Tag Archives: global radio

Managing the digital content strategy for the Jingle Bell Ball 2014

One of the reasons I absolute love working for Global Radio is being involved in the amazing selection of events they put on each year. Whether it’s Capital’s Summertime Ball, Jingle Bell Ball or XFM’s Winter Wonderland – it’s always an exciting time of year as the company rallies round to deliver a brilliant experience for our audience.

As a content person I particularly love these live events because, no matter how much you plan in advance, there are always challenges (and opportunities) that crop up which need to be dealt with in the moment. If you want to get academic, it means providing an editorial structure that is nimble enough to adapt to traffic behaviour, potential technical difficulties, competitors or just amazing stuff that just happens on the day that you couldn’t have prepared for in any planning session. And it rocks.

This year covering Capital’s Jingle Bell Ball has been extra special for us as we’ve recently launched our brand new mobile site only a few weeks ago. As the majority of the Capital audience visit us via mobile, it’s been important to ensure they get the best experience possible and, looking at the positive growth in audience numbers, it’s good to see they agree!

Besides updating platforms, I think the biggest change we made this year to cover the ball was just around workflow. This is the nerdy side of editorial that, I must admit, I’m very interested in. This year we really looked at the time it took to deliver content to our audience from inception (onstage performances or backstage antics) to delivery (video, gallery, article etc) and eliminated any obstacles. That meant creating a workflow that adapted throughout the day and in accordance with the content we wanted to prioritise.

Layer on search and social and that’s an interesting beast to manoeuvre – and only made possible by a brilliant digital content team working within a slick operation that is all working towards a common goal.

Day one is now over and I’m about to head over to the O2 to prepare for the arrival of another fantastic lineup of artists. If you’re with us today in person, or through radio, online or mobile, I hope you have a brilliant day!

Follow Capital’s Jingle Bell Ball live blog here.

Capital FM website.

Delivering Global’s Make Some Noise on Digital

Make Some Noise Global Radio

It’s 8am which means I’ve already been at work for a couple of hours swigging copious amounts of coffee and helping the digital team deliver Global’s new charity Make Some Noise. This a big day for Global as all our radio stations are coming together for one cause – which is to raise money for disadvantaged children and young people across the UK.

That means co-ordinating content across the brands and making sure we’re delivering the very best from radio – ultimately driving people to our Make Some Noise donation page.

It’s the first time since I’ve been at the company where we’ve co-ordinated a single campaign across all brands and it’s been really fantastic to see how people across the business have gone the extra mile to make it all happen.

I’ve used Scribblelive to track all the Make Some Noise activity across our brand twitter accounts which you can view here. We’re also using this live blog tool on the Capital fm homepage and Heart.
You can also view highlights of our #fakesomenoise social media campaign here and one of my favourites has to be this:

And yes, we also have a DRESS LOUD campaign and that is my favourite jumper!

So far we’ve raised just short of £300k. Text NOISE to 70070 to donate £5.