I was in NYC on Election Night. It was CRAZY. Everywhere you could see that excitement that Barack Obama had been just elected the next President of the United States.
But no 10 days later… the buzz of victory is starting to wane. People voted… they supported the movement of Barack Obama because they wanted to be part of this rush of change that was going hit both Washington, DC and the country.
It’s been 10 days of complete radio silence from President-Elect Barack Obama on Twitter and it seems like every other major social media communications mechanism.
The question is… how are they going to keep the momentum going? People don’t just want to see him on CNN. They want to feel some type of personal connection. That’s one reason why people use social media because it’s much more personal.
Now… the incoming administration has announced that they are going be posting his weekly addresses on YouTube, which is awesome! But… what about the time between now and when he get’s inaugurated?
The next couple months is a long time to let your vast community to go stagnant. Will people just move on to something else?
I’d take this as a lesson for those of you who have a large community that you want to keep engaged. You have to be regular. People are fickle. They have short attention spans. You don’t want them to engage with you and then at some point just go on to something else because there was too big of a break in the action.
Updated 2:14pm: Well, it looks like the transition is going to start posting the videos now and not wait till after January 20th. The video really contains no substance whatsoever but that’s a different discussion entirely.
Oatmeal Stout - Justin Thorp's blog 
Setting aside that the man just won the Presidency in what was the longest political campaign in history, I don’t think a ten day “outage” from Twitter is really that big of a deal. As you mention, turn on CNN and it’s wall-to-wall Obama coverage. If it’s personal connection you’re craving, sign up for email updates on change.gov, check out Barack on Flickr (where they’ve been posting a ton of photos), or just chill out.
We’ve got him for four years, I think taking ten days off of a niche social site is okay. Weigh that against the number of vacation days our current President has taken, and it’ll seem like nothing.