Why the mining industry should use radio

In the recent edition of 'Gold and Minerals Gazette' (what ? you don't read it ? 😉 Steve Harris, Managing Director of Perth's 'The Brand Agency' spoke about how radio could play a major role in improving the public perception and support for the mining industry.

Harris said…

"The core communication from individual companies and from the wider industry tends to happen, as a generalisation, when there's a crisis or there's a problem or they want something. That communication hasn't been an ongoing thing, it's not been about building a positive relationship and building a brand, it's been about responding, ad hoc, to specific issues.

"I think the industry does some fantastic things for the economy and for the community and how it spends money and engages with the community but it doesn't tell anyone about this."

Harris says it's not just about telling the right story but also choosing the right medium to communicate it.

"If you think of how the industry does communicate, when it communicates, it buys ads in newspapers, it communicates in stories in 'The Financial Review' but the mass population are listening to FM radio, they're listening to talk-back radio, they're on the internet."

Harris goes on to say;

"If I was launching my new window tinting business at a suburban shopping centre I would get the breakfast crew from Nova, or from 92.9, to come out there and do a live broadcast and a sausage sizzle and 300,000 people would be getting out of bed in the morning and they would be listening to it on the radio and it would be fun and they would be talking about my business and the activity."

"Why aren't we doing that for the companies that are opening a billion dollar mine ? Why aren't we getting breakfast radio crews to come up on the mine site and say 'hey we're sitting here with these fly-in-fly-out people they're having healthy breakfasts, here's what they're doing, here's what they're up to' ?"

"It doesn't need to cost huge amounts of money but it needs to think like an industry that wants to position and promote itself"