Have you ever had a roommate who didn’t help with chores? (Note to friends from college: Yes, I know, I was that roommate.) Can you recall the moment when they did do something, like the dishes, or take out the trash, and they expected kudos and bozo buttons for their efforts and you thought, “No. You’re supposed to do that every day!” Maintaining social media can be like that.

For example, I have not blogged in over a week. I am busy. I have stuff to do. I am important. Not important enough to want to tell you all about the stuff I have to do, apparently. But hey, I built the blog, didn’t I? I uploaded some of my work to the portfolio, right? I tweet. Not in the past few days, but I do, I tweet. I did the dishes. Where’s my bozo button?

One of the things keeping me in the weeds was my ukulele meetup group hosted a “Ukulele Melee” at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum last Thursday. (Note: I did not promote said event on my site anywhere. Bad Stacey! Bad!) I was responsible for posters and building up the event on our Facebook and Twitter. We also issued press releases to the local papers and radio stations and posted announcements on ukulele related websites. We did the advance work and it paid off, big time. The museum barely had enough room to contain us all. Between the attendants in the performance hall and the random ukers picnicking and jamming around the sculpture park, the conservative estimate was over 300 people. I think we expected maybe 100–150. It was really successful.

So, joy, happiness, all these new people asking about our meetup group. One fellow suggested that he would like to start a North Shore branch. There’s been a  jump in people following our Twitter feed and “liking” our Facebook page. Whether you run a meetup group, a business, a blog, a band, this is what you live for, that surge, that buzz. Then, over the weekend, our leadership committee sent an email to the club announcing that we were going on hiatus until September. It was like that roommate. “Look! I did it! I cleaned the bathroom. It’s done. Now I will ignore it for a month until it is back to the grody, post-kegger bathroom we had before.” What was the point of cleaning it in the first place? What was the point of finding all these people who also like ukulele, telling them about our awesome group and and then putting it on the back burner until they forget all about us?

You’ve got to do it every day, people. You’ve got to build the buzz and maintain it. You’ve got to reach out to those who like your brand and remind them why they liked it in the first place. Otherwise, what’s the point?

So, I’m sorry, for slacking on my blog. I will try to be better about posting, even if it’s about something silly like my extra-curricular ukulele activities. Now, I’m off to plan a hiatus meetup for my group, sans leadership committee. I don’t want to lose momentum.