Wednesday, March 4, 2009

College Radio and Social Networking

So, I'm off to New York City tomorrow to attend the Intercollegiate Broadcasting System (IBS) College Radio Conference. There will be lots of presentations and panels about the ins and outs of college, high school, community and low power radio. I'll be speaking on a panel about "Social Networking and College Radio" and would love to get your ideas about how your station is using social networking tools.

Does your station have pages on MySpace, Facebook, You Tube, imeem, Flickr, or others. Do you have a Twitter account? And who updates these pages and how often?

Do you think social networking tools like these are the best way to stay in touch with listeners and fans of your stations? Do you do in-person events too?

I also wonder if you take the time to monitor what people are saying about you in all of these venues? I just did a quick Twitter search for my station KFJC and saw some nice words from listeners digging the music. I also found some fun gossip when I searched for mentions of another station. And, as you might guess, plenty of people are posting tweets when they are annoyed by something that a DJ is saying or playing.

And, finally, is there a social network for college radio? There are various college radio groups out there (CMJ, IBS, CBI), regional college radio projects (Philadelphia College Radio Collective), and the private college radio message board Medium Rotation. Do you find a sense of community from any of these groups? Or are there others that I missed?

I'll definitely be recapping the conference and will let you know what everyone shares about social networking, but it would be cool to get a few ideas running here as well.

2 comments:

diane. said...

awesome...congratulations! can't wait to hear your recap.

never even knew about the twitter search feature, so thanks for that too!

kimbav said...

As a woman in her early 50's who used to always have a 2nd job at record store in order to support her music jones, I was really happy to hear that there was another gal out there who was passionate about college radio! Where else can we find out about new music when we're not riffling through the bins every day?

I'm going to be reading your posts from now on!