Radio 1 have been using Facebook in lots of interesting ways recently and I wanted to flag up something they did to promote Zane Lowe’s Masterpieces – a show where they play an album in full with interviews and things afterwards.
Now, most stations use Facebook to start a group about a show or station or they create a fan page for a station or presenter. This is okay, but quite often they miss the value in the FB community. The reason people join groups is to ‘endorse’ something, they’re saying “I agree”. The value of someone joining a group is that it’s often flagged up in their friends mini-feeds and might result in more people joining the group and thus spreading virally to more people. I really think stations miss a trick in how they brand their groups, they call them “Station FM’s Breakfast Show” rather than “I listen to Station FM’s breakfast show”, that’s a much better psychological endorsement than just a show name.
Anyway, Radio 1’s been bright about FB activity by trying to use the tools on offer to replicate how friends use the service to communicate. So, for Zane’s Masterpieces firstly they created a ‘fan page‘ for this element and then they got that page to create ‘events’ for each of the day’s playbacks. This is a great piece of specific activity that brings people closer to the programme and promotes the programme to other people. So, for the Public Enemy playback the event was “Let’s all listen to Public Enemy at exactly the same time!” . Now it only had 190 ‘attendees’ but that would have spread virally to all those friends in the attendee’s news feeds. Hey, even Chuck D joined the event off his own back – now that’s proper artist integration! A great use of Facebook.