Stepping forth on to the dancefloor

A CHEESY dance to a cheesy tune has led to Edinburgh-based radio station, Forth One, being nominated for a top UK prize celebrating viral marketing.

An online video featuring station presenters and staff dancing to the 1996 song, ‘Saturday Night’, by Whigfield, was so heavily visited, it has earned the station a nomination in the ‘Best Street’ category of this year’s Radio Academy Promotions and Marketing Awards.

Say the organisers, the category “is for the clever and the cunning. ‘Street’ here means a stunt, best use of ‘street or promotional’ teams, a PR or viral campaign that grabs the audience’s attention”.

They added: “Judges are looking for low budget but high impact campaigns that made a difference to the fortunes of the radio station.”

Radio Forth is up against three others for the category title, including fellow Scots hopeful, XFM Scotland.

The video racked up over 20,000 visits in its first week and involved inviting listeners to join in the dance at exactly 8.11am on April 20. On the day, the video was among the top 20 most-watched comedy videos on YouTube, worldwide.

The award winners are being announced on Wednesday evening.

Actually, it’s been a pretty good few days for nominations at Radio Forth, with Forth 2 receiving two nominations in this year’s Jerusalem Radio Awards, one for one of Andy Monaghan’s regular programmes, the other for a Good Friday special.