Snow fell on mountains across the Western Cape last Friday, including on Cape Town’s iconic mountain. For a change, Table Mountain wasn’t shrouded in cloud but instead was dusted with snow.
In the background, a team of content producers clicked into action.
Producer of Kfm’s Breakfast Show, Stephen Werner knew that the Show’s audience would want pictures of this unique moment. He kicked into gear, working with Ryan O Connor, 94.5 Kfm’s breakfast show host, to call for listeners to submit pictures while simultaneously activating the Eyewitness News and Ground Patrol teams to get more exclusive pictures.
Within the hour, Kfm’s Twitter account started to trend and EWN Reporter’s Twitter account followed shortly afterwards. Simultaneously, the music site’s team was ‘harvesting’ the photos and placed the best on www.kfm.co.za – a newly designed site powered by one the world’s leading CMS’s. Within 10 hours the site had received 450% greater traffic than an average day and was 12-fold up on the average Friday traffic. The content effect rippled across the weekend with three times the average number of visitors hitting the site, mostly to go snow-viewing.
Far from being a once-off event this seamless integration of listener insight, momentum, content work across multiple departments, convergence of radio and digital platforms and use of leading technology has become a feature of Primedia Broadcasting’s life over the last two years. Typically known for its big-name presenters, its dominant radio brands, its promotion of active citizenship, proudly independent news and its audience of affluent, responsive listeners the group is less known in the public arena is the enormous investment in people, systems and processes that ensure delivery on client briefs and content production.
In April 2012, Primedia Broadcasting re-launched Eyewitness News’s website. In the months preceding that there had been a lot of work preparing content producers and on-air personnel for the new site and the strategy that would drive it. Over the course of the next year, it would exceed all expectations. In 2012, EWN was awarded a Bookmark Award (South Africa’s premiere digital awards). Primedia Broadcasting was the only radio group to win such an award. By early 2013, EWN’s mobi-site (designed by another Primedia company, Prezence) had grown so rapidly that it was consistently in the top 15 mobi-sites in the country. Again Primedia Broadcasting was the only radio group to be represented in this grouping.
The main site itself has more than doubled its unique users and continues to maintain an upward trajectory. Today, EWN consistently features in top five results returned by Google for various news stories and most recently pipped Al Jazeera to the No. 1 position with its story on the arrest of Al Jazeera’s photographer, Adil Bradlow.
The learning from EWN has been spread across the business. In some weeks LeadSA’s Facebook page reaches in excess of 150 000 people thanks to a carefully honed content strategy. Talk Radio 702’s podcasts are downloaded in their thousands; Facebook posts by 94.7 Highveld Stereo’s Breakfast Xpress team are often shared by hundreds of fans. 94.5 Kfm’s breakfast team has become adept at turning around user-generated dance competitions, often receiving close on a hundred priceless video entries receiving thousands of views.
Star Power, a phone-app based promotion run on Primedia’s music stations in collaboration with Samsung was downloaded in excess of 65,000 times. In January, Primedia Broadcasting launched a Matric Results app – the first of its kind in South Africa – generating hundreds of thousands of views in under 3 days.
This case study was provided by Primedia Broadcsting.
IMAGE: From Kfm website, by Gilad Stern. For more snow photos, click here.
