I am a big enough man to admit it. I was wrong.
Over the summer Jeff and I had a sit down at Uptown Coffee in Kuna with Nick Dhaenens, one of our web cast producers. This punk kid had the nerve to tell me, ME, that I was missing the boat when it came to taking advantage of social media. I said, "Listen, we have an IS.com facebook page and it is doing pretty well. That's good enough. I am not going to waste my time Tweeting every thing I do during the day."
I can't remember how many "followers" we had at the time, I think maybe 56 or so.
But...just out of curiosity, I tried a couple of things he suggested and we started getting a few new followers. Then a few more. Just a few short weeks later we got our 500th Twitter follower yesterday. Now, I know that doesn't compare much with what most 10th grade girls probably have, but it has shown me that this Twitter thing might have some merit when it comes to getting info out to the fans. I still think it is a total waste of time for personal use, but to get information out quickly, social media beats the heck out of how we did it 10-15 years ago when all we had was - GASP - email (and we thought that was pretty dang cool back then).
So, now we have almost 3,000 Facebook (fans? likes? followers?) and over 500 Twitter (fans? likes? followers?) and those numbers are growing every day.
Looking around the state, most other media guys and gals are also tapped in to the social media networks. Take a minute to follow your favorites:
Paul Kingsbury - IdahoSports.com
www.facebook.com/idahosports
Twitter: @idahosports
Greg Lee - Spokesman Review
Twitter: @SRpreps
Mark Nelke - CDA Press
Twitter: @CdAPressSports
David Bashore - Times-News Sports Editor
www.facebook.com/david.bashore
Twitter: @TNBashore
Ryan Collingwood - VarsityCDA.com
www.facebook.com/varsitycda
Twitter: @Varsity_CDA
John Wustrow - Idaho Press Tribune
Twitter: @jwustrow
Rachel Robert - Idaho Statesmn
www.facebook.com/varsityextra
Twitter: @IDS_VarsityX
My goal is to have 5,000 facebook likes and 5,000 Twitter followers for IdahoSports.com by the end of the school year in May. Take that 10th grade girls.
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