The year within Earshot

Time for the traditional year-end rummage in Analytics to find the most-viewed Earshot Creative blog posts of 2013.

Excluding our podcasts, here’s our top five of the posts with the most from 2013. And here’s the music you’ll need to count them down pop-pickers.

Top 5

5. How Extra stations achieve critical mass for brands

3 October. A background piece that considered the mechanics of radio brand extensions to coincide with the launch of Capital XTRA.

4. The 40 greatest radio promotions ever

14 April. Jonathan’s Buzzfeed-style round-up of 40 radio promotions which have proved highly successful for audiences, sponsors and stations around the world.

3. The making of the Lincoln lip dub

24 July. I asked BBC Radio Lincolnshire head Charlie Partridge how this video project was produced, what were the project objectives and what it achieved. Yeah, I know – it reads like a pitch for a job on Ariel.

2. Sony Radio Academy Awards

13 May. A couple of posts, plus a live scorecard describing the awards nominations and results in charts. So colour. Very information. Wow.

1. Radio 2 changes its tune

29 July. Why the jingle logo melody changed without warning, and the musical score of the new tune. This story received significant referral traffic from Twitter and Digital Spy, helping to make it our most-read post of 2013.

What can we learn from the numbers?

1. It’s hard to predict the hits. Jonathan and I would not have guessed these five posts to all prove so popular.

2. You find the case studies we write valuable. We should put them in a category of their own.

3. Relatively timeless pieces on radio production technique are popular. For example, a post describing Six tips for using Skype on the radio from 3 November 2011 is in the top ten of 2013. We should find a way to surface these as blog recurrents, cluster them and make them easy to find.

4. Jingles are popular. We should do more about them (without stewing in a warm bath of nostalgia).

5. We shouldn’t attempt “news”. There are far better places for that.

6. We changed our domain and hosting in June, updating our WordPress theme to one with responsive design. That went fairly well but I should have listened to Adam Bowie on fixing redirects from the old domain.

7. We owe a special New Year greeting to the one person who views this site on a Nintendo 3DS. Good work, but now get back to Luigi’s Mansion. You’ve got another level to reach by midnight.

We’re taking requests

Thanks for popping by in 2013 and thanks to our sponsors Hobsons and PURE Jingles whose support has enabled us to build Earshot Creative into a valuable resource for anybody interested in radio promotion, marketing and imaging.

If there’s something you’d like us to cover or an individual you would like us to feature on the blog or the podcast in 2014 then Jonathan and I would like to hear from you.