B2B Communities - Niche vs Big - what is best?

I think that's kind of you touching upon a very, very big question that people in the industry, and I'm Talking about industry, B2B media and events, which represents the majority of the audience that we have here. We have about 40% media, 40% events, and the rest will be B2B organization, which is, okay, I have my event, I run my event, whatever size that is, or my portfolio events that that is. And they always think about the size. And I just want to kind of delve a little bit more into that. The size, the niche versus big we could see back in the day and some of the organizations that have kind of these big communities. You know, someone that I admire, Sift Group has amazing committees from a very long time, iqpc, you guys and everything. And I guess we don't really know how it all started, but our view as audiences that they're big, they have 9, 10, 10, 20, you know, e consultancy group to 200,000 at some point. So right now everyone is always thinking, okay, what is the right size, big or small? And everyone thinks that they should be big. So what is your view? And essentially you are running a, you're an expert in communities and you're running a tool that runs communities. Right. So you have a little bit of context. So what is the best size, what is the best group? And if you need to kind of bring up any of the graphics, please give me a nudge. But what makes sense? Is it better, big or small?

Well, I mean, you know, the easy answer is it does depend a little bit. And again, I think in B2C it is different because you can have very large communities where everyone's sort of, you know, like custom, like giffgaff and things. Customer support type communities can work quite well. And B2B, I think that can be a little harder because often there's, you know, more senior people, more junior people, there's buyers and sellers. And so there are sort of dynamics at play which can, you know, mean that often you need smaller, I think, peer groups where it's. And also there's more domain expertise in B2B, you know, some specialist topic area which those people are super excited about. But. But then there are not many of them, you know, so, so yeah, generally. And in fact, if you, yeah, maybe if you got that slide, I sent you this showing the various concentric circles and I'd be interested to see. Obviously we'll get feedback on this and I assume we'll be sharing these. In fact, I can post them into the professional community leaders Thing later. Yeah, that's the one. That's it. Yeah, there. So, because we get asked this quite a lot and it's something we think about for Gil as well, which obviously is mobile. And I don't think you want to be in a. The equivalent of a WhatsApp group with 14,000 people. You know, it's quite an intimate personal experience. It probably shouldn't be too big, but, you know, we. We have a guy, Professor Robin Dunbar, who's on our advisory board, and he's famous for the Dunbar number, which is about 150, which is the maximum number of people you can. Any human can really know. It's a limitation of our brain that's not changing very quickly. So if you kind of map that, there's a link there. We did a post about professional networking, but I think it applies to communities too, where you have these kind of. They actually goes up in multiples of sort of five, actually. And this is based on his. This is science in evolutionary anthropology and how human networks work and form and tribes, how they've worked through history and, you know, Amish communities, army units, they all break down into certain quite predictable patterns, actually. So I would say that, you know, three to five people, five to 15, very hard to make a B2B community out of that because it's too small. That's a kind of individual experience. We find that they, you know, the groups, networks and communities in B2B tend to be between 15 and 1500, which might sound like quite a big range. And different sorts of community suit, different use cases within that. But, for example, the average group size on Guild at the Moment is about 120, which is spookily close to the Dunbar number. I think if you go above 1500 A, you go out of the sphere that any human can actually remember even a name, let alone how they kind of connected with someone. And that's use that to me is marketing. I mean, so that can still be. That's your sort of touch points, you know, sphere of influence or this nice phrase I like from Lisa Reichelt. She talked about ambient intimacy. So it's sort of like there and you have a presence. But that's what me, you know, things like LinkedIn and Twitter and all feel like that now. But you can't. You don't really know the people, you don't really have a personal kind of connection with them. So personally, it feels to me like these B2B communities work well in that 50 to a thousands, you know, and a lot of them between you know, 150 to 300 that works well. And also because which I saw, you know, on your other slides, there are these surprisingly consistent, you know, rules or things around how many people are actually active or engaged in the community we which is, you know, any 10% ish may be actively contributing. And that's true whether that's an event, whether it's guild, whether it's linked to any of this thing. It's just the way certain people are more talkative than others and things. So if you only have 10%, let's say contributing to a group, if you've only if you've got 50 people, that might only be five people, it doesn't mean the others aren't getting value, but it just might feel a little bit empty. And so there is, you know, sometimes you need a certain quorum, a certain number of people in order to get enough of this sort of chatty motivator types for it to feel like it's got a natural momentum and life of its own.