I remember last month like it was yesterday. I would get all goose bumpy when I posted a Tweet and my world rocked when someone “liked” a Facebook comment. Yeah, I miss those days. Now, a new tweet is nothing special. I can post a Facebook status in my semi-awake state in the morning before I go to work and can post a pin on Pinterest in between making dinner and falling asleep watching the evening news. My tweetdeck chirps, and I don’t even care–I don’t know the person chirping at me anyway. My voyage toward social media competence now reminds me of that scene in the Chronicles of Narnia when the Dawn Treader runs out of wind and just floats around (I believe that’s the part right before they are attacked by bad monster-things). Yep. I have begun to master the tools, but am growing weary. I still don’t have many real friends on Twitter but I continue to get connected to good blogs and identify good trends in my professional work. The Facebook posts keep scrolling on, whether I pay attention or not. And although I still struggle with who my audience is–my mom, publisher, spammer, former student or future employer–I got 48 birthday wishes from people who at least knew my name.
As this social experiment evolves, I continue to parse through what is worthwhile and what isn’t. And although I am wondering even more seriously about the ROI of blogging, I am getting into a workable routine of surveying my social media environment and trying to manage some sort of momentum. And maybe that’s what this part of the voyage looks like–surveying and maintaining. We all know that if there is nothing new–whether it be in our Facebook or Twitter work, we will die. Well, ok, that might be overstating the metaphor, but if we are too inactive, people will stop paying attention. But if we are too active, they might forget what we look like at our real job–the one we get paid for. So maybe my lesson for today is that when things get busy and we don’t have anything terribly pressing to say, we need to shift into survey and maintain mode–keeping enough wind in the sails to keep us moving so when the next great idea comes, our sails will be ready to go. As I sit in the social media doldrums, I will continue to move.
Sail on, baby, sail on.
Peggy Kendall 
Looking for something to say is a distant second (if it finishes the race at all) to sharing your passion, sharing the best of the things you come across and what you think of them. It also helps to be intentional about controversy. That's the stuff people read if the numbers on content types are not lying. That's the stuff worth sharing. (It's a bit different/tweaky when your medium is also your subject?)Now we're talking content strategy and what you're trying to create/make/achieve and that can be boring or really exciting. It totally depends on perspective. However, it also directly corresponds to what you "get" and what your "Return on Investment" will be. It seems fair to do research and learn about a company before investing in it and expecting a "return." So also with online social? All of this is a bit like real life. We don't talk to everyone in the room every day, if at all. Pick who to talk to and what to say with some degree of consideration like we do in the analog world?I suspect that your subject is only sorta interesting to most and worth following to a tightly targeted group of people also just starting in the space or thinking of starting. Therefore your sense of the experiment's success has some degree of connection to your ability to get the kind of person who is not a social person to your site and getting them to comment? That's a tough context to be starting all of this in.