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Whenever I hear the catch phrase, “Radio was the original social media,” I shake my head.  I don’t really understand what that means because radio wasn’t really ever social, save for the people who always called the control room asking for a song.  And the social part assumed that someone took the time to answer the phone.

That’s not exactly interaction, nor is it very social.  But whoever coined the phrase must be laughing because you sure hear it a lot in radio conversations.

How about this one: radio was the original portable broadcast medium.

Now that rings true to me.  No one really dragged a television around (except for those weird people who took tiny TVs to sporting events).

But from transistor radios to Walkmans, radio was (emphasis on the past tense) the original portable broadcast medium.

The iPod ended all that.

But the smartphone has brought it back.

Recently, a new report from ComScore tracked the most trafficked digital brands in the U.S.  The results are interesting:

I put the red box around mobile because you can see which of these digital brands has the most mobile penetration.

Check out Twitter and Pandora (gold stars).  Over half of Twitter’s usage (51%) came from mobile – impressive.

But in Pandora’s case, a whopping 81% of their users access their audio on mobile gadgets.  And at the Arbitron Client Conference, Brian Lakamp revealed that half of iHeartRadio’s usage is now mobile.

This says a lot of the future of audio consumption in America.

And it also reinforces the notion that people love to take their media with them.  In radio, we’ve known this forever, and while perhaps the boom box was a bit bulky and cumbersome, mobility has always been one of radio’s great strengths.

When you look at the chart, you can see some very interesting laggards among the media companies listed.  For Disney Online and Viacom, less than 30% of their usage is coming from mobile devices.  You can bet that increasing mobile usage is a top priority at these iconic media brands.

It should be in your company, too.

Radio needs to re-establish its status as the portable broadcast medium.

What’s your mobile strategy?

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app development, Mobile, Smartphones, Social Media