Today I found out about Jet City Stream. Jet City Stream is a Seattle based internet radio station that you’ve probably never even heard of. Don’t fret! There is no reason to slam your iPhone to the ground and get your skinny jeans in a bunch. While Jet City Stream launched their facebook page back on January 5 of this year, and the domain was secured on February 11th, it appears that this station has only been broadcasting since yesterday.
While the format and “imaging” look and sound great, it’s painfully obvious that this internet radio station is having a rough start. This website has some serious issues. I’m not going to talk about what they are doing right. If you visit the site: Click here to visit Jet City Stream – they are doing a lot of things right. Seattle broadcast radio veterans Heidi May, Shawn Stewart, and Marco Collins are the featured on-air talent from 6am to 7pm from a lavish new studio in the old Rainier Brewery. It appears that advertisers flocked to this opportunity. The nauseating number of banner advertisements on the home page is cranked to eleven, and packed in tight like a can of sardines… on crack.
What’s Wrong With Jet City Stream?
The blog you are reading right now is about internet marketing strategies. I’m going to point out just the obvious mistakes that I see on www.jetcitystream.com. I’m not going to go into serious detail about each problem, but simply explain a number of things that they could be doing better that are related to their web presence.
Social Media Fails by Jet City Stream
1. First let’s look the Jet City Stream’s social media effort. The URL they picked for their facebook fanpage is pretty lame: http://www.facebook.com/JetCityStreamPage. Somewhere along the line someone thought that this would make a great fanpage URL because of the way it verbally sounds, or a misconception of how people search on facebook. Perhaps in 1994 Kim Komando said it was a good idea to capitalize every word in your URL. The internet is a very visual place. However, last I checked http://www.facebook.com/jetcitystream is available, and better, because it’s shorter, more visually appealing, and easier to remember. “Find us on facebook at jetcitystream” works much better when telling someone how to find you on facebook.
2. They have done 7 facebook posts just in the last 24 hours. In broadcast radio, it’s important to “come out loud” when you launch a new station or format. On facebook, if you post to your fanpage more than once every other day, people tend to “hide all your posts” or “unlike” your page all together. The picture at the top of the fanpage doesn’t tell you the URL for the main website, and it doesn’t convey that this is an internet radio station based in Seattle.
3. On twitter (http://twitter.com/#!/jetcitystream) Jet City Stream has managed to do a great job with the URL. However they’ve failed to incorporate the awesome background image that they have on their website. It’s super easy to add a custom background on twitter pages. Also, their twitter page has absolutely no description, and it lists the URL of http://www.jetcitystream.com/ incorrectly (without the “www” sub-domain that this link re-directs to, and without the trailing “/” slash. This page has been registered since Nov 21 2011, has 81 followers, and clearly wasn’t updated to flow with the program.
4. On Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/jetcitystream/) Jet City Stream has had a presence since November 9th of last year, and while the page URL looks great, this page sports an ugly green background and boasts 4 subscribers. Clearly this page only exists for hosting videos that play on the website, which in itself is a very, very, bad idea. But I’ll get more into why in a minute.
Social Media Summary: While Jet City Stream labels itself as “Local – Social – Music” it has failed to launch itself with a defined, organized, or accurate social media presence. Perhaps they decided to put a banner on the side of the 15th street King County Metro bus, instead of hiring and trusting a capable social media person.
Website Fails by Jet City Stream
The logo and the background of this website is great. It’s very obvious that this is a “community” oriented internet radio station. Awesome! They even have a directory of live music venues, and “events” section. That’s beyond epic… that is epically epic! There is even, not one, but at two least buttons you can press to listen to live music, and another button to submit your own original music for possible “air-play”. It will take you about 10 minutes to find any of those buttons, as the only part of the page that is visually appealing is the background, color scheme, and the logo.
It appears that this was originally a good design, but it was totally bastardized because someone’s grandma suggested that it have an annoying news ticker at the top. Everything has been crammed onto every page. 1997 called, and it wants it’s page menu back. What works in traditional media does not translate to internet well. This seems like a high concept failure, but hopefully what we are seeing here is a “soft launch”.
No attention has been paid toward page load speed. From my own user experience this page loads very slowly. It’s taken up to 25 seconds to load, and the fastest it has loaded is 4 seconds. At any given time, this site loads slower than 3/4 of the internet. This site will load slow, and even slower when it has more than a couple of visitors.
What is slowing Jet City Stream down?
By slowing down, we literally mean that this website loads slowly, even if you have a high speed connection. This website shares an IP with 79 other sites on VOXEL.NET hosting. I’ve never heard of voxel.net, but by the looks of other websites that share this IP address, it doesn’t look very promising. There are more problems.. structural problems with the way the code for this site was put together. Beyond that, Google tends to de-index websites that have advertisements on more than 1/3 of any page, ouch!
Summary of entire website and social media effort: Corners were cut in the quality of putting together a site and social media campaign that engages socially, and is technically capable of handling large amounts of traffic. This site fails the ability to deliver bandwidth sucking content such as video, audio, and javascript to the masses. Jet City Stream has a lot going for it, and I am a fan. However, this site will unfortunately fail if it is not set up to work properly with delivering content and engaging visitors.
