Here's a VRM : enlarge the market for public radio's products by reducing the friction required to pay for them.
Throughout the history of public broadcasting
It's Public Broadcasting Week here in Boston. The Interactive Media Association is holding its annual conference here all week. Then Harvard's Berkman Center will hold Beyond Broadcast this Saturday. I'm here for all of it, and that's in addition to meetings I attended last week at NPR in Washington, D.C.
I'm at the Integrated Media Association conference in Boston right now, where the first speaker is Henry Becton of WGBH, a public radio and television landmark here in Boston.
He's saying a lot of encouraging things. "We can't afford any more to work in silos", for example. He clearly understands What's Going On. But he (and the industry) need some help with the specifics. He knows that too, and is working to embrace the opportunities, which is also encouraging.
One area where his current model needs help is with silo-molded station-centricity. For example, he just said WGBH needs to do more "research, marketing and branding". That's old skool stuff. What's needed are ways to involve the station and its creative sources with the larger world where a surfeit of independent listeners and producers are generating and mashing up all kinds of stuff — including information that stations will need to remain relevant and involved with an industry they control less and less.
"We're leaving a lot of dollars on the table", Henry says. "Twenty million dollars" alone is lost when listeners move from one station's coverage area to another. "We need to manage relationships... merge member bases into a national database..." He laments that a paying listener moving from Boston to Washington gets pitched by a mailing from the soup kitchen before hearing from the local public radio station.This is CRM thinking, and totally understandabe, because Customer Relationship Managment is all that large organizations with lots of customers know. But what's needed here is VRM — Vendor Relationship Management.