Earlier this summer I blogged about 'Rewarding the Love' of your audience. As a broadcaster one of the best things about the emergence of social media is that it allows us to find what is being said about our output and respond. Our audience have grown up listening to us via a box formerly know as 'The Radio'. Now we can listen back to them and when we respond the results can be amazing.
And sometimes dangerous.
At this weekend's Reading Festival we delivered some 'Reading Presents' for our followers on Facebook and Twitter. We wanted to connect our listeners who didn't get tickets for Reading with the bands that they love. The idea was that we'd give them a present to make up for them not being there. More often than not the present would involve their favourite band carrying out a request they made to us via Twitter or Facebook. Sometimes we'd just surprise them by giving them a present for just tweeting about us.
You can see the kind of requests we got in the video featuring Fred Durst, Biffy Clyro, Arcade Fire, Paramore, Klaxons, Frank Turner, Paramore and a shed load of others.
In the last post I described it as being like a digital autograph, but having given it more thought these have much more personal value than a scribble on some paper. To begin with they are shareable and not confined to a dusty book you bring out once a year. They have much more kudos because they are 'real', they're pictures or videos that are connected as part of a bigger conversation, not just paper memory. Also, there is the WTF factor; that is actually your hero in that film/photo doing exactly what you asked BBC Radio 1 to get him/her to do via Twitter/Facebook. How does that happen from a bedroom in Bristol?
As you can imagine people's heads were exploding when they got their's whilst some people retweeted and retweeted and retweeted when they worked out what was going on. Their thinking being that the more they talked about us the more chance they had of being picked. Jealousy is a powerful tool.
Finally, the bands themselves retweeted what we were doing to their fanbases, which is not far of 2 million followers in the case of Fred Durst. Thanks Fred
Well done to Kate Lawrence, Laura-May Coope and Will Kinder who worked their socks off this weekend delivering these presents to our followers. You made a smaller group of people happier than we ever could have imagined in the days before social media.