Faraway strategies

As I mentioned there are so many differences in the way we work: in tropical countries like Maldives time is not of the essence. The work culture at Faraway.fm was quite something else, quite often having our strategy meeting over coffee in a café’. At one such meeting I suggested that all PR exercises hereon in must be tied to a strategy and that it must be a strategy that all of us at Faraway must agree on, believe in and work hard at achieving.

The CEO kick-started the meeting by laying down all the facts: “We are the only station based solely on the classic rock format, we are a no-fuss, no hassle station, we cater to the internet generation and therefore we must think and do what is appealing to the internet generation. We have a facebook presence of 486”. I thought that was a good start to any meeting on strategy.

So after coffee, it was my turn to put everything into a coherent document. I started out by thinking of a vision and a mission for Faraway. And then I researched into all the messages that were currently being used to represent us. They included:

(1) "The music’s better on 96.6 Faraway.fm" (This is a recording done by my dad and broadcast a million times a day, he gets joked at by family and friends all the time for this!)
(2)All the news that matters, all the views that matter, they are right here on 96.6 Faraway.fm
(3) More hits and memories on 96.6 Faraway.fm
(4) Send in your requests and comments to Farawayfm@gmail.com
(5) On 96.6 Faraway.fm October is Rocktober…great rock music all month long

I also went about hunting for statistics. I went down to the Maldives Ministry of Planning & Development and bought the national census data, which revealed the out of 396,334 people that lived in Maldives about 25% were below the age of 14! So no wonder my dad said, our listener base will increase when some in this group moved out of this bracket into the 15 and above age bracket! Our target market of listeners is in the group 15-55.

With all my information in hand I set about writing a corporate strategic plan for Faraway. They were doing great things already, which is a good start, like last year they pilot tested audience reaction by holding Maldives first-ever music competition called FARAWAY UNPLUGGED. I was quite surprised my boss was using that again and again by bringing in winners of that for every other PR function! My PR plan therefore includes ongoing events such as this.