Radio 92.9 who?

It’s been over a year since I first posted about the format change of WBOS to Radio 92.9.  For those of us who liked the old station, the switch was KIND OF A BIG DEAL.

I’ve got a pretty low key blog here, and I generally find it distasteful when people quote their stats, but I think it’s interesting too look and see what type of activity I had over the course of a year or so. I’m hoping my buddies over at WBOS/92.9 will think so too.

I still get a decent amount of traffic to this site as a result of people searching on WBOS or Radio 92.9.  YES, PEOPLE ARE STILL GOOGLING THIS TOPIC! According to my WordPress Dashboard, I’ve had 8,398 page views for my WBOS posts. That doesn’t even include the people who viewed multiple posts from the home page. That’s a lot of views.  I’ve had over 200 comments.  The comments have, of course, tapered off, but once in awhile someone still comes along to express their disappointment. 

I said back then that I was listening to WBUR  more. I STILL AM. And, guess what — WBUR actually talks to their customers. In fact, they do an excellent job at cultivating a positive brand image using a variety of social media — such as via Twitter (@wbur), and their regular in-person Tweet-ups where they give fans a tour of the station, engage in conversation and then head out for drinks after. I’m wearing my cozy WBUR fleece jacket as I type this. I shelled out quite a bit of money for this jacket during their fundraiser last fall, and I did so happily because of my relationship with the station.

I also said that I would have loved to listen to The River 92.5 just down the dial from my old station, but the biggest barrier was the reception. Non-existent in my house. Not so good in the car either due to a damaged antenna. Well, guess what? I have a different car now and can listen to 92.5 all I want, which suits me just fine. Plus, just to complicate things, the new car has XM satellite radio. So there.

If you Google 92.5 or WBOS, you will see that my posts are still near the top — maybe not #1 anymore, but still in the top 20 or 30.  I’m still surprised that I never received any official communication from the station.  Way to go!  I was also disappointed at several local journalists who clearly referenced my posts but didn’t link back to my site. Oh well. I wasn’t really doing it for the publicity. In fact, the surge in traffic was a huge surprise. 

So you might be wondering, what ended up happening to the station’s ratings? Did they improve as they had hoped. Well, it looks like they did.  See the ratings: http://tinyurl.com/d6mxnu.  And to show their gratitude to Dana Marshall, the program director who took over in February 2008 and would have been part of this success, Greater Media laid her off in January along with some others. Nice. 

So, in the end, the business bots over at Greater Media will pat themselves on the back and say they did the right thing. Some of their previous audience is likely putting up with the new station because it’s close to their preferred format, and they’ve likely got a bunch of new, younger listeners who like a harder sound. The rest of us, well…we just moved on and it worked out great too.  So I guess it was a win win after all.

After all, it’s not personal, it’s just business.