Building Digital Communities

Michael Hedges August 1, 2004

No single concept is more fundamental to radio broadcasting than building audiences. As digital replaces analogue and multimedia redefines the marketplace, the idea of audience is also challenged. Community is the new term.

From the Golden Age of Radio – first, second or third – building a radio audience meant organizing a program, producing it and then telling people about it. The audience existed to listen, tune-in, all rather passively. Ratings services registered the applause.

Closer to the present moment, broadcasters are told at every conference, workshop and seminar that the medium must be transformed or the customer will transform it. Technology might be the vehicle for this renewal but more is happening. The new radio customer – who is always right – is no longer the passive listener nor the computer generated audience segment.

“Multimedia Meets Radio” was the theme of a recent conference (May 2004) at the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) in Geneva. EBU radio department head Raina Konstantinova described a new chemistry with radio’s customers. But alchemy carried the day.

Granted, there was plenty of talk about broad-band, side-band, in-band, L-band and all dimensions technical. It was not, thankfully, the web-site love-fest that has peppered radio conferences for the last decade. It was also not another wake for the Golden Age.

Peppered through presentations and lively discussions was the notion of building communities and using every technical capacity to engage people.

“The center of gravity is moving from radio to the web,” said France Culture webmaster Anne Brunel.

Brunel described enhancing web-site users experience by tuning into their interests. Focus remains on the radio channel with the web-site serving as compliment. FranceCulture.fr offers over 7 million pages on its site and interactive forums for each program.

Denmark rules the web

Not surprisingly, the Scandinavian conference participants knew their multi-media tools. Denmark was recently praised as the most web-savvy of all nations in an IBM report published by the The Economist intelligence unit. The four Nordic nations – Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway – are “remarkable for the way in which citizens have incorporated Internet technology into their daily lives, completely altering how they work, shop, and communicate,” according to the report.

“The strategy was to make it interactive,“ explained Martin Ersted, Director of Denmarks Radios (DR) Boogie Radio project, which started as a television program and became a multi-media community.

“By making the program around a music-chart on the web, we had a chance to be in contact with repeating visitors. These visitors had an urge to commune between other visitors, to create an identity, by viewing what other visitors voted. And by letting the members of the community put out information about themselves and by letting their activity be visual for others, the members tend to use more time reflecting among the others.”

Media Tribes

France Cultures Anne Brunel refers to a “tribe spirit” among people who use the channels web-site. The idea of media tribes has been working its way from theorists, like Marshall McLuhan, to the present time. People join to participate, sometimes joining several “tribes,” changing often.

Participation sets apart audience from community and new media is more than a technical network. “The public demand for community,“ said Ersted, “to make a comment, a point of view on what is presented is very big. It’s possible with new media.”

Boggie Radio also confronts the passive listener. A station must, said Ersted, “challenge both the passive listener and the active ones. It has to be fun to listen to, whether you are one or the other.” The essence of radio stays the same.

Digital meeting point

“You need another media,” reflected Ersted, “other than pure radio, to build a community. Pure radio is very passive for the listener, where the listener can only reflect themself in the program or the show host. A community needs a place to meet. This can be a digital meeting-point. It is essential that there is a space somewhere around the radio.”

Arte Radio is an internet radio. Loosely associated with the Arte television network, Arte Radio produces a weekly radio magazine. Short – rarely longer than seven or 8 minutes - speech segments are freely available for download, sorting and re-arranging. People are encouraged to provide their own productions, though these are carefully screened. This participation by listeners creates a community.

Several of these web community sites are accessible to visually impaired. Arte Radio offers a parallel HTML site compatible with software developed for blind and partial-sighted people. Denmarks Radio sites offer speech synthesis.

More often than not, current discussion about audience building centers on marketing and promotion. Once that radio product is in place, all that’s necessary is telling people. Building community is about that too but also creating response and participation.

Language

Digital transformation has moved from the hot topic of the 1990s to today’s action point. Technical possibilities have given way to a few realities. One of those realities is that the language has changed.

Broadcasters continue to produce and programs and channels for audiences. That audience is measured by its recall of or exposure to the programs or channels. All of this has changed.

Another theme common to this digital transformation is media literacy. Media access devices now include personal computers and mobile phones, hardly passive devices. Since the beginning of this decade access to PC and mobile phones has shot up causing broadcasters to question how to integrate these devices into their output. It’s one thing to offer program streams and text messages through new devices and quite another to develop a significantly new medium. This is transformation.

Originally published in Radio World International, August 2004, in slightly different form