A Pow Wow with the Big Chief

It's not every radio company away-day that has the boss starting the day by crawling out of a teepee wearing a Native American head-dress; but then, this was no ordinary radio company away-day.

RTBF is the public-service broadcaster for French-speaking Belgium; and their inaugural away-day, for 400 people, was done in style. Calling it "Pow Wow Radio", this event was held on a Saturday so that people making the programmes were able to come. (You got a day off in lieu, as I understand it).

I was speaking at this event in the Flagey Arts Centre, a building that once was the home of public service broadcasting in Belgium (with a room that is still decorated with the old control-room consoles for the initial radio services). The stage in this wonderful old art-deco building was decorated with a lot of Native American artifacts: just right for a pow-wow with the big chief.

Coming to the venue straight from the Eurostar in an RTBF-branded 'black thunder', I missed Francis Goffin's big entrance; though it was quite the talk of the delegates during lunch.

I did, however, see much of Radio France's Digital Director's speech - replete with many statistics, including the slightly scary discovery that 80% of all Radio France's podcasts are downloaded through iTunes. I don't think this is particularly healthy, I must say - give Apple control of our industry at our peril, particularly since they don't care about our industry at all anyway... but I digress.

RTBF's Pow Wow Radio day included some workshops, a chance to question the boss, and a very entertaining portion where some finalists for an internal award got to present their projects. Restricted to only seven minutes to speak (there was a timer visible by the audience), the opportunity to present to six of the senior staff was taken very seriously by the teams: one presented rather cleverly by the same person on video and in real-life; another set of people using video and songs. This was clearly a chance to show off and have fun: and it succeeded. It's also a great way to get different voices on-stage, other than senior people. A nice thing to do.

I was also impressed at the "Espace I love radio", which was an area showing off the latest radio technology. We saw a few exhibitors, and a load of digital radio sets: DAB, or RNT - Radio Numérique Terrestre - as I discover it's known in French-speaking countries, is relatively new here, having been relaunched into the new DAB+ standard. Hybrid radio made an appearance too, with some attractive visual accompaniment to some of the RTBF stations: they're using both RadioDNS's RadioVIS, as well as DAB+ slideshow, on their services. We also saw digital radios made from Lego. It was that kind of day. In larger stations, we forget that many of our team don't have contact with this technology - it's important to ensure that everyone understands where we're going.

An overwhelmingly good feeling at this event - positivity and smiles all round. To persuade people to give up a day of their weekend to talk about work is a difficult job: but RTBF succeeded in injecting the right amount of fun, informality, and information to make it a great day.

- There are notes (en français) from the event if you peek at the Twitter hashtag #RTBFpow
- Later this month, I'll be talking at the FM+ Radio Conference in Tel Aviv, Radiodays Europe in Berlin, Canadian Music Week in Toronto, and to the Radio-Canada radio teams in Montréal. And I'm available to speak at your event, too.