consumer? To that we provide a carefully considered Platform Diversity Strategy, that first protects radio’s core content assets, assures against cannibalization, and most of all, expands branding and monetization. We are basically fighting for, and appealing to our friends in the industry to do, is to be deliberate and strategic about new platform opportunities. Doing so will be well perceived by radio consumers, shareholders, vendors and observers alike. Good leadership points will be scored as well.

So, to the point of this post, the prediction of an near term expansion of media platform diversity. I just found an article today about the work television leaders are doing, titled: Network Execs Wrestle With Multiplatform, Time-Shifted World. The compelling quote within it that should bring additional comfort to us in radio is…

“It’s early days still, but the good news is that multiplatform exploitation seems to expanding audience, not cannibalizing it,” said NBCU Digital Distribution president J.B. Perrette.

When this kicks in, it will kick in quickly. Together we can lead this change, or tomorrow you can follow it. Let’s build alliances to help radio rebound well in 2009, not by reacting, but in leading.

Andrew.