Forward Slash Podcast: Warthen Episode from Wesley Donehue on Vimeo.
Forward Slash Podcast: Warthen Episode from Wesley Donehue on Vimeo.
A couple of weeks ago — just before he went on a European vacation — Wesley Donehue asked me to be his first guest on a new web show he was starting. (I had already been on Pub Politics, which he and Phil Bailey host, six times.) The topic, rather than politics, was social media.
So I agreed, as I am always willing to show off my prowess in that area — being one of the Twitterati and all.
Funny thing is, we spent the first half of the show, if not more, talking about OLD media. I sort of reminisced about what it was like in the MSM before Wesley was born, and then brought the tale right up to the moment I got canned by The State, along with an explanation of the forces that led us to that point.
So there wasn’t all that much time left for social media. I get get to plug the blog a little, and talk about how I have close to 200,000 page views each month, etc.
But you know what we didn’t get to? The role that the briefer forms of social media — especially Twitter, to a less extent Facebook — have played in the growth of my blog.
The biggest month I ever had on my old blog, when I was with the newspaper, was something over 80,000 page views. That was January 2008, the month of those two hotly contested presidential primaries in SC, which drew a lot of national and international attention. After that, the average month settled down to something like 45,000.
Then, after I left the paper, Tim Kelly talked me into using Twitter (and Facebook) to promote my blog. My biggest month ever was June 2010, with 254,545 page views — largely a result of the national attention paid to Nikki Haley and Alvin Greene. After that, I settled down to where the last few months have hovered between 180k and 220k.
I attribute a lot of that to social media. Now I just have to figure a way to get Twitter to pay me for going around saying that.
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Maybe I can talk more about actual new media when Wesley has me BACK on the show. I guess since this was the first one, it was cool to reminisce about where we had BEEN…
In 1976, I was living in TX, and President Ford came to Dallas during the campaign. I went to see him at the First Baptist Church. Ann Compton and Ed Bradley both rushed up to me and asked where there was a phone, so they could phone in their reports on Ford’s visit. The times sure have changed.
Averaging about 200,000 pageviews per month? No wonder they had to run you off.