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Part 1
Over the next several weeks I’ll be sharing some
insights on how storytelling can impact your station, your air
talent, your imaging, and even your promotions. I’ll even go so far
to say that the art of storytelling is one of the significant
distinctions between highly successful Christian radio stations and
ones that aren’t yet.
We take it for granted that successful movies, books, television
shows and even sermons must have compelling stories. Seldom do I
hear that concept related to a good radio station. The typical
evaluation tends to focus on the analytics---about how much, how
little, how many, how often. When chatting with our friends about a
song, a book, or a movie our first question is not ‘how long is it?’
but rather ‘what’s it about?’ Limiting the evaluation of your
station to the analytics can make for a technically efficient
product but one that may not be very interesting.
So, what’s your station about? How do you tell your story?
Part 2
Last week I shared some insights on how storytelling
can impact your station, your air talent, your imaging, and even
your promotions. I shared that the art of storytelling is one of
the significant distinctions between highly successful Christian
radio stations and ones that aren't yet.
This week I’m sharing how the effective use of TIME and SPACE can
transform content into one of your station's strengths.
My brilliant friend Gary Morland of New Life 91.9 in Charlotte
shares, “All stories take place in specifics of time and space.
People are numb to generalities, even true, spiritual, generalities.
Even spiritual things are played out in time and space. As soon as
you hear, ‘This morning, as I was walking out of Wal-Mart..,’ your
ears perk up—you know something’s coming. God has designed every
human to want to know, ‘What happens next?’ All we have to do is
take advantage of that.”
You can improve your station immediately by minimizing generalities,
particularly spiritual generalities which can be often perceived as
trite even if the core message is true. One I hear most often is
what I call the Christian radio default of ending breaks with “we’ll
be praying for them.” The sentiment is good, of course, but the
phrase is often thrown in because the air talent can’t think of a
better way to end the break. (I’ll share later about the importance
of strong endings. You’ll notice that very sentence is a tease and
not a very strong ending). I’ve heard “we’ll be praying for them”
as the wrap up phrase for everything from lost dogs to fender
benders to washing whites with colors (I’m not making this up).
Having your talent consistently apply a context of time and space
greatly diminishes the likelihood that a concept will be interpreted
as trite. The more spiritual the thought the more personal it
needs to be.
Using time and space moves you from stating facts to telling
stories, allowing you to engage your listeners with an idea and
allowing them to participate in the discovery right along with you.
In other words, a story is an adventure you take together.
I love Seth Godin’s perspective:
“People don’t believe what you tell them.
They rarely believe what you show them.
They often believe what their friends tell them.
They always believe what they tell themselves.
What leaders do is they give people stories they can tell
themselves. Stories about the future and about change.”
Part 3
The last two weeks I have shared some insights on how
storytelling can impact your station, your air talent, your imaging,
and even your promotions. I shared that the art of storytelling is
one of the significant distinctions between highly successful
Christian radio stations and ones that aren't yet.
This week I’ll focus on some story telling words of wisdom from my
brilliant friend Tommy Kramer, who I’ve known and worked with for
parts of thirty years. (I say ‘parts’ because I’d hire him, then
he’d quit, and I’d hire him back later). Tommy is perhaps the most
remarkable coach of talent I have ever seen. In fact I hired him to
be my program director when we launched a 24 hour a day sports
station in Orlando, Florida, a decade or so ago, and he was so
effective in coaching the talent that I decided to have him work
with all five of the stations in our cluster.
Tommy’s words:
“All stories should
contain an Emotion. Without emotion, it's just a recounting of the
facts.
And the 2 words to remember are Discovery and Surprise.
Discovery--meaning that something is discovered through the "arc" of
the story--keeps you from repeating yourself, or even worse, ending
at basically the same place you started from.
Surprise (not Shock, which a lot of people think is the same thing)
is essential. It can be simply the words you use, or it can be
literally arriving at a "destination" we didn't quite expect.
When you get where you do things in a way that no one else can, you
gain a special place in the Listener's mind. A station without
surprises is a station that's not worth listening to.”
I hope you’ll share this tip with your on air team!
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John is a partner in Goodratings
Strategic Services, and has been a successful major market disc
jockey and program director for such companies as CBS, Cap Cities,
Westinghouse, Sandusky, Gannett, and Alliance during his 38 year
broadcast career. John joined Goodratings’ partner Alan Mason in
1999.
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