{"id":941,"date":"2015-04-08T21:23:34","date_gmt":"2015-04-08T21:23:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wensmedia.com\/ens-on-sales\/?p=941"},"modified":"2015-04-23T21:24:19","modified_gmt":"2015-04-23T21:24:19","slug":"break-down-your-silos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ensmediausa.com\/ens-on-sales\/uncategorized\/break-down-your-silos\/","title":{"rendered":"Break Down Your Silos"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It seems that most radio stations manage their websites in a programming silo, segregated and sometimes alienated from sales.<\/p>\n<p>Lately, I&#8217;ve been spot checking some of my station client&#8217;s websites, and I&#8217;ve yet to find one that did NOT have a mistake. Have you clicked on every banner, Icon or link on your website? You should do so regularly.<\/p>\n<p>I clicked on a banner for a pizza chain on a station&#8217;s website today, and it mistakenly linked to a location in another state more than 1000 miles away.<\/p>\n<p>If the sponsor is tracking results, and you can bet they are, that station won&#8217;t be getting a renewal of that pizza banner ad.<\/p>\n<p>I Googled one station&#8217;s site but the link took me to their sister station&#8217;s site in a different market. It was obviously managed corporately, and no one ever Googled it.<\/p>\n<p>Some of the common errors I find on station websites are;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>No phone numbers, or they are hard to find<\/li>\n<li>No way to access sales, only programming contacts are published<\/li>\n<li>Contests or special offers that expired last month still posted<\/li>\n<li>Links that don&#8217;t work<\/li>\n<li>Concert announcements for concert dates that have long since passed.<\/li>\n<li>No mention of sales, advertising or radio advertising anywhere<\/li>\n<li>Sponsored promotions are hidden or take a back seat to programming promotions&#8230;it&#8217;s not fair to the advertiser who paid for it.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>These are just a few of the many common errors, and as I said, I&#8217;ve yet to find a problem free station website.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s probably time to get a part time student or non-staffer to safety check your website every week, if not every day.<\/p>\n<p>I understand why programming manages your websites rather than sales. But it&#8217;s time the two worked together to everyone&#8217;s benefit; listeners, staff, and sponsors.<\/p>\n<p>And whoever manages your website should be aware of the difference between audio communications and written communications.<\/p>\n<p>Live audio programmers have to be careful not to do anything to cause audience tune out.<\/p>\n<p>Programmers of written content have no such limitations. A feature that&#8217;s of no interest to part of your audio audience can cause them to tune out.<\/p>\n<p>Irrelevant written information can simply be ignored while the reader skips to the next feature&#8230;.we have eye lids, but we don&#8217;t have ear lids.<\/p>\n<p>You wouldn&#8217;t publish &#8216;news&#8217; about a sponsor&#8217;s store opening in your on air newscast, but you can certainly have a page full of various sponsor news on your website, because disinterested parties can simply ignore that page without ignoring your entire site.<\/p>\n<p>As I travel across the continent, virtually and in reality, it&#8217;s becoming increasingly apparent that programming, your webmaster, and sales, need to work more closely together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It seems that most radio stations manage their websites in a programming silo, segregated and sometimes alienated from sales. Lately, I&#8217;ve been spot checking some of my station client&#8217;s websites, and I&#8217;ve yet to find one that did NOT have a mistake. Have you clicked on every banner, Icon or link on your website? You [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ensmediausa.com\/ens-on-sales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ensmediausa.com\/ens-on-sales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ensmediausa.com\/ens-on-sales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ensmediausa.com\/ens-on-sales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ensmediausa.com\/ens-on-sales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=941"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ensmediausa.com\/ens-on-sales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":943,"href":"https:\/\/www.ensmediausa.com\/ens-on-sales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/941\/revisions\/943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ensmediausa.com\/ens-on-sales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ensmediausa.com\/ens-on-sales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ensmediausa.com\/ens-on-sales\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}