If you were in DC for “The Radio Show,” you hopefully had a chance to see “Goin’ Mobile,” our ethnographic collaboration with Arbitron about mobile phones. It was very well received and attended. And as is always the case with this type of research, interpretation is often in the eye of the beholder.

We hope there will be a way to present it to broadcasters who were not able to attend “The Radio Show,” and we are working with Arbitron on ways to make that happen. We are thinking that a version of “Goin’ Mobile” will be shown at our combined “Client Conference/Summit” in December, and we hope to see many of you there.

Because this presentation is 100% video clips – no charts, graphs, or numbers – everyone’s takeaways can vary depending on your point of view. For the presentation itself, we put together a “To-Do List” for radio that was centered around action steps for becoming more active in the mobile space:

Since the presentation, we have heard from several programmers about our “Texting While Driving” segment. When we were conducting the interviews, a number of respondents mentioned Oprah Winfrey’s “No Phone Zone Pledge.” It resonated in several of these interviews, and for attendees at “The Radio Show.”

It provides an opportunity for a 7th action step on the above “To-Do List” – creating your own localized version of this campaign, utilizing the power of a morning show or a personality who can make this type of initiative personal and genuine.

This is a big issue and a growing problem, and for many, it resonates in a major way. Many of our “Goin’ Mobile” respondents told us they had recently been involved in a car accident where phone use while driving played a role. And in a number of their households, this topic had been a point of discussion – with both teens and adults.

For radio, this is a natural, because so many of our listeners are tuned in while driving. No matter the type of station or format, there may be an opportunity here for you to do the right thing and perform a public service for your audience.

And the other side of this issue, of course, is that when people are using their mobile devices while driving, chances are good they’re not listening to you. In our study, while many respondents were terrestrial radio listeners in the car, all that changed when they picked up their iPhones, BlackBerries, or Android devices.

We hope this is helpful for you, and we’re very interested in how you use this “Goin’ Mobile” tip on your air, online, and in social media.

In the coming weeks, we will also be examining the other six “to-do’s” on this list, and what they mean to you, your station, and your company.

We are proud of “Goin’ Mobile,” and we thank Arbitron once again for imagining and financing this project. But we want to be sure they don’t just end up making for great presentations at industry conventions. There is great substance in this study, and we are excited about passing these lessons about mobile for radio onto you.