I manage KCRW’s Social Media Efforts, and I’m ready to divulge all my use theories for each platform. Despite the changes in resources, demands and an ever shifting level of interest in each platform, here are some general thoughts about how I’ve applied the KCRW Brand to each.
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With a running goal of around 2 – 7 posts a day, I feel like we have to bring the best of the best to this platform. The community is demanding and super vocal. 90k+ followers and growing by the minute, this community is a tough one to please! The Facebook algorithm continues to make it harder and harder for brands to get their message heard organically, but KCRW has never been one to pay for post views. We are all about being organic. Like us or dont’ like us, we don’t want to pay for friends. We just want to share awesome shit! We seem to have the most success with posts that relate specifically to Los Angeles and the community here, so we’ve been cognizant to add several voices from the news team to our stream of posts! Thanks Saul, Caitlin & Avishay! Besides keeping our community apprised of interesting issues that we are reporting on, we also feed our massive audience of music lovers with content from Morning Becomes Eclectic, DJ Events & exclusives and other cool prizes from the Music Blog. We used to give a lo of stuff away on the FB, but we’ve cut back on contests and giveaways on the platform since they frown upon it.
Want free tickets? Follow us here. We also serve up a dizzying number of tweets about upcoming events. We will let you know when a program is available to stream on demand as a podcast, when we’ve uploaded a sound byte to Soundcloud.com, or if something cool is happening on one of the 9 KCRW blogs! It’s all about hyper-positive headlines that drive traffic to KCRW properties. We almost always include links. We also have a huge list of KCRW Staff on twitter, and routinely I retweet staff. I’ve encouraged a ton of the 77 staff on Twitter to append KCRW to their handle, to help to personalize our brand there. I believe that Twitter is a great platform for making connections in your field of work, and introducing yourself as a KCRW employee is mutually beneficial.
We have multiple YouTube accounts, with the most success the KCRW account that hosts MBE video singles. KCRW uses YouTube as more of an embed and sharing tool than as a community within the platform. We get tons of views, but are low on engagement. Our subscriber numbers are crawling as a result. We do have some friends there though, and we’ve been able to experiment with some awesome projects like The Cue….. and maybe more to come. This platform could use a TON more time and effort to optimize the content and explore greater success, but thus far – we just don’t have the manpower to get in there and really go for it.
Wow, this community came out of nowhere. Soundcloud is a natural fit for us because we are radio, but I had no idea how excited the community would get to consume our content. I gave the keys to the KCRW account to a handful of producers here, and they are encouraged to pull out snippets from their show to share here. We also use the embed and sharing tools across our blogs, facebook, twitter, etc. We have friends at Soundcloud, and were happy to be a part of their beta testing program, setting up all of our podcast rss feeds to automatically create full versions of each show on the platform. We’re still testing this out and I imagine that we will have greater involvement on the platform as it continues to grow.
Tumblr is my favorite new community. I want to break in there so badly, just talk to me people! I blame Melody Kramer, NPR’s Fresh Air producer for getting me totally hooked. Believe or not, KCRW has been producing content on the platform for over 3 years, but it was not until recently that I’ve been experimenting with content and trying to build community there. We’ve also used the platform for live blogging events like SXSW, LAMC, Coachella, the National Conventions….. It’s such a great tool, I’m into it!
ABOUT KCRW:
Los Angeles-based public radio station KCRW is one of the most respected and progressive radio stations in the world, featuring an eclectic mix of independent music, NPR news, as well as arts & culture programming. KCRW’s music selections are handpicked by a pool of talented DJs who have only one directive: play what you love.
KCRW hosts live sessions from a wide variety of artists on their signature music show Morning Becomes Eclectic. All sessions are available in their entirety –with audio and video — on demand on kcrw.com . The most recent performances can be viewed at kcrw.com/mbe.
Many musicians — including Beck, Adele, Miike Snow, Sigur Ros, Band of Skulls, Jesca Hoop, Coldplay, Norah Jones — have made their U.S. performance debuts on the station.
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