We invented a completely new way to consume radio. We made radio visual, interactive, and very shareable. And we made sharing personal. The solution is called Swedish Radio Plus - a new radio player for computers, pads and phones. When you listen to a program, you can add videos, pictures, comments, maps and polls to the timeline, to add information (like a Wikipedia link with more info) and give your personal thoughts (making a comment). What you post in the timeline will also be shared on Facebook, with a link to that exact part of the program. So you don’t just share a program, but your personal take on a specific subject. In addition to the sharing function, we used banners, web-TV and cinema for promotion.

Since Musikhjälpen is all about requesting music, we created a song that a lot of people would want to request. Why? Because all these people would actually be in the song. On a website, you could record pieces of a new track by Hoffmaestro (a band very popular among teenagers), just using your computer mic. And then you could post your actual recording on Facebook. If you didn’t have a mic, you could also play the different instruments using your keyboard. For extra motivation, everyone who participated got their Facebook picture on the album cover.We sent a press release to all major news and music sites and blogs. We also contacted famous musicians and other celebrities, and got them to do recordings on the website. And when they posted their recordings in social media, we reached all their followers. We also had banners on the music service Spotify.

After just a few days, the website had over 100,000 unique users, in a country with only 9m residents. Add to that the positive publicity on some of Sweden’s major news sites, such as SvD, DN, GP, Aftonbladet and Feber, approximately generating over 4.5m media impressions. On Facebook and Twitter, Swedish Radio got lots of cred for their social evolution. Words like ‘innovative’, ‘very cool’, ‘fun’ and ‘impressive’ were used – exactly the kind of values Swedish Radio needs to be associated with.