For this week's blog post, our group focused on WPST's PR plan. We followed WPST and how they run their business as well as any problems we see within the radio station. We also evaluated their company through a variety of different media functions and how they interacted with fans and listeners.
After talking to a former Intern at WPST, a growing problem seems to be their communication: one of the major factors in running a business. Although WPST's website is very interactive and great for social media, the communication is still a little off and lacks some things. DJ's can be contacted on their blogs with questions regarding them, and you can also call WPST directly. But, in today's day and age, email is a huge factor for communication. During this interview, email came up a lot as well as how they manage their emails. Some feel as though their communication can be a lot better. Over the next few weeks we will be conducting an interview with WPST and hopefully we can help them solve part of this problem.
Another concern of WPST's PR plan is the demographic they target. WPST is mostly focused on the "tween" (ages 10-15, and adults ages 30+). They are missing out on a great target audience, which are the older teenagers and college students (ages 16-25). WPST does many great things to promote themselves to the audiences they want, such as concert events that feature artists that young teenagers listen to and lunches and cookouts for local businesses. However, they could do much more to try to get college-aged listeners. They could come to different college events, such as our Cranberry Fest or even sponsor our fall and spring concerts. WPST would really benefit by opening up their target audience and going out of their way to get more listeners from different age groups.
During the entire Fall '09 semester, we have been following WPST on Twitter. The first thing we noticed was how easy WPST is to search and how accessible they are for their fans. They usually tweet every three hours. Tweeting often is a good public relations tool, because it makes WPST a fun and informative radio station to follow. We also following other radio stations such as,WAYV 95.1 and Q102. Both radio stations do not tweet daily, and sometimes it takes them a week for them to tweet. Not updating your Twitter often creates lack of communication among them and their fans and also a bad public relations. Although WPST is doing a great job on managing their Twitter account, we did not see any interest from the radio station on following their fans. They are only following 41 twitter profiles and the majority of people who are they following are celebrities. We have been trying to get WPST to follow our Twitter page since the page was set up and we would suggest that they follow us in order to let them know about our opinions and our project.
We did not only follow WPST on Twitter, but we also became fans of their Facebook profile. Their statuses are also updated every four hours. The DJ's often share links and also pictures with their fans. This is a good public relations strategy because they give their fans an opportunity to know about the radio station events and crew through this popular social website that everybody logs in often. Their Facebook profile is filled with useful information about their events and other links to their other social websites profile such as, Youtube, Twitter, Blog, and their main website. As a fan we can also comment on their links and statuses.
As we've been studying WPST inside and out, through following their Twitter, Facebook, website and conducting a helpful interview, with hopes in acquiring a larger one. We've learned a lot about how their radio station works and functions. They do a good job at updating both their Facebook and Twitter, two exceptional PR tools of this age, but there are still a few suggestions we could make to improve their connections with the outside world a.k.a. their current listeners and general public that they wish to attract. By observing and evaluating WPST, we've devised a great list of questions that we plan to ask the DJ, whichever one we obtain when we acquire the interview, to ask the station (improvements, suggestions and such) that they will hopefully take into account. With our hopes and intentions, this will widen their event schedule, branching out to new genres of people (college students and older adults, etc.), increase their demographic to other ages, and overall, make WPST a more appealing radio station that people of all ages will be attracted to.
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