The response to Elizabeth Warren’s “Coming Home” post has been so remarkable in several respects that it merits a post of its own. Here’s what we noticed.
- The traffic was nearly off the charts. On a typical weekday, we receive in the neighborhood of 3,000-4,000 unique visitors, according to our benevolent overlords at Google Analytics. Yesterday, the count was 9,380. For a sleepy day in the middle of August when a lot of people are on vacation, that’s extraordinary – we’ve had only a handful of days in the history of BMG with traffic like that, almost all of them on or very near a big election day. UPDATE: Perhaps even more remarkably, the second-day traffic (Friday the 12th) was even higher than Thursday’s – Google Analytics pegged it at 11,043 unique visitors.
- Driving the traffic, of course, was the fact that news outlets all over the country picked up on the post. The NY Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, CBS, Time, Huffington Post, The Hill, The Nation, and others wrote up the fact that Warren’s post surely signals serious interest in running for Senate, and linked back to us. We very much appreciate the links, and we welcome the readers of those fine publications to our humble abode.
- If you haven’t read through the lengthy (100+) comment thread yet, you should do so. It’s impressive to see how many visitors from other states have been inspired enough by Warren’s work to come to BMG, sign up for an account, and leave their thoughts. Also impressive is the social media response: the post has been “liked” over
300 600 9001,000 (my goodness!) times on Facebook, tweeted 100+ times, and has no doubt rocketed around the intertubes in other ways that we don’t track. - Sadly, I do find it necessary to mention that, nearly alone among media outlets covering the story, the Boston Globe could not bring itself to mention the name of the hometown site at which Warren’s post appeared. The following appears in this morning’s Globe:
In a posting on a website supportive of the Democratic Party, Warren tells the tale of her Aunt Bee and Aunt Bert.
“A website supportive of the Democratic Party.” Boy, you’d think we were “Blue Voldemort Group” or something – The Site Which Must Not Be Named. The Herald, in contrast, managed to get this right. And Politico, which noted the Globe story in a news-of-the-day summary, hilariously found it necessary to go out of its way to identify us.
WARREN PIECE: ‘COMING HOME’ TO MASS. — “Elizabeth Warren, the architect of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, sent her clearest signal yet yesterday that she will challenge Republican Scott Brown for his Senate seat,” Theo Emery reports for the Boston Globe. “In a posting on a website supportive of the Democratic Party, Warren tells the tale of her Aunt Bee and Aunt Bert” …
–That “website supportive of the Democratic Party” is Blue Mass Group. Here’s Warren’s post, titled “Coming Home:” http://bit.ly/o8YZvN
Honestly, Globe, it’s not that hard.
- UPDATE: Additional links back to Warren’s post have now appeared in Slate and – OMG, what a HUGE win for us – MortgageOrb, “Required Content for Real Estate Finance Professionals.” File under, “you know you’ve made it when…” 😉
I have it on the good authority of a bumper sticker I’ve seen a few times that, “Voldemort Votes Republican”!:)
One more thing to be grateful to Elizabet Warren for instigating.
Mischief managed.
You guys are so cute when you go all meta. 😉
Seriously, though, it’s just small blogger envy, don’t mind me! 🙂
my second comment on the top level (not including responses to the first one) did get picked up and quoted by one or the other of the articles around the intertubes.
*beams*
Hehe. I do so love it when things get interesting around here, even when that comes with certain obligations to “check back in” in a major way. Oh well, so much for taking an election cycle off. 😛
Ryan’s Take! I made a graphic and everything 😛
All kidding aside, her post was a very shrewd one and the fact that she’s reaching out to the netroots at the beginning of the campaign, not taking us for granted… like “the local paper supportive of lamestream media norms, (like not naming the original source because it’s a blog and somehow blogs are exempt from universal media standards of sourcing).”
Dear Professor Warren,
Many thanks for even considering a run to unseat Scott Brown. He is adamantly opposed to any revenue increase, which needs to be part of our fiscal solution.
In your travels, please be sure to get to the Berkshires, where you will get a warm reception.
Thanks again for your grit and perseverance in the presence of bullies.
The Globe finally mentioned the-website-that-shall-not-be-named.
Hat in hand.