5-10-2012
There are a lot of things that can hold a station back from being highly profitable, nationally recognized, sought after for panels, and nominated for all kinds of awards. You could be in a small market. Your signal could be just shy of awful. You may have very few advertisers, very little revenue, and thus nothing to invest in any improvements. Every one of us either knows, or has been part of, a station like that. They can barely function, and it's a daily mental feat to convince yourself it's worth being on the air at all.
There are a lot of things that can hold an air talent back from being pursued for bigger gigs, for syndication, for more pay, for the above-mentioned panels and award nominations and industry notoriety. You could be in a small market. You could be on a signal that's awful. You could have no access to consultants, confabs, or tools to get better. You could be forced to work four full-time jobs at the station, guaranteeing you'll never get anywhere as an air talent since you have no time to think or prep. Every one of us has felt trapped in a situation where it didn't matter how good we were, it was a virtual certainty we'd never get noticed. And it was a daily mental feat just to crawl back to the mic.
Take heart.
Social can change your fate in a heartbeat. With social, it's never too late. Even though you might think your station or your career is on its last legs and you're "done," there's hope in social. There's redemption and rebirth in social.
Alex Tanney became a viral YouTube video star thanks to a montage of him doing a bunch of incredible football passes. We're talking throwing into a moving pickup from a 2nd-story window; off the bounce into a far away trash can; off props into basketball hoops, etc. Alex had just finished his playing career at Monmouth College, a Division III school in Illinois. Because of the division and the lackluster competition, he got no notice or recognition for his play. The video was uploaded in February of 2011 and has gotten almost two million views. Among those who saw it, the Buffalo Bills. He's now getting a shot at the NFL.NYU grad Rob Delaney was pursuing a path undertaken by many, trying to be an actor and comedian. With so much competition out there, he wasn't exactly setting the world on fire. No HBO specials, and the few TV roles he landed included such career-launchers as "Outer Space Astronauts." And then came Twitter. His tweets landed him a TV deal on Comedy Central and he was recently awarded "Funniest Person on Twitter" at the Comedy Awards, besting nominees like Steve Martin, Aziz Ansari, and Stephen Colbert. His nearly 400,000 followers get tweets such as:- "The story of Titanic speaks to me because I once tripped over a bag of ice at a party and then killed over 15,000 people."- "You can take the boy out of the country but you can't take the country out of the boy because countries can't fit in boys to begin with."- "You've really got to hand it to short people, because they often can't reach it."- "I just sent back the 'everything' bagel because it didn't have tiny Spice Girls figurines on it."
The point is this: If you think your station is forever relegated to being small and insignificant; if you think your on-air career is either over or has already seen its best days; social has fixed it so that you don't get to think those things anymore. There's only one thing that stands between you and breakout success, and that is your own ability to captivate.
Social has torn down the barriers and put all real control in the hands of content creators and the public. All those management types and bureaucracies that you'd like to blame for holding you back are not what's stopping you. Social is the mightiest signal of all, and it costs you nothing.
Social should give you all hope, and spark, and a renewed passion, dedication, and energy. If you're a tiny FM oldies station in Daytona Beach, Fla., putting truly original talent, ideas, events, experiences, and information on your social streams could blow you up into a national brand. If you're an OM/GSM/PD/imaging director/PM drive personality in Fresno, creating and hosting irresistibly original high-concept programming and distributing it via Facebook and/or YouTube could make you the next Ryan Seacrest.
You're not trapped, and you're not finished. Quit trying to get the attention of radio managers whose heads are somewhere up near their liver and show everybody what you've got.
Mike Stiles is a brand content specialist with the social marketing tech platform Vitrue. Check out his monologue blog The Stiles Files and follow him @mikestiles.
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