As I mentioned yesterday, I am part of a crew that will take a look at each of Andrew Dubbers’ 30 Ideas and hopefully pick one out that we will then execute and implement in 30 days.
Andrew’s second idea is called My Radio Alerts and has a lot of appeal to me. Here are the things I like about it:
- It brings more information my way. I hardly ever listen to the readio these days, this idea might just re-open that information channel for me
- It also allows me to strongly filter that information: I only get alerts for the information that I am interested in.
- It offers some leverage for the ‘old radio industry’ by opening up their content to more listeners. Which might make it more likely that they would support the concept.
I also see some challenges:
- I would rather not be alerted to text in commercials, so they need to be filtered out first.
- It needs a ‘relevance filter’. Why? With Google Alerts, it is easy for me to scan through the linked information because it is tekst-based and readable. With audio, it takes more effort to listen through attentively and once I discover the audio-segment to be of low information value, I have already wasted my time listening. If a term I’m interested in is only loosely referenced during chit-chat, I don’t want to be alerted.
- Copyrights need to be cleared. Andrew did mention the 7 days Listen Again service of the BBC, but something similar might not exist (yet) for other radio stations
Are there bigger opportunities?
- This will add some more ‘social’ statistics to information, that we could -for instance- add to our new Tribe Monitor (a New Music Labs service) to expand on the amount of detail that we offer to our users. Not just airplay, but also ‘talk-about-you’.
- Aggregating these alerts, it is easy to identify actual trending topics for radio stations, which might be of interest to a number of parties willing to pay for that information
Just my two cents. Let’s see how it goes down in the Ideals Project Group.
