Ricardo Molina talks with a guest about building B2B communities. Start small and focus on quality members over numbers. The strongest communities form around shared experiences or in tough times, and mixing digital forums with in-person meetups works better than either alone.
Chapters
Did you have any basis of. In terms of an audience or do you have anything? That's because many people. And again, taking into account the answer on the post, many of the audience right now are looking at building and growing it. So did you start very, very small and start building it? And again at the time, no digital, no nothing. How did you start building that audience at that point in time?
Yeah, I mean, we had say it was pre social media, as in pre LinkedIn and Twitter and things like that. We obviously were focusing on B2B, professional rather than consumer here. But there were web forums, you know, bulletin boards, discussion forums and there were email lists. So, you know, and the very origins of the Internet really, after its military incarnation were, you know, academic, largely communities sharing information. So it started really with communities. But I think the thing was that, and I still think this is quite an interesting point, is that I think some people, they like big numbers or success equals big numbers, you know, so it's lots of followers and lots of members and I've got 14,612 people in my LinkedIn group. Isn't that great? And I've never really bought into that. I mean, I put this. And specifically, again, talking about B2B, where usually it's about value rather than volume, it's about quality rather than quantity. In most industries, there's actually a fairly small number of very influential, more powerful people and there is a sort of structure and a hierarchy. So if you can start with quality and not kind of chase numbers too quickly, and if you maintain quality, it feels a bit slow and kind of painful, but I think that's the way to do it because it keeps quality and then quality kind of attracts quality and good quality polices itself better and things. So I guess in that sense, and it starts to. And if it's good, it starts to spread organically as well. And then good people are happy then to refer or recommend their friends because they know that it's a quality space and it's worthwhile and valuable. So I think that this is. People worry sometimes too much maybe about their communities or groups being too small, whereas I would worry about the quality rather than the quantity. So with E consultancy, I mean, I was working agency, I had some contacts and some clients, but it started off very small but highly engaged and we used to meet up actually as well, just in pubs and things. So it was not just digital, it was physical as well. And you know, particularly then it was like a sort of underground weirdo movement digital at that time. And I think again, strong communities are often formed in adversity or where they feel that they need to defend themselves against something. So. Or they have they got some strange thing that they feel a kinship around, but which other people maybe, you know, think is a bit unusual. So. And that was true of digital in the late 90s, obviously now it's not the case. So again, often, you know, I think, you know, and obviously coronavirus at the moment, you know, that there are opportunities to create strong emotional bonds and ties in communities at either times of adversity or sort of shared experiences. And that digital, early days of digital was definitely felt like that.
