Mobile Radio Simplified. Accessible. Relevant.

Relating to radio, the departure of David Rehr as CEO of the NAB will likely be a welcome change.
The industry has been under a lot of strain during his tenure, and although most of what he has faced was outside of his control, the parades he has stepped in front of to lead have been disappointments. Radio Heard Here has been castigated as a flat and lifeless appeal. Radio 2020, even with its laudable tenets which we have offered to help them achieve, were correctly interpreted in action as mostly a shill for HD Radio. The HD Radio parade itself has drifted off onto a country road to nowhere.

I like David and wish him the best, but for the sake of the radio industry, I hope we quickly get someone who will actually sit down with innovators, syndicators and stations together to create solutions that can bring the industry truly in line with the times, and defy the criticism of radio’s detractors.

Kudos to those who saw it coming 6 months ago, and let there be mercy on an industry in genuine transition.

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.

Good to see this line up from eMarketer on a pretty thorough variety of sources in which people that know the internet use to get informed.

31% use talk radio and 6% use mobile media.

That may seem like a small share, but nothing even gets 70%! This is the year where it all turns toward mobile. We believe the best interfaces will be the most intuitive, personal and portable. The iPhone is bearing that out, but they are just the beginning. We’ll be building radio apps for Android and the iPhone and more as the year progresses.

The shift is not just technologically based, but cultural as well. 2009 is going to be a very political year, with new voices striving to be heard and more people seeking narrow channels of on demand media to participate in. We are about to see convergence not just around what is possible, but what is practical for a people striving to survive as well as lead in this trying time in our history.

I just posted a comment on RRW’s great post on 10 changes expected in Social Media for 2009 and realized my list of 6 needs to be on our own blog.

IT IS ALL ABOUT THE CONTEXT OF RADIO AS FAR AS WE ARE CONCERNED…

Well… having attended more than a few conferences on social media, blogging and “what’s next”, as well as being a daily social media networker, my take is that in 2009, we’ll start to see the next group of early adopters from the mainstream and more traditional media begin to use social media.

This will produce the following:

1) Those that successfully experimented first to help extend their brand, like Hugh Hewitt’s twitter hash #hhrs, will see others flood in and withdraw somewhat, as the buzz subsides

2) Most of the newer adopters will bounce right off like they have been doing all along so far, as they are too out of touch with adapting to the new demographics of radio

3) Twitter, FF and FB will be gateways back to radio’s core audio content, rather than a distracting parallel activity.

4) Social media will be more about Mobile 2.0, and radio, if the leaders pay attention, will be able to score a win for a change!

5) The conversation leaders will again be those from other media that have finally come around and decided to really engage the listeners into the conversation. The value of UGC will max out at about 30% of the overall content, and UGC-based portals will lose a lot of their value.

6) The things talked about on Twitter and other such services will thankfully be less inward focussed, and more about the substantive contributions of the participants. Right now, it is such a freaking echo chamber of discussion about how everyone is doing social media, but really it is the few who promote media change that account for 90% of the activity.

More things come to mind now that I am posting this on our blog, and rereading the RRW post that triggered it. Namely, like we have been saying all along, talk radio as a form of media is a pioneer in interactivity and social engagement. Once the listeners were invited to call in and be part of the program, the conversational aspect of media jumped way ahead of the “letters to the editor” model. Now, radio needs to harness what is happening on Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed and realize that the audience can form a meaningful audio based community about the audio of the show.

But this is not going to happen from social media geeks pushing people in that direction. Radio programs need to work on ways to engage their audiences and nudge them into the new century as well as pick up new fans from younger demographics. Social media is radio’s strength, not weakness.. at least for a few more months.

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.

MocoNews reported today on ESPN’s release that shows the explosion of traffic to their mobile sites since last year. I imagine this will double again in 2009 when people can go right from mobile college team sites over to a live or delayed audio stream of the games. If DVR adoption is more than a passing fad (of course it is) then any investor would be dim-witted to pass up an opportunity to be part of this shift.

College football increase mobile traffic to ESPN: ESPN (NYSE: DIS) said today that traffic to college football content on ESPN’s mobile web exploded during the college football regular season, with 59.9 million visits and 639 million page views, representing 185 percent growth compared to last year.

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.