The report, which is drawn from the Edison Research/Arbitron Infinite Dial series, showcases how moms are using technology and consuming various forms of media.   Moms have specific needs that non-moms don’t and therefore use their devices in different ways.  The report notes strong mobile tendencies that continue to evolve as smartphones and tablets become even more integral for moms.  These devices allow for constant access to the Internet wherever moms are, and whatever they are doing.

According to Moms and Media 2013, smartphone ownership among moms continues to show growth.  64% of moms reported owning a smartphone, up from the 61% we saw in last year’s report.   Also noteworthy is the steady lead that moms maintain over the total respondents 12+, with 53% of that sample saying they own a smartphone.

A good match for a busy lifestyle, tablets are fitting in nicely with mobile moms, showing significant growth over the last year. About 3 in 10 moms now own some kind of tablet.

We see that moms favor mobility in their devices so they can take Internet and specifically Facebook with them throughout the day.  We see in this year’s data that cell phone has closed in on computer for how Facebook moms are accessing the site most.    Just as many moms (45%) said they access Facebook most via cell phone as did those who access it most via computer (46%).

This ever increasing, mobile nature of moms allows them to fluidly multi-task with their media, boosting their total consumption on a daily basis.  In ten years, mom’s time with media has grown to be more than one third of her entire day.

We now know that moms are multi-tasking with their media on the go, but Moms and Media 2013 also revealed that they are simultaneously consuming new and traditional media even at home.  The majority of moms with Internet access said they share at least some part of their television viewing time with Internet usage.  Without a doubt, smartphones and tablets are giving moms the means to do this, while social networking is giving them the reason.   With a remote in one hand and a smartphone in the other, moms don’t have to miss a thing.

Download the complete Moms and Media 2013 report here.

Separate Reports By Individual AM/FM Formats Available to Clients, Planned For Early May

Forty-seven percent of CHR format P1s have listened to Online Radio in the last week according to new data from The Infinite Dial 2013: Navigating Digital Platforms from Arbitron Inc. (NYSE: ARB) and Edison Research.  The new data released today for Arbitron clients looks at radio format P1s from nine AM/FM Radio formats: Adult Contemporary, CHR, Classic Rock/Classic Hits, Country, News/Talk/Sports, Public Radio, Religious, Rock, and Urban.

Highlights of the study’s many findings include:

• CHR P1s have the highest Online Radio listening levels with 47 percent having listened in the last week. More than four in ten Public Radio, Rock and Urban P1s also listened to Online Radio in the last week.

• One in three Public Radio P1s have listened to audio podcasts in the past month

• CHR (75 percent), Rock (70 percent) and Urban (67 percent) P1s are the format P1s most likely to own a smartphone

• The vast majority of CHR P1s (82 percent) have a profile on any social network, with nearly half (45 percent) of these listeners using social media several times per day

• Eight percent of the population age 12+, an estimated 20 million, has signed up to receive email from the AM or FM radio station they listen to most; 20 percent of Rock P1s and 18 percent of Religious P1s have done so

“This representative and projectable study looks at how various format P1s use digital platforms, revealing that each format has a unique digital profile.  Programmers and brand managers should consider these unique differences when formulating their digital strategies,” said Bill Rose, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Arbitron.

“Ninety-two percent of the population has not signed up to receive emails from the broadcast radio station they listen to most.  If broadcast radio programmers are making decisions based solely on their email databases alone, this will not give them the complete picture of the digital media usage and behaviors of all of their P1s,” added Tom Webster, Vice President of Strategy and Marketing, Edison Research.

This study may be downloaded by Arbitron clients free of charge via the Arbitron website at my.arbitron.com.  Previous studies, including the full Infinite Dial 2013 study (released earlier this month), may be downloaded free of charge via the Arbitron and Edison Research websites at www.arbitron.com and www.edisonresearch.com.

How the study was conducted

A total of 2,021 persons were interviewed to investigate Americans’ use of digital platforms and new media.  From January 15 to February 10, 2013, telephone interviews were conducted with respondents age 12 and older chosen at random from a national sample of Arbitron’s Fall 2012 survey diarykeepers and through random digit dialing (RDD) sampling in geographic areas where Arbitron diarykeepers were not available for the survey.  Diarykeepers represent 45% of the completed interviews and RDD sampled respondents represent 55% of the completed interviews.  The study includes a total of 711 cell phone interviews.

To categorize separate format P1s for this study, we asked respondents, “What one AM or FM radio station do you listen to most?”  Each station was then identified, and respondents were assigned as P1 to a format.

About Arbitron

Arbitron Inc. (NYSE: ARB) is an international media and marketing research firm serving the media—radio, television, cable, and out-of-home—the mobile industry, as well as advertising agencies and advertisers around the world. Arbitron’s businesses include: measuring network and local market radio audiences across the United States; surveying the retail, media, and product patterns of U.S. consumers; providing mobile audience measurement and analytics in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia; and developing application software used for analyzing media audience and marketing information data.

The Company has developed the Portable People Meter™ (PPM®) and the PPM 360™, new technologies for media and marketing research.

Portable People Meter™, PPM®, and PPM 360® are marks of Arbitron Inc.

About Edison Research

Edison Research conducts survey research and provides strategic information to a broad array of clients, including Activision, AMC Theatres, Disney, Dolby, Google, MTV, Samsung, Siemens, Time Warner, Yahoo!, The Voice of America and Zenithmedia. Edison Research works with many of the largest American radio ownership groups, including Entercom, Clear Channel, CBS Radio and Radio One. Another specialty for Edison is its work for media companies throughout the world, conducting research in North America, South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Edison Research is the sole provider of election exit poll data for the six major news organizations: ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, NBC and the Associated Press. Edison is also the leading provider of consumer exit polling and has conducted face-to-face research in almost every imaginable venue.

Study Also Reveals That More Than Half of Americans Now Own a Smartphone

One in three Americans aged 12 and older now listen to all forms of online radio[1] on a weekly basis according to the new national survey from Arbitron Inc. (NYSE: ARB) and Edison Research, The Infinite Dial 2013: Navigating Digital Platforms.

The study, released today, is the 21^st in a series of studies dating back to 1998.  Among the many other findings:

• Fifty-three percent of all Americans aged 12 and over (an estimated 139 million people) own a smartphone; three-quarters of those aged 18-to-34 own these devices

• Weekly online radio listeners report listening for an average of 11 hours 56 minutes per week, up by more than two hours over last year’s listening levels (9 hours 46 minutes in 2012), and nearly double that reported in 2008 (6 hours 13 minutes). During the same span of time, Arbitron’s RADAR service indicates that AM/FM Radio has grown to 243 million weekly listeners and time spent listening has remained approximately two hours a day

• More than one in four Americans (27 percent) check their social network several times per day, estimated at 71 million people

• AM/FM radio is an “almost all of the times” or “most of the times” in-car choice for nearly six in ten adults aged 18 and over; dashboard AM/FM radio (58 percent) far outpaces frequent in-car use of CD players (15 percent), portable digital audio/MP3 players (11 percent) and satellite radio (10 percent)

• AM/FM Radio delivers far more consumers (49 percent) than other media during the half hour before they arrive to shop, more than twice the number reached by the next closest medium (advertising on Billboards at 21 percent)

• Twenty-nine percent own a tablet; this is up more than 70 percent in the last year, compared to 17 percent ownership in 2012

• Among the nearly half of Americans (45 percent) who say it is important to learn about and keep up-to-date with new music, AM/FM Radio is the top source for new music discovery at 78 percent

Throughout the evolution of radio research, spanning nearly 40 years, the industry has mostly concentrated on the hard facts of research, and the easily-quantifiable – answering questions like, “What portion of the audience likes this song?” or, “What portion of the audience works in an office?”  For that sort of study we call people on the phone, or now contact them on the Internet, or bring them to hotel ballrooms for auditorium music tests or to focus group facilities.  However there is one place that our research mostly hasn’t gone to – straight into the homes of the listeners.  There’s also an entire line of inquiry we largely haven’t attempted – understanding the emotions underneath the behaviors and the real connections that people have to country music and country radio.

We are in a time where broadcast radio has more competition than ever before.  Yet at the same time, the masters of the radio universe have pulled way back on the inquiries that we engage in about music and radio.  This is why we are lucky to have the Country Radio Broadcasters and their commitment to provide innovative research for the radio industry.  The project they tasked us with undertaking this year is what is known in the broader research world as ethnography, or the practice of observing and talking to people in their homes and natural environments.  In order to conduct the deepest-level inquiry we combined our experience in radio research with the expertise of Prosperity Productions, a New York-based company that specializes in ethnography.

There can sometimes be quite a difference between people’s actual behavior and what they say they do in a survey or focus group setting.  When you ask directly about the purpose of a paper towel, most people will say, “to clean up messes.”  However, when you actually observe people using paper towels, they often crumple them up into big wads before cleaning anything.  The real motivation underneath the behavior is creating a barrier between the hand and the mess.

For this study, we aimed to get underneath the story of Country radio music listening and get a glimpse of how people behave when they’re being their real selves in their real environments. This allows us to draw insights into who they really are, in ways that they often can’t even articulate themselves. At this base level, radio programmers can learn how to give their listeners a connection they may not have even known they wanted.

In an average ethnographic study, you might talk with eight to ten people – a smaller sample with a much deeper amount of inquiry.  We actually doubled that for this study, talking with people in four time zones and using a variety of methods.  We first created a connection with our respondents through telephone interviews. Then, some went on to do what’s called a video diary, where they film themselves and their families in key moments throughout their everyday lives. For others, our team actually traveled to their homes and visited with them for several hours.  We also followed up by telephone with additional questions based on what we had observed.  Overall, we spent over 60 hours with these Country Radio P1s, in 13 states, across four time zones.   That’s a substantial amount of time, and more than enough to see major patterns across our audiences.

We’ll start off by meeting Jason, a 30-year-old gym manager and fitness trainer who lives just outside of Fort Worth, Texas.  In the video, you’ll see what Country music means to him in his life and just how often and how deeply he connects with it, both personally and socially.  His favorite radio station is KHYI, “The Ranch,” and he listens to that primarily in his car – but as you watch this video, notice how much he’s relying on his phone now for music at work.  The good news for radio is that he has downloaded an app to listen to The Ranch on his iPhone, but when asked what he’d do without radio he said, “It would be kind of hard to accept at first, but I think with technology these days I could adapt.”  Take a peek into Jason’s life here:

Oftentimes in this type of work, it’s instructive to think about the things we could have heard, or expected to hear, but didn’t. Going into it, we thought we’d hear about the moment each day or throughout the day when listeners turn on the radio, in the same way that in other studies we hear people talk about the ritual of making their first cup of coffee.  But Country fans found it difficult to pinpoint the exact moments they turned Country on, because Country is always on. This in itself is a significant finding and points to how Country is different from other kinds of music in a fundamental way.

In the next video, you’ll see several respondents show us how and where they listen to music. One is a man named Dwight, who has an impressive amount of media hook-ups throughout his home – he has a radio in almost every room – but recently he’s also set up a wireless speaker that can play music from his iPad when he doesn’t like what he hears on the radio.  When asked about new technology impacting his listening he said, “MP3, iPod kind of stuff, it’s just made it so easy to plug it in anywhere – car, home, you can move to it real quickly…now you can have all that and so much more on just one small device.  It certainly makes it easier to move to that if you want to.”

The video also shows Terri, who has a radio in every room as well, but she inherited her parents’ home so the radios in her home effectively came with the house.  She does some iTunes downloading, but still has a strong allegiance to radio.  She doesn’t love the idea of moving to a service where DJs wouldn’t have a presence. She said, “They really do need those radio personalities on the air because you feel that there’s somebody that’s attached to it. It’s not automated everything. I don’t like it that everything has gone to an automated industry… you see that everywhere. It’s taking the actual person and personality out of those stations.”

So what we’re seeing now is not just about listening, but about a kind of personification of Country. Country music is a constant companion. Country travels with these people throughout their days and throughout their lives. It’s there for them in all the important moments. For parents, it’s the difference in the relationship with your kids when you’re always there versus if you have to go away for a week or only see them at night. We’ll see more about why this makes Country different from other kinds of music, and later on how Country radio can capitalize on this difference. Our respondents overwhelmingly saw Country radio as a companion in their cars, and we explore that particular relationship further with this video:

The best marketing is often like a gift or a conversation you’re having with your listeners. The first order of business, then, is to understand the people. Who are they? What matters to them? How is today’s listener growing and evolving? We drove three hours from Dallas to a ranch in Hugo, Oklahoma. Nicky has his station presets in his truck for when he visits the city, but his selection at home is limited to one country station, KITX. He’s a bit of a character, and his rancher lifestyle certainly doesn’t match your average listener, but if you listen carefully and remember his words, they match the sentiments we heard from almost everyone in this study. Watch for the FM headset he wears when is on his tractor:

Country music is always on – traveling with these people throughout their days and their lives. This is where we start to see the special relationship that Country has with its listeners. It’s deeply connected to every important memory in their lives; and therefore has significant meaning, and it often begins early in life:

Now let’s look more deeply into the bonds that Country creates. Look for a deeper connection and the relationships here:

Now that we know a little bit more about who we are talking to in our marketing relationship, let’s look at what it all means to them by digging into that emotional connection and how that evolves over time as well. Why is Country so valuable, and how can radio tap into that sense of value more deeply?

Ashley is 20 years old and lives at home with her parents and two siblings. She’s been going to school and working part time. You might think a woman of this age would be itching to move out of her parents’ house, but she appreciates their support and they are a very close-knit family. For Ashley, Country radio means family. Her favorite station is WQRK. She’ll listen to it in her car going to and from work, but the station also plays a huge role during family time. Look for CMT playing in the background in the living room (the heart of the house) in the following video. At night, Ashley’s dad lights a bonfire in the back yard and that’s when we were first exposed to radio there. They roasted marshmallows, told stories, and the kids goofed around – all to WQYK’s soundtrack.

What we’re starting to see is that Country is there for them in all of their life moments. Other genres of music may come into and out of your life, but Country is with you every step of the way, like a good friend who is always there for you. If you’re a radio programmer, you should be thinking about this. If Country is a friend, and if radio used to be the way that everyone connected with that friend, how has that friendship changed? How is it evolving?

We asked, “What are some of the moments where Country music played a big part in your life?” and amazingly, these people told stories we weren’t quite prepared to hear. They opened up about some sad and very personal moments in their lives, particularly Erika from Aurora, Colorado (look for her at the end of this next sequence). The first woman in this clip is referencing “Ronan” by Taylor Swift, a song about a child with cancer.

So now we’ve seen that Country is part of every significant moment of people’s lives. For the most part, it’s the lyrics that create this bond. Country is like that great friend who is always there for you. Again, this lifelong relationship with Country used to be 100% radio, and we’re seeing that that is changing. If you’re in the radio industry, think about what you would do if you were a friend, offering this level of support and how that could apply to deepening the relationship with Country radio.

Studies on emotion show that a lot of happiness is not really experienced in the moment. Most of our happiness happens as we anticipate an event, and as we relive it. One of the key differences with Country versus other kinds of music is the degree to which it’s passed down to others. We’ve seen that with other music, people become kind of “frozen in time.” If you talk to kids whose parents love beach music, it’s a certain type of song. Country is shared with the whole family, from generation to generation.

We’ve already seen a lot of our next profiled respondent, Barbara, throughout the previous videos; she is 49 years old and lives in the suburbs of Baltimore. She is the mother of nine kids – several now grown with children of their own. We spent some time traveling around in Barbara’s minivan, where she had Country radio playing in the car the whole time. She had all the country stations on her presets bur her loyalty to WPOC developed mainly because of the personalities. She said that she loves radio “because it feels like community.” She doesn’t like all of the same songs as her kids, but as you’ll see it’s extremely important to her that she can relate to her kids through Country music:

Throughout this ethnography process we’ve seen that Country has a different kind of relationship with listeners than other genres, and we’ve seen that it stays with you, as Barbara said, like a lifelong “best friend.” It’s such an amazing relationship that people can’t wait to share it with their family and friends. Interestingly, even people who come to Country later in life feel the same way. So if Country is a lifelong friend, how is this friendship changing in 2013? As you watch this next clip, be thinking about how this relationship with Country is evolving and how radio can be a better “friend” to its listeners, growing and expanding that relationship to the next generation:

If we put ourselves into this mindset where we can think of Country music as a lifelong friend and constant companion, it allows us to talk about radio in the context of how it operates in service of this friend. It’s clear that when one spends time with these people, that radio has an at-home problem. Most people simply don’t have a lot of radios in their homes anymore – and acquiring them is a low priority. The priorities are television, Internet, and cell phones.

Radio is creating great entertainment every day, providing music people love, information they need, and a connection to their communities, but outside of cars, radio doesn’t bother with the hardware that enables it. When we asked people about radio, they talked about their cars.

It’s not just evident from this small group of men and women – it’s evident in ratings. In both diary markets and PPM markets, TSL at-home is declining – as is, to a smaller extent, cume at-home.

There are two potential solutions to this problem for the radio industry. One could try to convince people to buy more radios. We do see a little burst of purchase after every natural disaster. Hoping for natural disasters, however, is not a business strategy to be proud of.

The much easier solution is to make sure that radio is easily-available, top of mind, and works well on the devices that people already have and prioritize in their homes. Recently, Lew Dickey said on CNBC that he doesn’t see a revenue model for streaming. It’d be wise to figure one out, because for many people streaming through their phones is how they listen to music and radio, and how they want to listen to it. That phone is the hub of their lives.

Also, in almost every other country in the world, radio got itself on cable systems so that people could listen through their televisions. Is it too late for us here in America to offer our local radio products to local cable systems?

To this day, despite cable Country music video channels, services like Pandora and Spotify, iPods, or anything else, Country radio remains the closest relationship people have with the music. Only we can screw this relationship up by failing to deliver on the devices they want to consume audio on. Radio is competing not just with the other options along the radio dial, but with all the ways one can consume media today, especially in peoples’ homes.

Above all, what we learned from this study is that people mostly follow the path of least resistance to media. In their cars that remains, for now, the radio. At home, it’s increasingly not the radio – not because people don’t want to listen to the radio – but because it is harder and harder to find radio on the devices they use. Most people don’t even have a radio in their bedrooms, but they do have their phones, computers, and televisions.

They also do still have a relationship with the local Country radio station, and we’ve seen the depth of the relationships they have with Country music. As the medium connecting people to the emotions we saw throughout this study, radio programmers need to understand, develop, and nurture these relationships.

If you thought of radio’s relationship to listeners as a friendship instead of a consumer relationship, how could programmers act differently? How do you talk to your friends? When you send your friends e-mails, are you always selling them something? Are you concerned with commercializing your personal Facebook page? If you pull up the websites, Facebook pages, and even the on-air products of Country stations, it’s rare to find one that connects with the emotions we see in this study.

Most radio stations sell themselves to their listeners as something like “New Country,” or “Today’s Country and the Legends,” or “The Country Leader.” These are bland, emotion-free slogans. The one exception is the new Nash-FM in New York, which is taking a slightly different approach in a very different market with their “Country for Life” slogan.

What we saw in the lives of Country fans is that the radio is, or should be, a part of the relationship that connects them with their favorite music, not simply a pipeline that funnels the music to them. Do voice-tracked dayparts enhance that relationship? How about when one of Country’s truly emotional songs is followed by a fake DJ saying things that don’t connect with the song in any way?

And if every communication from the radio station is a sales pitch, what does that say about this relationship? Who would be loyal? If stations began thinking of listeners as more of a friend and less of a consumer, they might begin to re-assess some of their actions and marketing.

For the last 40 years of radio research we’ve done a great job with the clinical parts of the task – playing the right music, developing optimized clocks, and maximizing revenue opportunities. But before it’s too late, radio has to consider the emotional level of its appeal.

Thanks to the Country Radio Seminar and its leadership for helping us to conduct a study of this depth and enabling us to achieve some of these insights.

Edison’s involvement with St. Jude came when we were approached to perform research on listeners and radio managers about the Radiothon (and for what it’s worth – we performed this work pro bono). Since the advent of PPM, some stations had dropped the Radiothon when they saw that (naturally) their listening levels dropped during the days this effort ran. And on one level I get that – programmers are hired, fired, and bonused based on ratings, with no proviso for “two lower days while we help save the lives of kids with cancer.” And we know that the managers of today’s radio stations are under brutal pressure to produce based on ratings. Disturbingly, some stations in diary markets were considering dropping the Radiothon as well, even though any slippage is largely washed out and ‘unfindable’ in those markets.

Our research showed that while yes, listening dropped during those days, the levels recovered rapidly and in fact within a few days listening had pretty much reverted to the pre-Radiothon levels. And two weeks after the event, listening was actually a bit higher than before. So there is evidence of compensating goodwill that balances any lost listening for those two days.

But more to the point –if anyone actually were to go to Memphis, tour the hospital (which cares for all kids with no restrictions –and without accepting payment), learn about the research they are doing to find cures and how that ripples back to one’s own community, and chat with parents of these kids – it is nearly impossible to believe they would not immediately say “how can we not get involved?”

St. Jude is not the only worthy recipient of radio’s fund-raising time, of course. There are countless charitable causes who need and can use our help. But if one of the conclusions of PPM data is: “Taking any time from our broadcast year to help our communities and people in need is hurting my station”, then we need to come up with a new standard of interpretation. If radio can’t find even a few days a year to appeal to, as Lincoln described them “the better angels of our nature,” then we may as well turn the transmitters off. A business with no heart at all will eventually find that their customers will stop ‘hearting’ them back.

The report contains more than 30 slides of all-new data, including:

Demographics
Impact of Pinning on Purchase Behavior
Which products are pinned the most, and why

The report is available for immediate download for $99 at The Social Habit website. Click here to read more and purchase Pinterest Users in America.

Edison collaborated with noted expert Linda Ury Greenberg on this report, which explores the modern grandparent, and examines both the perceptions and behaviors these Americans have about such topics as smartphones, Facebook, and other aspects of technology and media. Among the principal findings:

* Nearly Three in Ten Americans are Grandparents
* One-third of Grandparents are working full or part-time.
* Nearly two-thirds of Grandparents have a home wi-fi network
* More than one-third of Grandparents have a Facebook account
* 83% of Grandparents have a mobile phone

The complete study is available to view below and for download on our Slideshare page. For more information, contact Tom Webster at Edison Research or Linda Ury Greenberg at her website here.

For more data on how Americans use mobile, social and other technology, subscribe to Edison’s mailing list here.

How the study was conducted

A total of 2,020 persons were interviewed to investigate Americans’ use of digital platforms and new media. From January 20 to February 19, 2012, telephone interviews were conducted with respondents age 12 and older chosen at random from a national sample of Arbitron’s Fall 2011 survey diarykeepers and through random digit dialing (RDD) sampling in geographic areas where Arbitron diarykeepers were not available for the survey. Diarykeepers represent 45% of the completed interviews and RDD sampled respondents represent 55% of the completed interviews. The study includes a total of 500 cell phone interviews.

A few months ago I had lunch with a friend of mine from Princeton who had started a digital agency with great success. So successful that he sold it to Publicis for $575 million dollars. In the course of our lunch I asked him for his opinion about radio’s digital efforts. After he stopped staring into space, followed by him staring at me, he politely told me that he was entirely unaware of any digital efforts by radio. He said he knows there is streaming radio and he is familiar with Pandora. And that was pretty much it.

Then the idea came to me. I went to the good people at the RAB and said: “We should investigate how pervasive this might be, and more to the point we should get a handle on just what people at digital agencies are thinking about radio.” The RAB team agreed, and my team at Edison Research began collecting interviews.

Last week at the 2012 Radio Show, I had the pleasure of presenting some clips of the interviews we did with media buyers, planners and executives about the digital revolution and radio’s role in it.

Now let me stress – the interviews seen here are not necessarily representative of the vast sweep of digital and ad agency buyers out there. This is not a quantitative survey, the kind you usually see from Edison. This instead is much more along the lines of a Focus Group. The respondents who spoke to us may or may not be speaking for all digital buyers and planners, but they offer a lot of great perspective.

So let’s start by duplicating a bit some of the questions I discussed with my friend – just how do you perceive radio? Before viewing – let me warn you – some of these answers are pretty negative. But take heart – over the course of this presentation many of the answers will be more positive and constructive. But let me not take THAT too far either – radio has a ton of work to do in this space.

Let’s dive in – what is your perception of radio’s role in the digital space?

Yeah – ouch. Small audiences, worse than TV and Radio, and in that context the comment of the last lady about not being approached may actually be a good thing. I suppose until we have our acts better in general. Now I should mention that in general these people were almost all responding to our local efforts – although comments about national efforts are coming.

Let’s move on then – what is the role that radio can play in digital buys? Here we listen for the things that do come to mind when people are put this question:

Gravy. As of today that seems to be what radio’s digital offerings come to for the local buyers.

And now we come to perhaps the single most important item – or at least I thought so – the education of radio reps about digital. Listen closely to this one… In general – these people are not impressed with our salespeople. And I think we should take to heart the comment about ‘hyperlinks’. Those little things absolutely DO send a message. And I can’t imagine that people trained at the pure-plays are mentioning client’s chance to be on “the Information Superhighway” or whatever.

As I said – these people were NOT all negative. Many did come with ideas – and maybe no surprise they said: “Remember your strengths.”

And this point is amplified when we talked with our respondents about scale. Those who have looked under the hood of radio station streams and other digital offerings are like Mikayla Maroney – not impressed.

Now as you’ve been listening to these, it’s pretty clear when these people are commenting they are mostly thinking of your streams. Let’s see what they said about our sites.

Youch. I don’t know what to say about this one except for – are any of them wrong? There are tons of sites with babes of the day and other sketchy content – any many suffer from the Times Square effect where so many things are moving and flashing one can’t concentrate on anything.

OK we need some good news. Here’s what people said about streaming. And it starts with some of the positives but then some of the negatives and challenges do emerge.

Now let’s turn to the big fish – Pandora. What do these buyers know and say about Pandora?

Interesting. They are impressed but some of Pandora’s challenges emerge here as well.

Now that one is great. They love radio and the respect it. And they have great ideas.

But where are things going? Well here is where things get interesting – because you have to remember these are people who are involved in the digital side of things. And they crave what radio, to date doesn’t have. Watch this one…

And this point is made further when we asked people about where Digital is going in general.

The buyers of today are looking for the mass and response that radio elicits, but they are equally looking for measurability, personalization, efficiency and trackability. Radio has to continue on a parallel path of innovation to provide these items to advertisers or simply watch its portion of the total advertising pie continue to slowly diminish. I hope hearing it from the mouths of these digital media professionals will help you to better understand the challenges and opportunities in front of you.

So, as of early 2012 (when this study was fielded,) 8% of Americans 12+ (well over 20 million people) had ever used Google+.  That puts it just a bit smaller than Twitter (10%) and LinkedIn (13%) in terms of penetration, which I would argue is a solid debut. In fact, just to put that 8% into context, here is the growth of Twitter over the past five years, as tracked by our Edison/Arbitron Internet and Multimedia Research Series of Americans 12+:

2008: <1%

2009: 2%

2010: 7%

2011: 8%

2012: 10%

It took Twitter at least 4 years to get to 8%; Google+ did it in a few months. And here’s the thing about usage: Google+ isn’t like most social networks in that they don’t require you to “use” the service everyday to get your eyeballs. That isn’t really the game. Once you signed up for Google+, you pretty much did all Google needed you to do–tie your demographic/profile information to your search activities. Once you did that, it really doesn’t matter how much or little you use the service–your profile data is being factored and figured into every Google search you do, and your search results are influencing–and being influenced by–your friends.

To invoke the name of a sub-premium line of Day Care facilities I once wanted to introduce, that’s “a pretty good start.”

How much do you use Google+–and how much do you think it influences what you see and share online?