Live and Local: you’ve heard it more times than you’ve watched Friend’s reruns. Those ridiculous promotions meetings and meetings with your PD about how to get the station to sound more Live and Local. What does that even mean? In a small market, where funds are as hard to come by as interns, the challenge of making your station sound “Live and Local,“ seems like a never ending uphill battle where you always lose. The only way I have figured out how to keep my GM from saying those dreaded words “We need to sound more ‘Live and Local,‘” is by answering the damn phone.
Answer the phone! This still seems to be the way that most GM’s and persons in charge find that a radio station sounds “live and local.” I’ll save the “how to get a listener to call me” blog post for another time, but while I recognize the challenges of getting a phone call in the first place, as a personality, why aren’t we taking more advantage of each golden opportunity, as few and far between as they come. So here are a few sure fire things that have worked for me in the studio.
When a listener does call, RECORD it! You have no idea what they are going to say, what they might want, how chatty they might be or what they might think about a particular topic.
Doesn’t matter how chatty your listener is, they are probably calling just to request a song, which will be extremely difficult to play that request soon unless it happens to be in power, or heavy rotation. That is why you SAVE the call. Just because a listener calls to only request a song, doesn’t mean you can’t use that phone call later in the show, or even later in the week. I’ve been known on slow show prep days to use phone calls that are months old!
Now that you have the listeners attention, remember, this is a golden opportunity to sound live and local. Keep them on the phone for as long as you can! Ask them anything. You’ve been show prepping, you know about the town. Ask her about how excited she is for spring because the new ice cream shop opened up around the corner, or ask her about the construction that makes traffic on 45/52 about 10x more horrific, or even ask her about her day. All of these questions could lead to other follow up phone calls!
You may think that there are enough ice cream shops in town, but adding a new one just makes you excited for warm weather and never having to eat the same flavor twice this summer. What’s the best ice cream in town? BAM! Now you’ve got a town wide debate that could cross over onto your social media platforms well after you’ve discussed it on the air.
The traffic sucks. What is the best back route to avoid that terrible construction? Now you’ve just connected someone in the know, with ALL OF YOUR LISTENERS! You have now just become a place people can turn to for great ideas and solutions to problems all of your neighbors are facing.
Asking about her day just makes her feel heard and understood. She’s not the only one who had a lousy Monday at work. Make her the voice of all your other loyal fans, who haven’t happened to call yet. The struggle is real, but that doesn’t mean any one of us should go through it alone.
A request is nice. A request is easy. But ask your listener about their life…and you’ve got a fan for, well… life! Plus, they’ll call again and you have instantly made your show sound LIVE (because you play the phone calls on the air) and LOCAL (because you ask them to talk about life in your town).
The beauty about getting one person to call in, is that other people hear them on the radio and it becomes engrained in their head that it is in fact OK to call and it is encouraged. Hopefully, within six months, your show is THE place to call and get heard and get on the air.
Lastly, make sure to THANK them for calling. Calling people on the phone is not fun, for anyone. Think about it, we live in a texting, FB messaging, tweeting, don’t look directly or speak directly to my face kind of world. So when some one decides to actively engage with you via old school methods like voice calling. THANK them for their time, because it is valuable, and they just made your show better without compensation. So thank them. Bonus points if you throw in the “Thanks for calling, and I’ll talk to you soon!” They’ll remember, and call you again. So Answer the damn phone already. (Mostly because you can't screen them in the studio, unless your studio has fancy equipment to do that.)
