Having spent nearly a decade at the World Bank followed by building a consulting practice that includes clients such as GE, IBM, Microsoft, and McKinsey, Denning has continued to study the ways, in which management needs to evolve and adapt in the global economy.

In particular, Radical Management begins with the goal of Delighting Customers. This concept is not necessarily something new. In fact, management guru Peter Drucker believed, “There is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer.” However, in an effort to cut costs and hit quarterly numbers, it’s easy for managers to lose sight of the customer experience.

Denning believes, sustainable corporate success is built on delighting the customer, which means, “continuously providing new value… It goes beyond mere transactions; it’s about forging relationships.” Translated into radio, delighting the listener goes beyond mere tune-in occasions: it’s about forging relationships, which is the focus of dmr’s 360° Listener Engagement Strategy.

Radical Delight

According to the research shared by Denning, there are 10 Steps to an organization Delighting Customers.

1. Commit: The focus of the entire organization from executives to the front desk is to bring more value to the audience, sooner than they expect.

2. Target: Identify the core segment of listeners and focus on delighting them first and most.

3. Focus: Deliver the simplest ideas to delight your audience. Complicated and cumbersome enhancements too often simply get in the way.

4. Read their Minds: Meet listeners’ unrecognized needs and delight them with the outcome. dmr’s Points of Passion study helps you understand what matters to your audience, especially when they are not listening to the radio, so you can delight them.

5. Innovate in Stages: Launch the product and services and add selectively through upgrades. Our long time customers find great success in engagement and ratings by adding unexpected incentives for long time listeners that continue to add value to the overall connection to the station.

6. Evaluate: Simply adding features, can make a product unusable over time. Ensure each upgrade truly enhances and delights the core listener.

7. Customize: Enable listeners to have an experience that meets their own needs. Perhaps some members of your audience prefer to receive station updates via text message or Twitter rather than email.

8. Partner with Customers: Team up with listeners to create new experiences. This can be on-air, with social media posts, and at station events.

9. Empower: To fully please listeners, make sure frontline workers have the power to make decisions on the spot, whether it’s in studio or at a remote. Everyone in the organization should be inspired to think every day: what can I do to give more value to the customer sooner?

10. Measure: You can’t manage without a measurement tool, this includes delighting customers. In 2006, Fred Reichheld created a system for just this task – the Net Promoter Score – by asking your listeners a single question – how likely is it that you would recommend this station to a colleague or friend? The quantitative results, demonstrate how effective you’re efforts are at delighting your audience.

As we embark on the New Year, it’s a great opportunity to set goals and objectives for yourself and your team. In this era of the constantly expanding infinite dial, how will you engage and delight your listeners in 2012, so that you can provide them increased value quicker than they expect?

Helping stations engage with the listeners who matter most is a critical element of the value proposition we provide our clients. dmr’s unique 360° Listener Engagement Strategy leverages multiple personal communication platforms to delight listeners and strengthen relationships. For more information on how dmr can support your ratings and audience engagement initiatives in 2012, please , contact Andrew Curran.

Online, the brands and topics that people talk about are directly influenced by the awareness that other people are watching and they select topics accordingly, a social media version of dress to impress. In the research, this was dubbed “motivated transmissions.”

On the other hand, offline conversations are based much less on “motivated transmissions” and instead focus on products and topics that are truly top of mind, but often time are much less interesting than their online counterparts.

For example, someone might post or comment on the latest tech gadget, but have an actual conversation with a co-worker about the spaghetti sauce they had for dinner last night. It turns out, being a new and interesting brand can generate immediate buzz, but it quickly fades relative to the brands that are part of everyday life.

Good News for Radio

The study also reports there are specific methods for brands to generate buzz and word of mouth conversations and the biggest influence in buzz is accessibility. People continually talk about the things that they know and use every day.

In fact, to help better understand the social media landscape for broadcasters, we’ve once again partnered with Arbitron. We’ll present these findings during a session at next week’s 2011 Client Conference. If you can’t make the conference, contact dmr and we can share with you the insights.

Getting back to the Wharton study, another method that helps drive conversations is to offer samples. People aren’t going to talk about you if they haven’t met you yet. However, simply inviting people to listen is not enough, you have to also offer them some interesting ways to engage with your station.

We regularly see that when people are invited to listen and also have a chance to share a prize with someone else, the authenticity of the answers is impressive – “my sister who’s out of work,” “my neighbor who just got divorced,” or “I’d start my grandson’s college fund.”

In these instances, the station gets transformed from being a source of entertainment and becomes a way for people to help someone else. This enhanced offer is not only worth tuning in for, but it’s worth talking about.

The final conversation starter suggests using your marketing efforts to give people clues and reminders about your brand. In particular, if you can offer a unique twist to your brand that wasn’t expected or well known, it will also get people talking. Perhaps it’s an offbeat segment or some counter programming around the holidays. It’s easy to imagine listeners having these conversations about their favorite station.

Being the latest fad, certainly creates buzz, but research shows it’s unsustainable relative to products people use every day.

To learn more about how dmr’s 360° Listener Engagement Strategy creates buzz and sustainable engagement among the listeners who matter most, contact Andrew Curran for more information.

As these platforms mature, there are increasing opportunities for brands to fully harness the power of social media.

One such way is the new Facebook metric, “Talking About This.” For many brands, it’s still an arms race to see how many “Likes” their Page can collect. At the same time, this new qualitative metric reflects the number of conversations and activities happening during the last seven days. Truly, it’s an engagement score with numerous implications. For an in depth overview of this metric, see the Search Engine Land article by Greg Finn.

According to Facebook, “It’s a good gauge of the content Pages are putting up and how to generate more conversations around a Page.” Why does a qualitative score about the quality of content matter?

On Facebook, each story (formerly called a “post”) that results in limited fan activity (Likes, comments, etc.), can negatively influence the page’s EdgeRank score. EdgeRank is the algorithm that Facebook uses to determine who will see future posts. Although your brand might have 20,000 fans or “Likes”, a much smaller number is likely being served your content, especially if you have a track record of contributing stories that generate limited interaction.

If you think about your station’s Facebook Page and this all sounds familiar, don’t worry, you are not alone. In fact, in an effort to help our industry better define their presence in social media, we have again partnered with Arbitron on a session during the 2011 Client Conference coming up in December.

The title of the presentation is Let’s Get Engaged – The Surprising Parallels Between Ratings and Social Media Success and it will focus on how stations can both strengthen and employ listener relationships to fuel social media and ratings success.

In the meantime, the Harvard Business Review has published an article that focuses on why some corporate social strategies work better than others. The findings provide a variety of insights.

First, simply trying to continue your digital strategy in social media by continuing to broadcast your messages is the first mistake many companies make. According to Harvard Business School associate professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, “Customers reject such overtures because their main goal on the platforms is to connect with other people, not with companies.”

Instead, companies with the most successful social strategies enable people to connect with one another. Jan Piskorski continues, “These work because they’re consistent with users’ expectations and behavior on social platforms.”

What’s In It for Me?

If successful brands merely facilitate conversations between people, what’s the point of investing time and resources in social? That’s where having a comprehensive strategy comes into play. The research indicates that brands aren’t simply allowing people to have conversations, they could be having elsewhere.

The Harvard Business Review article shows there are four different types of social strategies firms can pursue:

- Reduce costs by helping people meet
- Increase willingness to pay by helping people meet
- Reduce costs by helping people strengthen relationships
- Increase willingness to pay by helping people strengthen relationships

According to Jan Piskorski, “the work people do on a company’s behalf can include customer acquisition, supplying inputs such as R&D and web content, and selling the company’s products or services.”

The challenge is to identify unmet social needs and then develop a strategy that allows your business goals to be achieved. It’s a completely different approach from simply trying to figure out what to say and how often to say it.

Social media offers stations yet another powerful way to deliver enjoyment to the audience, while fulfilling various unmet social needs and facilitating personal relationships. By doing so, there is a tremendous opportunity to grow ratings and revenue.

To learn more about how dmr can help develop your social strategy and connect it to your larger marketing efforts, contact Andrew Curran for more information.