Six of the many speakers at RadioDays Europe were chosen to speed through five good ideas each on the second day of the conference in Vienna.
 
“Ideas you can steal and pretend they’re your own.”
 
Here are the speakers and their ideas:
 
Staxx Williams Z100 New York

• Jingles: do your jingle singers reflect the demographic of your audience?
• Use the same music tools that your artists use
• Keep it meme-erable. Will your content make it through the first 5 seconds before people mentally skip
• Your creative diet is important – do things that enrich you and inspire you with good ideas
• You are always interviewing for a new job, be the person who gets it done, it what will get you your next job.

 
Lynsey Hooper, The Offside Rule Podcast UK

• What is your USP? Make sure you have something that is unique that sets your podcast apart
• The beauty is in the detail. Think about the platform, content and quality before you start to get the best audio.
• Branding is important. Use branding tricks to reach your audience
• Spreading the word. Link with other podcasts, use every promotional opportunity to mention your podcast
• Monetisation – it is starting to be big business, tap into it

 
Martin Fencak, Radio Express, number one station in Slovakia

• Listeners already know the information before they turn on the radio, so what’s your added value for them? Give them more than just news headlines, weather or music positioning.
• Authenticity is key. Encourage hosts to have active and exciting personal lives so they can share things with listeners that they are enjoying or passionate about. If you’re in a team, surprise each other.
• The strategy is not only for top management. They have to believe in you, talk about what is working, sharer great audio in meetings.
• Details make a difference in research. Dayparting is key and it applies to all program elements: music, news, hosts, etc
• Effective promotion. Always try to create unique content – questionnaires, polls, etc are your listeners creating unique content that only you can use.

 
Naja Nielsen, Orb Media, Denmark

• Love your community. Include your listeners are expert informants, backgrounders. Shout out via social media and on air to your audience, it leads to really good journalism.
• Ask not what you can do for you, ask what you can do for your audience.
• Do what you do best and do it really well. Example Serial podcast – listen to the credits at the end of the Serial podcast to see how many people doing many different jobs you will see the commitment to quality in that show.
• Collaboration is true win-win. Example: The Correspondent https://thecorrespondent.com/. This publication only publishes a few detailed stories per year, but they are well researched and they collaborate with media around the world to make and spread the story

 
Jo Stanley, Australia
 
5 things that talent want program directors to know:

• Great ideas happen in the shower… or on a run, shopping, on the toilet. They happen incidentally, they almost never happen in a meeting room to a external deadline.
• Don’t throw us out of a plane. Making us do stunts is entertaining because we are pushed to our limits, but what is better is getting us to answer questions that go to the heart of us. Who are you missing right now? Talk about when you let someone down? The moment you first saw your baby?
• Let us fail. Failure is important for creativity, you have to take risks to grow so create an environment when it is safe for us to fail. We know it didn’t work, we will never forget it, I don’t need to sit in a room and explain my failure because it will not gie me the environment to fail. Let us play and see what happens, even embracing the failure as it is happening.
• Give us a seat at the table. Don’t treat us like babies, inform us about the big picture and the strategy.
• We can handle the truth. Don’t lie, manipulate or protect us, have the hard conversations with us.

  
Steve Ackerman, Somethin’ Else Social Media Content Agency UK

• It’s a battle for the eyes and ears on social media. Grab attention. Don’t let the intern write dodgy tweets, make beautiful social media aassets that grab attention immediately.
• Think like a brand. Create a uniform look and feel for your social media content
• Sweat the assets. You have great assets – content. Take what you are doing and amplify that.
• What do I hear, how does it look? Listen to the audio and imagine the visual. Visualise your audio trailers.
• Keep your social media entertaining. We are in the entertainment business, our social media should be too.
• Turn fans into listeners and listeners into fans. Reach out to people on social who don’t know you exist. Create social media content that your own fans can share with their friends to promote you.