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Editor's note: Brett was previously the interactive editor of 5 live before becoming the managing editor at Three Counties Radio. I asked him for his thoughts on the role of social networks in local radio. (PM)

Last July I left Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio 5 live after six years and drove north to Luton. I hadn't worked in local radio since the early nineties, but the chance to run my nearest radio station was too good an opportunity to pass up.

The 5 Live newsroom I left was fully engaged with social media, with a variety of Facebook and Twitter accounts, presenters engaging with the audience and audio and video shared and distributed daily.

At Ö÷²¥´óÐã Three Counties Radio I quickly found that social media was not really on the agenda. So as we set about putting together a new schedule and defining how we were going to re-shape the programming, I thought it was important to get the station working in digital spaces at the same time.

Working with the brilliant and we designed two days to talk to everyone in the station about what could be achieved. Every producer and presenter spent 2 hours learning the essentials. There was a clear message: if we do this, it will increase the reach of our radio content.

But it's not just about teaching people what to do. Integrating social media into the radio station needs support from the very top. The management needs to be engaged and actively involved. It's not enough to have a lone person in the newsroom responsible for social media, it's everybody's job.

At 3CR the two news editors that cover the broadcast day now have it as part of their job description to update social media, share content and engage with the listeners. We created time in their day to do this. Just as crucially the journalists are using it as a newsgathering tool.

In just a few weeks we found on Twitter a gamer addicted to playing 18 hours a day that tied into a Panorama programme, friends of a murder victim and a local man who was designing a space mission to name just three. We uncovered local stories, new guests and shared masses of content. When we tweeted and engaged , the callers that rang in were keen to point out that they had never listened to 3CR - and didn't know it covered their area. We found an 18 year old dancer from Hertfordshire waiting in a queue outside the Hammersmith Apollo to audition for Britain's Got Talent.

Additionally, and just as importantly, the presenters are connecting with the listeners in digital spaces for the first time. Social media is being used to extend the reach of the radio station and bring new ears to 3CR content. Just a couple of weeks ago, there was Melvin, a caller . He was on air at 0920. , who produces the , had this on and in the Twittersphere by 0935, as she continued to output the show. To date, as a result of social media, it's been played 115,000 times, that's greater than the weekly reach of some stations. Melvin may have called his local station in Luton, but the next day he could hear his call being played and talked about on WNYC in New York.

So has this strategy it worked? Well admittedly it's difficult to equate social media activity directly to gains in listeners. But last week Ö÷²¥´óÐã Three Counties Radio had its best for six years. I would like to think the two are connected.

Brett Spencer is currently working on social media innovation projects for Ö÷²¥´óÐã English Regions. Follow his personal account on Twitter

• Follow Ö÷²¥´óÐã Three Counties Radio on Twitter at
• Read radio and new media consultant 's blog post on radio and Twitter ("...Overall, Twitter is a great resource and platform to help grow audience and engagement. Remember though that the vast majority of your listeners probably don't care..."):

Following the headlines in March's iPlayer stats pack that we published last month, I wanted to share some more details and insights about Ö÷²¥´óÐã Network Radio's interactive performance, as it was a record month for us. They say events drive reach, and plenty happened on the Radio websites in March that helps prove the adage. Reach to all Ö÷²¥´óÐã Radio sites hit 3.7 million average weekly unique browsers*. And if you factor in A&M's music and events websites, such as Music and Radio 1's Big Weekend, we recorded an overall reach for all Ö÷²¥´óÐã Audio and Music sites of 4.3 million UK average weekly unique browsers. That's an all-time high for us.

Online interest in Chris Moyles' marathon 52-hour broadcast for Comic Relief was a big part of this, pushing traffic to the Radio 1 site to a record 2.4m average weekly UK unique browsers. Live footage from the studio, carried on the Red Button, attracted 2.84 million viewers. And then there was Fearne Cotton. Her offer to if the total raised by Moyles topped £2 million caused a surge of traffic that helped crash the Radio 1 site for a brief time. So, events do drive reach, and we've learnt some useful lessons there about capacity planning. On top of this, there have been about half a million clicks to view the section of the programme again via the website, and at .

We've had a superb month for live online listening. And although live listening via the internet still accounts for a relatively small amount of all digital consumption, we know people find it convenient to stream radio at their desks: compared to consumption via analogue platforms, online radio listening doesn't fall away so dramatically after radio's 'usual' breakfast time peak. In March, we recorded 29 million requests for live streams, 18% up on this time last year. Record performances across Ö÷²¥´óÐã network radio contributed to this, including 5 live sports extra, which nabbed 1.3m live stream requests for its World Cup Cricket coverage. Did I say... events drive reach?

We broke more records with our podcasts, delivering 12.3m successful downloads to UK subscribers in March. The Archers topped the list of our daily podcasts, with Scott Mills in second place. Interestingly, although Radio 4's landmark series A History of the World in 100 Objects ended last autumn, its podcasts remain popular enough to make it the 5th most popular daily podcast title in March. This is evidence of the demand there is for making podcasts available for longer and of the public value we can create by opening up the archive. First indications from the Desert Island Discs archive are also very encouraging. I've just had a first sight of April's podcast results - they're looking equally promising, including several hundred thousand successful downloads of our Royal Wedding 2011 podcast. This included a lot of interest from users in English-speaking countries around the world such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the USA. It's another good example of how events drive reach.

A final, encouraging thing to note is the steady growth in reach to A&M's websites optimised for mobile devices. We've done a lot of work over the past 2 years to improve the usability of those sites, including automatically tweaking the pages to suit the device in question, and adding the ability to stream live radio for many devices. Devices are becoming easier to use too, and the performance since the start of this year suggests that the effort is now paying off: significant numbers of users now accessing A&M's content via mobile. March was a great month for this. There was growth across the board, with new sites for Radio 4's Desert Island Discs and Radio 1's Big Weekend contributing to the increase. And there was especially strong growth for Radio 1 and 1Xtra, where all mobile devices are now covered with key services and where fans used their phones to join in the fun with Moyles & Co for Red Nose Day.  Which all goes to show... well, you know what goes here.

* Unique Browsers: this is the term we use to describe a single computer accessing our websites. It's not the same as measuring 'people', and it's not a perfect proxy - but is the closest we have for now. One 'unique browser' is counted for every distinct 'cookie' which has visited a website within a given timeframe. In the Ö÷²¥´óÐã, this timeframe is one week. A cookie is a small piece of information that a server sends to your computer to identify that computer on its return. Whenever you clear your cookies, as some people regularly do, your computer is issued with a new cookie when you return to a website.

Alan Phillips is senior business manager, Ö÷²¥´óÐã Audio & Music Interactive

At Radio 1's Big Weekend 2011 we are testing a new mobile feature that allows the audience to say "I'm here now" to their friends while watching their favourite artists throughout the day. The key thing is that they have to be present at a stage to check in.

So why are we doing this? This is an experiment to help the Ö÷²¥´óÐã explore around Check Ins and ask whether the technology can enhance our audiences' experience of similar events. By using the latest mobile location technology, and a bit of web design, we've built a prototype that let's our audience share the experience with their family and friends in a way in which they're used to. We decided to use Facebook Places because we believe most of the audience at the event will have an account.

At the Ö÷²¥´óÐã I run a number of social media projects and we've been wanting to do something involving the audience at festivals and listeners at home for quite a while. The challenge I set myself here was to find a new and engaging way for the Ö÷²¥´óÐã to encourage users to share their festival experiences, good or bad, with the wider world.

The 'Check In' experiment is my proposed solution. It was initially developed on a beer mat in December 2010 but after a late night or two and hard work from the team it was delivered on time. It will only be available to smartphone users with Facebook accounts, attending Radio 1's Big Weekend in Carlisle. Participants are able to share a number of things: which stage they're at, who they're listening to and what they think of the performance. This information will be shared with friends via the user's Facebook newsfeed.

Here's how it works:

The site asks users to verify their location by either checking their cell or using their . Privacy has been a concern on this project from the outset. We have taken great care in making sure that this site is an example of how to be safe whilst using Check Ins. By default, our site only publishes information and comments to a user's friends via their .

The prototypes database tells us how many people have checked into a performance and how many times they have checked in but the Ö÷²¥´óÐã does not hold any users' personal data. The system is completely anonymous, so while we can visualise the numbers of users we're unable to tell who they are. We also signpost that users can amend to decide how and with whom they share this information. As Radio 1's Big Weekend is a ticketed event, we felt that this would be the perfect choice for an experiment of this kind as it reduce concerns of the audience sharing where they are. We also felt that this was a great opportunity to raise awareness with our audience of location privacy. The way we are doing this is to promote how to stay safe on-line as well as providing top tips for anyone using location based services.

From the start, allowing users to say where they were as one of our prototypes was going to be an interesting shift in what we do. We defined a set of criteria to be evaluated and we are carrying out three stages of audience research focusing on qualitative research at the event with 6 young people. They'll be given phones for the day and asked to evaluate the experiment and the promotion.

This has been a truly challenging and thrilling project to work on with some great people but there'll be no rest until the final evaluation in a few weeks. I'll be doing a further post after next weekend with details of how it went. - RM

Richard Morland - Senior Producer Social Media - A&M Interactive

NB: This is an experiment so unfortunately we cannot make it work on all mobiles. If you are attending then your handset will need to have location detection enabled and a browser that can handle HTML5 web code. For example: the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, Sony Ericsson X10, Samsung Galaxy and Galaxy S, HTC Desire, Desire HD and Nexus One, and any phones using Android 2.1 operating system and above (excluding tablets and small-screen devices such as Samsung Galaxy Mini, Sony Experia X10 Mini and HTC Wildfire).

The Royal Wedding is tied up, done and dusted... and was my highlight. It was emotional, it had some new music (to my ears at least) bringing together hundreds of millions of people all listening and enjoying the same moment together. Whether you attended in person outside the Abbey, Buckingham Palace or lining the route, or whether like most of us, you joined in via the TV, radio or internet it was about people coming together to celebrate a single live event.

In part the music was powerful because we all knew it the came from the personal choices that the happy couple had made and it meant something deeply to them. An intriguing insight because, if you are married, you know the music choices as with many other wedding decisions, had probably been hard fought.

Only 40,000 people can attend Radio 1's Big Weekend, making their own choices on the day, which stage to wander to and which artists to see. The rest of the audience can obviously listen on the radio, watch all the stages live online or navigate through the 60+ videos available later on. Our research tells us that they are normally seeking out what they know they already like.

Personal choices in music are what make Radio 1 breathe. The expert view (i.e. our DJs' passion about a tune), combined with a populist, audience viewpoint (charts, sales, audience research and comment) - make Radio 1 in 2011, I hope, just as valuable as ever. It represents the friend (our DJ) and the family (the listeners) coming together. Interestingly, it is reported that these are still the most popular ways in which music choices are decided. Family. Friends. Radio.

Big Weekend gives our DJs a place to curate music in the digital space as well as on air. We are starting with six of our DJs at Radio 1's Big Weekend and their selection of photos, video and favourite artists that mean something to them. Our users' choices will also be reflected for the first time on the site via rankings of the 'Most Viewed' and 'Most Shared' artists.

Encouraging presenters and audiences to curate and discuss their personal choices is a really important part of what Ö÷²¥´óÐã Music does online. It harnesses the Ö÷²¥´óÐã's role as a trusted guide and helps us build deeper relationships with our audiences on the Ö÷²¥´óÐã and in their digital social spaces. Radio 1's Big Weekend site and projects like Music Showcase feature elements intended to make discovery of those personal music choices even easier for our audiences. Radio 1's strength in social spaces means the conversation we can have about personal choices in music is ever more meaningful - keep your eye on and on Twitter and on on , on the weekend of 14th May.

We are also experimenting with location based services on site, building our own check-in service using . One of the motivating factors is to understand the safety and privacy issues around young people using check-in services but still allowing them the freedom to brag in a meaningful way to their friends that they are stood in front of Lady GaGa. It also allows us to begin to understand how mobile will help us in the future, what an individual's proximity to others means, whether they are famous or simply a friend at any live event.

Ben Chapman is Head of Popular Music for Audio and Music Interactive

• To find out more about the Big Weekend visit the Radio 1 website
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• Picture shows: Snow Patrol at Radio 1's Big Weekend 2009