Disclosure:  I’m an NPR junkie.

I would say that about 20% of my total media consumption is via NPR…and, yes, I donate.  One of my favorite programs is Forum with Michael Krasny, which is produced out of KQED here in San Francisco.  It’s interesting, insightful and educative.  The other day I’m listening to a Forum program about the new changes to the Netflix subscription packages.  In addition to the emails and phone calls they received from listeners, they pulled comments and questions from their Facebook page, located at facebook.com/KQEDForum.

I thought this was a great use of social media.  Historically, you’d probably see a bulletin board style feature on the radio station’s web site (which they also have at kqed.com/forum) and the program host would drive people there by promoting the site over the air.  But think about how much more effective using Facebook is in getting to their goals, which arempresumably about  engaging their audience,  getting people’s opinions, gathering perspective and creating conversation…in other words, creating an online “forum.”  Using social media to host and enable this conversation is a really good move.  To date, they are not using Twitter as well as they could, but they are moving in the right direction by allowing visitors to the program’s website to tweet the subject being discussed.

Right now (and as of this writing), there were 5 comments on the Netflix price hike segment.  On the program website, there were over 90.  The folks at Forum have a little work to do in getting their audience engaged on Facebook.  But, when they do, they’ll see greater benefit, specifically listener’s thoughts and opinions will  be exposed to a larger audience via over their walls and exposing their involvement with Forum and KQED to their social graph.  How great would that be?