Heather Davies

One of the recurrent messages from the radio industry events and conferences I’ve attended over the past four years has been that as programme makers we have to go to where our audiences are, instead of expecting them to come to us (push rather than pull marketing).

However, each station has a different audience, with different expectations and different touchpoints (places they go). With tight budgets for online, clearly each station needs to work out where it’s time is most effectively spent. And this is even more important if you’re a two-person company with a massive to-do list!

It used to be that media types were to be found on Twitter, musicians on MySpace, parents on Friends Reunited, students on Facebook, and kids on Beebo. But all that has slowly changed and homogenised. Three years ago hardly anyone I knew outside of uni was on Facebook and now pretty much my whole family is (including my Nan!), and similarly with Twitter – suddenly lots of quite surprising people are popping up.

As the producers of a landmark series on BBC Radio 2 – Sounds of the 20th Century, Thursday nights at 10pm – it was important to work out how our online activity would fit with the show and the expected audience.

Initially we were keen to push our programme out to as many places (or touchpoints) as possible, but as a two person team we realised that it might be wiser to do a couple of things really well, rather than do lots of different things in a slightly mediocre fashion.

So we’ve set up a blog with a more detailed running order and production notes for each year (and other little treats), and we’re running a twitter feed that updates in real time when the show is on with information about each clip as it goes out. This is in addition to the dynamic music playlists that we upload to the BBC page each week.

What’s been interesting though is the number of mentions we’ve had on messageboards – something I really wasn’t expecting! It’s fascinating to see how certain methods of internet-based interaction endure in the face of shinier platforms. Messageboards and newsgroups were there right at the start of the internet, after-all.