You are running late to get on-air for whatever reason. You throw open the studio door, site down in ‘THE CHAIR’ and throw on your cans and open the Mic channel… phew! But… what are you going to talk about today?
Do you do a quick Google News Search? Hit up your RSS feeds? Open the newspaper? (if there is any in-house at the station)… what do you do?
I recently witnessed this happen and the jock, didn’t even break her stride – she had the mic open, double clicked on her web browser of choice and opened 3 tabs and hit the book marked links as she talked… tapped a word or two into one of them, then, turning her head slightly, started to chat about the topics of the day – wow – I was impressed.
But what tabs had she opened – what was the site she was using? I waited to the first song to start and then asked those questions.
The first was Tik-Tok – as she called it – “the search engine for Gen Z, for anything and EVERYTHING online.”
Ummm…. okay, that’s not what I thought TikTok was – but apparently it is a surprisingly pleasant experience, and highly relevant to her weekday audience.
Even the New York Times agrees with her, saying that the real threat to Google search is Tik-Tok. Read the story – HERE.
The second was a universal search engine called SWURL which gave her the results across multiple platforms including Google, News, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and Reddit.
SWURL puts them all the results for your search on one page, with an easy to navigate interface that makes it simple to browse all of the results together.
I pulled it up on my phone and I have to say it has now become my go-to search engine of choice.
Next was CrowdView – which is similar to SWURL but focusses on forums and discussion boards from around the web. While less visually pleasing as SWURL – it is a fantastic tool.
She said that she used CrowdView to find out what real people were chatting about online, and it didn’t rely on SEO results, but instead the results came from trusted web forums and discussions.
I found out later that CrowdView scrapes its data from posts in the niche that you want, from specialty sites and sites that are based around your topic. Giving better ‘real’ results than a Google search.
Later during a long song break we chatted about other sites she used regularly – and one that she can recommend – and she only uses it for her weekend shows – was FEEDLE – as she had more time during that show to do an in-depth dive into topics than she could do during her weekday show. Fair enough.
Searching shows results only from these RSS feeds – allowing for the latest results to be displayed first and then going backwards you can see how a story has evolved – genius!
I am sure that there are more search engines out there that help you to define a topic, timeline, and to keep your finger on the pulse of what is happening – but these examples really worked for her, and as I said, SWURL has fast become one of my favourite search engines – not only for news, but also for research when writing copy – seeing what people are saying across multiple platforms really helps to drill down on an idea or concept I can use when writing a radio script.
Until next time – Ciao!
Photo Credit: Photo by Andrea Piacquadio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/cheerful-young-woman-screaming-into-megaphone-3761509/
