Cool Idea for Radio Jocks: Use Google Hangouts for Audience Engagement

Check out this article from USA Today:

After initially offering the service to a limited number of users, Google is finally rolling out its Hangouts on Air feature to Google+ users around the world.

We've seen some great uses of people being able to publicly broadcast their hangouts, from celebrity interviews to showcasing non-profit initiatives.

Curious about what the new feature holds? Google explains:

"Broadcast publicly. By checking 'Enable Hangouts On Air,' you can broadcast your live hangout —from the Google+ stream, your YouTube channel or your website — to the entire world.

See how many viewers you've got. During your broadcast, you can look inside the hangout to see how many people are watching live.

It would be a bit of a juggling act amidst your showprep and the actual execution of your show, but I could see doing this before, during or after your airshift.  It would also work nicely as a chatroom for people listening to pre-recorded programs.  I've often wondered how I could create a real time experience for broadcasts of my Secret History of Rock show across the country.

Imagine the kind of community you could build!  Think about it and if you have any ideas to share, please do.

Comments

[Nscafe]

Twitter works really well for realtime engagement. Use a and promote a hashtag to keep track of show fans. This does involve setting aside time to participate in the real time side of things.

Barring that, because you still seem to read all the tweets directed at you, compile a list of things brought up in that hashtag and address them in blog posts (maybe a weekly roundup, mark tweets you want to comment on as "Favorite" so you can look them up again easily until you're done with the content).

And the biggest difficulty for real time with a show like the Secret History of rock is that Canada is really, really big and even in markets where the show is playing near the same time have a vested interest in keeping their listeners (it's one thing to say tune in, it's another to say where and if you favour one station over another for the real time feedback loop, I'm sure someone will notice... sooner or later).

Creating more and more niche spaces (G+), I think help dilute a brand (unless you can devote resources to maintain them all).

[Nscafe]

Or hey, make a blog post for the show and keep refreshing and replying to the comments as the shows air across the North American timezones.