Radio has, like we always seem to do, take something like social media and look at it with a very one dimensional vision: “Hey Bob, now we have another way to spam and annoy our audience.”

 

Granted, it would require “work” and “effort” but Twitter and Facebook have given us wonderful ways to court listeners and create fans.

 

Take this amazing story from Morton’s Steak House where they snatched a tweet out of the ether and created a true and loyal fan. “Fans” are good. We need fans.

 

Radio “futurologist” and brilliant mind, James Cridland was telling me about having a crappy hotel experience while in Toronto and tweeting about it. Within minutes, a service like www.trustyou.com had caught the reference to their client property, alerted the front desk and help was on the way to a very surprised and grateful Mr. Cridland.

 

But no. It didn’t stop there. They then visited his Facebook profile, noted his apparent love for beer and candy (and who doesn’t?) and had some delivered to his room.

 

Bing. Bang. Boom. Fan. He will now stay nowhere BUT that hotel when in Toronto.

 

You should be constantly poring through social media looking for references to the station and solving problems or heaping accolades. Mike Gartell is one of the best and brightest at CBS and uses Tweetdeck to do this for him. His Clear Channel counterpart is Derek Spartz. “I’m old school and just check them myself because I’m on Twitter 24/7 anyways. Have a hootsuite account too.”

 

In 2013 I was looking at the Facebook account for the competition in San Francisco and noted one of their listeners who posted five seemingly more-frustrated comments over the course of about eight hours. I think it went something like this.

 

“When will you have more Bruno Mars tickets?”

 

“Does anyone know when the next Bruno Mars giveaway is?”

 

“I really want to see Bruno. Are there going to be more tickets?”

 

“Hello?? Is anyone there?”

 

“Why have a (bad word) Facebook page if you’re not going to reply to your listeners?!”

 

At which point I alerted Carlos Pedraza at 99.7 NOW-FM who reached out to this frustrated young man and gave him tickets. Not only did he create a “fan”, but the young man went on the other station’s page and ranted about how great NOW was…and it remained up for weeks.

Steaks. Candy. Beer. Tickets. Maybe just a congratulations on a marriage or a promotion at work. There are so many customer service opportunities on social media if you can just think beyond the spam.