Tommy Kramer Coaching Tip #288 – What a fan fight at a football game has to do with you

On Sunday, December 2nd, 2018, two fans got into a fight in the stands of a Pittsburgh Steelers game.  One guy said something.  The guy he said it to tellingly removed his cap, then head-butted the first guy.  Guy #1’s girlfriend and several other fans got involved.

Not exactly untypical, but as I read about it (and watched the video), something the writer of the article, Jay Busbee said, really caught my attention:

“This is why nobody brings kids to football games anymore, and why nobody under the age of 40 spends any time on Facebook.  They know enough not to get caught up in whatever messes the ‘olds’ are creating.”

The “olds?”  Wow.

Now whether you agree with the Facebook statement or not, it’s still something to consider.  I’ve been coaching people on how TO use – and now NOT to use – Facebook postings for years.  The gist of it is that if a comment is relevant to something top of mind TODAY, you might want to use it, but random postings are virtually useless, because Relevance is King when it comes to Content.

I’m not saying your listeners don’t still use Facebook, but we should always be looking at the next big thing.  Because habitually when radio does that, they find out that it’s already here.

Frost Advisory #435 – My GPS Is Broken!

“My GPS is broken,” my friend Mike said to me.  “It only tells me where I’ve been, not where I’m going.”

The ratings arrive.  Our emotions react.  There is running up and down the hallways and gnashing of teeth!  DO SOMETHING!

I’ve heard some pretty wacky ways that people have reacted to ratings.  Moving the deejays’ shifts around, playing music from another format, and implementing no talk segues to sound more generic.  I’M NOT MAKING THIS UP, as Dave Barry would say.

Making programming decisions based solely upon ratings is like driving with a GPS that shows only where you’ve been.

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Frost Advisory #434 – We Become What We Focus On

“It is what you make it,” was my dad’s advice at various milestones in my life.

There was a time in my career when I considered a radio station no more than the sum total of the things that it did; the deejays, the music, the jingles, the contests.  Like a sport being nothing more than the players, the uniforms, the goal posts or bases.

If that were true, then places like Cooperstown, New York, or Canton, Ohio, wouldn’t be shrines since they are not even home to the big league players and teams they eulogize.

It’s hard to remember how we thought about coffee before Starbucks, or personal computers and digital devices before Apple.  What they focused on changed the way we think of them.

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