Bill Virgin's Radio Beat October 30, 2008

Includes archive of Bill Virgin's columns fromJ une 2006 - March 2009

Bill Virgin's Radio Beat October 30, 2008

Postby radiofan » Wed Oct 29, 2008 9:38 pm

On Radio: New way to connect listeners with stations
By BILL VIRGIN
P-I REPORTER


Radio is a one-way medium in a world that increasingly values two-way communication.

Broadcasters have long worked around the limitation by encouraging listeners to use the telephone to call in song requests, participate in contests and comment on talk shows. With the emergence of the Internet, e-mail and cell-phone text-message capabilities, they've incorporated those technologies to allow listeners to talk back to stations.

Now a Mercer Island company is hoping a technology it has spent three years developing will provide listeners a new way to communicate with a station and its advertisers, in the process building more loyalty with and connection to that audience.

Emo-V Inc. is rolling out a service called MyQuu that allows users to text-message a note to a personalized Web site they've set up when they hear a song or an advertisement that interests them.

Once they call up that page on a computer, they can find out more about the song and artist (that information is also sent to their phone screen), and purchase it if interested. For ads, they can get more information about the sponsor, see an expanded pitch (with video, which they can also view on their phone if it supports such applications), or they can get an immediate callback from the advertiser (such as for ordering concert tickets).

The service also allows voting on polls or for rating songs. Emo-V is also working on a system that involves a flash-drive device equipped with a sensor that, when near a radio using the MyQuu system, allows the listener to automatically save information about a song or ad, for later downloads onto a computer.

MyQuu is designed to get around the problem of listeners trying to remember a song title or artist's name. "We get hundreds of calls a day, asking 'What song did you play?' " earlier in the day, says Marc Kaye, general manager of Sandusky Radio Seattle. MyQuu is "like a notepad with all the information; you choose the manner in which you wish to receive it."

Sandusky is Emo-V's first radio partner for the service. Susan Dingethal, director of new media at Sandusky, says MyQuu will start on its three FM stations (KQMV-FM/92.5, KWJZ-FM/ 98.9 and KRWM-FM/106.9) within the next few weeks, and it should be available on its two AM outlets (KIXI-AM/880 and KKNW-AM/1150) by December.

Kaye says he's always on the lookout for ways to get his stations on as many platforms as possible and to "build a relationship with our audience that's more than one way." Although he gets lots of pitches for new technologies promising new delivery and interactivity channels, he's interested in those that are not too cumbersome or difficult for listeners to use.

Joe Harb, Emo-V's founder and chief executive, says some of MyQuu's features, such as song tagging, already exist. But what MyQuu provides to advertisers, broadcasters and listeners is "a whole suite of interactivity with radio."

The technology could draw advertisers to radio who haven't used it before, he adds, by giving them a way to supplement the audio message with videos; conventional radio ads, he says, are cumbersome because they repeat a message such as a phone number as many times as possible so that listeners will remember it, a habit that actually serves to drive some away.

And advertisers get a way of measuring just what sort of response their ads are generating, Harb says.

In other radio notes:


Little Feat performs in the "Mountain Music Lounge" at 3:15 p.m. Thursday on KMTT- FM/103.7.


"Audioasis" on KEXP-FM/ 90.3 presents live performances by Mad Rad and Lozen from The Sunset in Ballard beginning at 6:30 p.m. Saturday.


Guitarists Martin Taylor and Martin Simpson perform live in the Seattle studios of KPLU-FM/88.5 at 12:20 p.m. Wednesday.

P-I reporter Bill Virgin can be reached at 206-448-8319 or billvirgin@seattlepi.com.

Bill Virgin's Radio Beat, Thursdays in the Seattle P-I
Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who couldn't hear the music.
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