I attended a presentation by Steve Pratt, Director of CBC Radio 3 and Digital Music and the first thing I thought was I gotta get an interview with him to share what he’s been upto and how he accomplished it.

So, here’s what I did: I held an interview with Steve (just before his holidays btw, thanks Steve!) to outline how CBC Radio3 carved out and defined a niche, how they deal with the tug of war between openness vs. control, his thoughts on levels of engagement, etc.

The Meat and Potatoes

Here is the interview with Steve from CBC Radio 3:

Here are a few highlights of the interview:

19:00 – how CBC Radio3 deals with having control while having an open environment for users

26:06 – Why cold, hard market research may be complete BS to finding and carving a niche. This one really took me by surprise!

29:00 – The three lessons Steve has learned as he’s grown and built CBC Radio 3. If you don’t have time to listen to the whole interview, listen to this :)

If you’re interested in building an online community, I would really suggest going to CBCRadio3.com and he what Steve and his team have built. There are many smaller pieces that make the bigger picture and if you’re serious about building an online community, I would study the work CBC Radio is doing on the website as well as its outposts such as Twitter.

What do you think about CBC Radio3 as a community? What was your biggest takeaway that you’re going to implement?

PS: If you’re Canadian music isn’t that bad, eh? Lol.