Saving your community affairs department

As television stations around the country look for ways to cut costs in the face of dwindling revenue, increased operating expenses, and economic turmoil, many have already dramatically reduced the staff alloted to, or even entirely eliminated, their community affairs departments. Now, with the future viability of local media often called into question, you can sense the fear in the halls of most broadcast companies. Change has come to our industry. Make no mistake. But this is a time for your community affairs department to be leaders of that change not its victims.

1. Admit you’re really part of the marketing department.

Community affairs departments were created years ago to reinforce a marketing message of community service. That message was especially important in an industry that relies upon the FCC licensed use of public airwaves. But now, thanks to deregulation and the proliferation of new distribution models, broadcast companies decreasingly see themselves as beholden to the public as such. Consequently, the message you were initially called to propagate has too, overtime, become less valuable. But if you can embrace marketing as what you’ve been called on to do all along, you’ll find marketing has changed, and that you’re perhaps the best suited department in your station for the challenges of new marketing. You see, new marketing isn’t about massive media buys. It isn’t about bombarding as many people as you can with a branded commodity’s advertising. Simply put, new marketing isn’t about broadcasting. But what new marketing is about is engaging consumers in discourse. It’s about seeking out your customers where they are to engage them instead of waiting for them to engage you. It’s about the niche. It’s about building communities, and, if you’re good, new marketing is about starting movements.

2. Get back to your grassroots. Start some movements.

I’m willing to bet that at least some of you reading this found yourself attracted to this field because of a desire to help others, to be a part of something larger than yourself, a part of a movement. But somewhere along the way you found you were going to meetings. You were dealing with human resource issues. And you were struggling to make budget. But you weren’t building communities, and you certainly weren’t leading any movements. Well, now is the time to get back to your roots, your grassroots. You need to be discovering your station’s content niches, fostering any community that may already have grown up around them and then leading your station’s engagement with these communities. What can you do to give a community voice? How can you help build that community? Grow it? How can you help shape that community into a movement? Thanks to the Internet, now, more than ever, the tools to enable communication within a movement are readily available, but don’t wait for your station’s Web department to fit you into their schedule. They’re too busy posting news content and creating display ads. Instead, seek out the ever-increasing number of free online tools you can use to build and extend communities. In addition to the more popular tools like blogging, Facebook, Flickr and Twitter, try setting up your own social network on PeopleAggregator or Ning.

3. Earn revenue by offering niche sponsorship opportunities.

You may already be earning revenue through corporate sponsorships of a handful of seemingly philanthropic programs. Those sponsorships usually boil down to a logo and a voice-over credit at the tail end of a promo. The problem with this, though, is two-fold. First, as an economy wanes, campaigns of these sorts are often the first cut by advertisers. Second, and more pointedly, as ratings decline in the face of alternative distribution models, these paid sponsorships are of decreasing value to clients, and thus, will be increasingly difficult for your sales team to secure. You won’t be able to find a few sponsors that underwrite most of your department’s budget through large sponsorship deals. Instead, you’ll need to find a greater number of advertisers willing to support your station’s niche communities. Ultimately, this is better for advertisers because the barrier to entry, namely cost, is significantly lower, and it allows them to better target niche audiences which are more likely to respond to their marketing efforts.

4. Build communities and movements within your station.

We’re often so focused on our users, viewers or listeners that we easily forget our stations themselves are made up of individuals who want and need to be social, to be a part of a community, a part of a movement. Look for opportunities to be leaders of change in your very own building. Do you have a station effort to help your staff be more green? Could you start one and impassion others around the effort? What about identifying your station’s early adopters and tapping their expertise to discover emerging technologies, applications and platforms that could benefit your operation and then implementing some of those discoveries? Find ways to start conversations about change within your station and to enable voices who otherwise might not have been heard. If your station isn’t using Yammer, which is a Twitter-like tool for communication within the enterprise, it should be. In lieu of that, start an email list to reach out and foster discussion around areas of change. But don’t let your efforts stall in those discussions. Look for key actionable ideas and then lead the execution of those ideas. Start some movements.

5. Become your station’s social media experts.

Every department in your building is or is beginning to realize just how much the game has changed. The old tools aren’t working as well as they used to and social media is beginning to pervade almost every sales, promotions, and news effort. Your promotions department will want to know about using social media for marketing your station’s efforts, to reach your audience where they are. Your news department will have questions about using Twitter or Facebook to find sources, cover breaking news. Help train reporters to use their smart phones and social media to increase transparency and expose their process. Work with your sales department on campaigns that leverage your station’s existing communities to extend your client’s marketing message. In short, be the go to people for social media.