For Better Content, Treat Ideas like Runners in Scoring Position

“Runners left in scoring position” is one of those “relative” baseball stats.

If a team scores a lot of runs and wins big, RLISP (runners who were on second or third base and in a position to score but did not) is an afterthought. But if the game is tight or the team loses by a couple of runs, the number of runners who had the potential to score but didn't takes on more significance.

At its core, RLISP is a measure of missed opportunities, of something that began with great promise but was not brought to its ultimate conclusion. 

A lot of shows stumble with their own version of RLISP: good ideas that don’t get sufficiently developed and simply remain “in scoring position.”

To more get more interesting, unique and fully developed content, try this 3-step, “brainstorm your brainstorming” technique. We did this last week with a room full of morning shows but you can absolutely do this by yourself with great results.

First, we brainstormed the big topics:  things we believed listeners are or were going to be doing or talking about, things that are now - or would in the near future be - impacting listeners' lives, and things the group had heard or experienced that they felt listeners would find interesting. We wrote all the ideas down without judging. The first round is about quantity not quality.

Next we choose one topic from our list that the teams felt had the best potential and did a second round of brainstorming, this time on all the different ways the topic could be approached. Again, we wrote down all the different perspectives, angles, or “takes.”

Here’s what we came up with for our big topic: “school reopens next week.”

Lastly from this list we chose the three approaches the teams believed would be the most fun/entertaining to listen to, that provided a showcase for each player on the show, that we could do stellar execution on, and that offered opportunities for listener engagement and participation.  Then we brainstormed how we’d execute each with the goal of presenting the big topic three times over the course of the show, but each time from a different angle.

“Schools reopen” put the idea on base. 

Brainstorming the treatments put the idea into “scoring position.” 

Brainstorming the execution drove the idea home.

Your content will be richer if you approach your good ideas as if they were simply in scoring position and it was up to you to keep batting (developing and enhancing) until you brought them all the way home.

Horn Of Plenty

I was brainstorming with a morning show this past Monday about the World Cup when the discussion turned to the fun potential of the vuvuzela as content.

We considered its radio applications…

…improving a song or two by adding a few, inappropriately placed vuvuzela riffs

…using it as a contest sounder, for a right answer or wrong answer, or when someone on the show agreed, disagreed or got tired of a team member’s content

…as an alternative for a song that has high burn; spending just a few seconds at the online, commercial-free radio station playing all vuvuzela all the time on line  might do a lot to lower “tired of” scores.

We considered its household potential…

…a very large drinking vessel (remember those ‘yard of beer’ glasses?), an alternative to a tripod, a waffle ball bat (with a large bat handle), as a golf club/polo club/javelin substitute 

We considered it as a device for public safety…

...as a handy device to alert the bus driver that you want to get off at the next stop

…having a member of the show blow it at railroad crossings as an added alert to commuting motorists that a train was coming thinking that you might miss the flashing red light but not the vuvuzela

And we considered possible variations on its original purpose as a communication device…

…as a ringtone (at least 750,000 downloads have already happened)

…or for expressing your approval of a point made during next Sunday’s sermon

While search engine analytics suggest that the topic’s high point could have been reached yesterday, for a short while this was a talk about with good potential for fun (feel free to share anything you did).

Great shows are always finding content in the next talk-about – content they make uniquely their own with brilliant brainstorming.

Just ask if you need some brainstorming tips.

I’ll send them out as soon as the noise from the vuvuzelas dies down and I can concentrate a little better… ;->

photo credit: Flickr