The great ones make it look so easy.
While watching the recent Masters tournament my wife turned to me and said, “He looks like you.” She’s trying to give my golf game some much needed inspiration by pointing out the resemblance between Tiger Woods’ golf swing and mine. Yeah, right!
Continue readingIn the last tip, I referred to basketball coaching legend John Wooden’s “Pyramid of Success” – something you should read, if you haven’t already done so.
Here’s another prime tenet of his teaching: Team Spirit. About that, he says “The star of the team is the team. ‘We’ supercedes ‘me.'”
So ask yourself this: When’s the last time you even MENTIONED someone else on your station? And even if you did, did you offer any real insight as to why I should listen?
I arrived at Easter Sunday church during a torrential Florida downpour. Streets were flooding and the church parking lot looked like it could host a water ski tournament.
As I jumped out of my car and headed for the church building I was greeted by a friendly young man in rain gear carrying an umbrella. He greeted me with a paradoxical sunny disposition and walked me from my car to the covered walk way. He then ran off to greet the next apprehensive still-dry visitor.
Continue readingThis tip is for music stations.
If you don’t know who John Wooden is, you’re probably not a basketball fan. Wooden, called “The Wizard of Westwood,” won TEN NCAA national championships in a 12-year period as head coach at UCLA, including a record seven in a ROW. (No other team has won more than four in a row.) Many of his players became NBA stars, often Hall of Famers like Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Gail Goodrich, and Bill Walton.
Wooden’s “Pyramid of Success” has become the Bible to dozens of present-day coaches, and one of the things adjacent to it is his list of “12 Lessons in Leadership,” one of which is “Little things make big things happen.”
What’s your station about? My experience is that most stations are about new music adds, the next Christian music concert, deejays and features.
“The foolish thing to do is pretend your features are so good that nothing else matters.
Something else always matters.”
Seth Godin
Tiger Woods has just won his 5th Masters.
“He had gone nearly 11 years since he won his last major, 14 years since that green jacket was slipped off his Sunday red shirt.”
Doug Ferguson, the Associated Press
Notice I’m not quoting the Golf Channel. The stories are streaming out from the Associated Press, Fox News, CNN, NPR, and TMZ.
Continue readingThis is what I hear a lot of the time nowadays: A jock stops down in the middle of two songs for no apparent reason. Then he or she reads some idiotic story from the internet that most people saw five days ago, adding a C-minus punch line. (Or the jock does some piece of trivia, or some “cheerful thought for the day”.) Then they lurch forward into another song.
But back in the day, when radio had tons of forward momentum and much bigger ratings, there was this thing called the “Q” format. It was somewhat the same as the Drake format, in that jocks talked over song intros (and at the end of a music sweep, the jock talked at the end of the last song, of course, and did some Content into a commercial break). But the Q format was often thought of as screaming, hundred-mile-an-hour jocks cramming as much as they could into an intro before the vocal hit.
“I don’t care about your mom” may initially sound rather harsh, but… it’s true. Here is the redeeming part. I may not care about your mom, but I care about OUR moms. We care about the common experience.
“People will be more interested in your home movies if they are in them.”
Roy Williams
Just last week I was involved in a project where we asked loyal listeners about a certain radio station. Funny though, they didn’t talk about the features and attributes of the station they way we radio types do… they talked about themselves; their struggles, their kids, their responsibilities, their stress, their environment, their values. The radio station was only referenced in the way it intersected with their lives, if it added value to their lives.
In other words…
Continue readingTelling a story is like being on a see-saw. On one end is that you want to share something. On the other end is not wasting the listener’s time.
Here are some rules to help you NOT be the person who takes a long time to tell a story that doesn’t matter:
The first line or two will be what “tethers” your subject matter to the listener – or not. Start abruptly into something that isn’t timely or relevant to the listener, and you’re dead in the water already. Spend too long getting into it, again… dead.
Add only the essential details, and let vocabulary and attitude, fueled by Emotions, fill it out. More facts than we need, names we don’t know, too much setting up who someone is, etc. will kill the story.
End with something we DIDN’T hear earlier in the story. The ending should surprise, delight, or inform. Try not to use cornball punch lines. The “that’s what SHE said” type of line is beaten to death.
Here’s an example, from a team show I worked with:
T: Oh, check your mail today. You may get the coupon that I got yesterday. It was for a new product, called “Spam lite.”
B: What do they leave out… to make Spam lite?
T: I don’t know… the snout?
That’s how easy it is, and how little time it takes, to serve up something that the listener will REMEMBER. (On the air, even with the station’s name, artist, song title, and the team’s name leading off the break, this took only about 20 seconds. But it’s never really about length. It’s about IMPACT.)