The PhoneBoy Blog

Engage Your Audience Or Lose It

19 Sep 2008

Image of Ken Rutkowski

For the longest time, one my favorite podcasts has been KenRadio. It isn’t one of the longest running daily “media entertainment technology” news shows for nothing. However, I came to an important conclusion about the show and how it interacts–or doesn’t–with it’s audience.

Let’s be clear. I don’t expect someone like Leo Laporte, Cali Lewis, or even KenRadio’s Ken Rutkowski to necessarily respond to emails I send to them personally. I know these guys get hundreds of emails a day and couldn’t possibly do it. I also don’t expect them to necessarily respond to everyone who sends them a message on a service like Twitter, either.

However, I expect these “stars” or “media personalities” to make an effort to participate–especially if they sign themselves up for service like Twitter. Or–worse yet–set up a forum on their own site! More often than not, over the years, the forum on KenRadio has either not worked or when it has, has almost zero participation from the host.

Ken Rutkowski often calls himself a broadcaster. He’s right–in the very old sense of the word. He broadcasts. There is very little attempt at engaging the audience directly. In fact, I think that’s the reason Ken doesn’t get Twitter. He doesn’t want to engage the audience.

Contrast this with someone like Leo Laporte or Cali Lewis. They interact with their audience, or at least they make a very honest attempt at it. Again, there’s no way I would expect them to be able to respond to all the emails they get, Tweets, or whatever. They actually try, though.

The bottom line: Ken asks us to engage him, but he doesn’t really engage us back. That’s old school broadcasting at it’s worst, and quite frankly, I’m done with it. I’ll miss the Ken and Andy banter–as well as some of the insight they offer. On the topic, though, there are plenty of other shows out there that cover similar topic and do a much better job at actually engaging with the audience.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to engage me on this topic because I’m either right or full of it, you know what to do. Unlike some people, I’ll respond!