Radio DJ's -- the Ultimate Community Manager?

The other day I was listening to my morning radio and realized something. Radio DJ's are very well suited to leverage social media.

Source: Boston.com

And that's because they have an established history of being good at soliciting user interaction by asking listeners to call-in to tell them what they think or be the n-th caller to win a prize.

The problem is it took a lot work from a producer or DJ to queue up the phone callers and listen to them to determine what or who to air. Or if it was a contest based on the n-th caller, they had to run through (n-1) callers to identify the winner.

Enter social media. With Facebook walls and Twitter feeds, the landscape has changed. Now instead of processing one caller at a time, the DJ can quickly ask a question on Facebook and glance at multiple posts on their fan page wall to identify the most engaging responses (see example below from STAR 101.3 FM).

It also engages listeners/fans more because now we all get to see everyone else's response; whereas, when this was done by phone, you usually didn't hear what other callers had to say.

A quick word on mobile. SMS has had a similar effect. DJs ask callers to text their responses to a short code, and they can scan and curate content that is worth mentioning on the air.

This makes DJs natural experts at generating and curating user content, a skill that's required by brands today.

So, the next time you're looking to hire a community manager, maybe you should be looking for DJ experience!

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