Interaction and community are key in the future of radio. But how are we able to collect, manage and use input from various interfaces in an efficient way? Enter the MARCONI platform. Have a look at this third use case and find out how radio presenter Jan and listener Bernd are able to co-create stories on the radio.
Jan is the presenter of an informational radio show on the national radio station of Belgium. The show attracts thousands of listeners every morning. An important asset of the show is listener interaction, such as the request for feedback on a certain topic, or a response to polls on current topics, or asking for domain experts to comment. Interaction is supported via several platforms such as e-mail, sms, Facebook, Instagram and the radio station’s smartphone application.
Each of these platforms has their own interface. As a result, radio presenters and editors need to constantly switch between several screens and/or browser tabs, which is an inefficient and frustrating way of working. Luckily, MARCONI offers a solution: Jan is able to open a unified interaction interface with the MARCONI editorial app. The relevant platforms for his radio show are automatically loaded in the app. Jan already predefined these relevant platforms a few months ago. Most of the listeners contact him via e-mail, so they are automatically connected with his radio show and added to the live feed. Jan does not often use photos, but for the item in his show today, he requests listeners to send in pictures of traffic safety examples in Brussels. In the “Sources” panel of the MARCONI editorial app, he filters for pictures of streets, geotagged by Brussels. Incoming pictures are automatically filtered and added to the live feed view. Jan starts a conversation with a listener that sent in some very interesting pictures, and labels the pictures appropriately so that he can use them in a discussion on the next day.
After his show, at 10:00AM, Jan starts to prepare for the next show by creating a new label for his item. He uses the MARCONI editorial app to look for listeners that are most likely to provide valuable input for this story. Listeners are classified by these properties and are given a category named after an animal. For his item about the traffic safety in Brussels, Jan looks for people with an informed opinion, writing skills and interest in mobility. After some searching, he finds out that these properties are mostly found with people in the "Owl" category. First, he opens the "Announcements" tab, and clicks the "Create new" button. He adds an internal description for the editorial team, and an external message, that listeners in the "Owl" category will receive. He schedules the post for 12:00PM, as most people have a lunch break then and will be available to respond.
Listener Bernd receives this external message with the app of the radio station: “Give your opinion on the traffic safety issues”. Bernd opens the message and sees a text field that can fit 280 characters. In this field, Bernd reads “What’s your opinion?”, which is the default message. Bernd types in that there is a news article that predicted these traffic problems half a year ago, and posts the link to the article.
The next morning, the debate on traffic safety continues as new accidents occured. Jan creates a new filtered feed of live incoming messages from people in the "Owl" category or messages that contain "traffic", "accident" and "Brussels" as well. He marks relevant messages with the label that he created earlier.
Around 1:30PM, he opens the "Announcements tab". A new, filtered feed with answers to his Announcement has automatically been created. He selects some relevant answers, and interacts with these listeners, asking for more comments and quotes. He also labels the most interesting responses.
During the compilation of this story, Jan remembers a video sent in a couple of weeks ago that could be relevant to his story. Jan opens the search field of the MARCONI editorial app, which he uses to search the entire "Audience" database for messages. He types in some keywords that he can remember in order to identify the video: "video of largest traffic jam at Meiserplein in Brussels in December 2017". He finds two relevant videos and hovers over the first one, enabling him to run through it quickly. Using this method, it turns out that the video he’s been looking for is actually the second one. He clicks it to open the conversation and find more context. He uses this conversation to post a quote with the video.
His story has two derivatives: one radio item in the evening, and one article on the website. Jan opens the MARCONI app and selects the label that he created earlier to collect assets for his story. There, he can find all relevant messages, photos and videos, categorized by type, user and content. For the radio item, he starts dragging the items in the show’s rundown, which is automatically synced with Pluxbox RadioManager. For the article, he drags the items in the website editor, for some additional formatting and text in-between. Afterwards, he is able to publish it on the radio station’s website with one click. Because he has a precise overview of every listener that helped co-creating this article, he sends a link to the final overview to every one of these users.
