Follow KDHX on Twitter!

Probably my biggest personal accomplishment of the past week was the creation of a new and improved Twitter account that I took it upon myself to create for our wonderful local community radio station, KDHX FM 88.1. If you’ve been on Twitter for a while, you may have noticed that KDHX already had a Twitter account, but it wasn’t really getting used to promote anything going on at the station, and in fact, had a grand total of three tweets, with none newer than April 27, 2008.

At the same time, I’d been following what is probably the most popular independent community radio station in the nation, WFMU from the New York City metro area. I’d been really impressed with the way in which they updated Twitter with all kinds of cool stuff going on at their station. WFMU’s Twitter account had over 2,000 followers and was getting updated several times each day, helping to promote the station to its fans all around the world at a time when Twitter appears to be growing by leaps and bounds. Genius!

“Damn,” I thought to myself, “it’d be nice if KDHX had something like that.” That was when the proverbial light bulb sputtered on over my head and I suddenly realized I could quite easily set something up for the station my own damn self that would do even more than what WFMU was doing for its fans, and that was to create an account that automatically updated everyone (sorry, “tweeted”) every time a new show was about to come on the air, plus include tweets from the KDHX blog. Any additional information could always be tweeted manually by myself or someone at the station (who I’ve yet to really talk to in great detail about this) anytime they had an announcement they’d like to make.

The way I went about doing this was to go and gather up all of the pertinent information about KDHX’s daily program schedule and create a new program calendar using Google Calendar. The reason I wanted to use Google Calendar was because it has a way of sending out reminder e-mails for every event, or, in this case, program. I would have these e-mails sent directly to my e-mail address in Gmail, and I would use a filter to have those e-mails automatically forwarded to a special “e-mail to Twitter” address that I got after signing up with a free service called TwitterMail. TwitterMail would then, in turn, automatically update the station’s new Twitter account a couple of minutes before the start of every program. After a bit of tweaking with the input fields and whatnot, I finally got it to work the way I wanted it. I discovered, for example, that the outgoing Google Calender reminders were limited to about 60 characters for the Subject field, which was the one that I wanted to contain the name of the show, the name of the host or DJ, and a quick link for people to tune in online. Some shows simply had too long of a show/host name combo to make that work, so a shortened direct link to KDHX’s website was used instead of the slightly longer direct link to the streaming audio (live.ram) file. The longer link file got truncated if it, along with the show/host names, extended beyond 60 characters, and that truncated link didn’t work at all, so I had to ensure that each show’s reminder didn’t have too many characters in the subject field, lest someone not be able to get a good link they could click on from the tweet. Make sense? Well, if not, don’t sweat it. The bottom line is I got it working pretty well and even those shows that are tweeted with the shortened “www.kdhx.org” link will still take people to the station’s website where there is a “Listen Live” link right there on the front page. Pretty easy to figure out. And so far I have to admit that it’s been working great and I’m even seeing people retweeting their favorite shows when they come on. It’s also great for me, personally, because now I am also reminded of when my favorite shows are about to come on, so I can quickly turn the station on to hear ‘em, something I wasn’t doing much of lately because most of the time I’d completely forget about them. So that was the main point of doing this, to help others such as myself get reminders via Twitter about KDHX’s programs. I think it’ll work great for the station and may even help expose it to some new listeners, not only locally but all over the world as well. So if you’re on Twitter, by all means, please follow KDHX! And while you’re at it, feel free to go ahead and follow me as well. Thanks.