Alan Mason, a consultant to the radio industry and partner in the GoodRatings consultancy, made an interesting comment in an article today:
Take Twitter on the other hand. It's jumped from nothing to more than five million active consumers in a short period of time. Raise your hand if your station as more than five million people in the cume.
But it's not about Twitter, it's about why consumers use it and how it will help you engage your consumers. That's the important part, the level of relationship you have with your listener us where the money is, not with the technology itself.
If you want to monitize technology you need to get into the technology business. In radio, it's still about how many people listen, and how passionate they are about you, not about whether you twitter or not.
The technological tools that are available today are not going to make you money unless you find a way to tie them to your core business - radio. For example, you're not going to be able to monetize your twitter feed; but, you could use it to drive listeners to your advertisers by using tiny urls and measure the click-through response. Just an idea.