A Good Community is a Function of Good Curation

During the pandemic, the word community became the buzz word de jour. Left and right, people were talking about their communities as if they were these special things. But what I found is that the use of the word community was a fancier way of describing an audience.

I developed my own formula for determining whether something was, in fact, a community. I looked at it through three levels, which I wrote about back in 2020:

Nucleus: The content that you create. At A Media Operator, that’s the essays that I write about media businesses. I really don’t think non-media people are reading this.

Layer One: The access readers have to me. People reply to my essays all the time and I try to reply to every single email. That access has built a stronger relationship.

Layer Two: The access readers have to each other. A Media Operator doesn’t really have this yet. I offer comments, but by and large, people don’t feel inclined to participate here. I’ll have to continue figuring out the right way to build this.

For most media companies, they never grow out of the nucleus stage. People come to our sites, consume our content, see the ads or pay for a subscription, and then move on. There is nothing inherently wrong with this; however, this is not a community.

But sometimes, the company graduates into the next layer. The newsletter companies were particularly good at this because people could easily hit reply. At Morning Brew, we get emails from all sorts of people, which we reply to. Now there is a two-way conversation, which makes readers feel important. This is how many of the newsletter companies have built such loyal readers.

Ironically, this is also how OnlyFans has facilitated such strong businesses for their models. Most porn on the internet is free and yet there are models making seven figures a month with their businesses. I wrote about this a few years ago and this part is worth calling out:

On OnlyFans, which is currently photos and VOD, users can leave comments on each piece of content. The most successful models reply. Recall the quote above: people are paying to feel acknowledged. There are plenty of places to get this sort of content online for free. Yet, this is the only place that a user can go to interact with that specific individual. And often times, a single reply can keep a user engaged for a long time.

While this feels like a community, it’s still not truly a community. Yes, people are able to say things back to the publisher, but it’s still one-to-one. It’s very hub and spoke. Each spoke is on its own, but feels a connection to the publication.

A true community requires each of the spokes to be connected with each other. Not only do you have a relationship with the reader, but the readers are also building relationships with each other. If you are able to facilitate this, then you have a legitimate community.

Here’s the problem with that. Communities are inherently small in nature, which frustrates many operators. As they begin to grow, they start to fall apart.

Dunbar’s number states that our brains are only able to have true relationships with approximately 150 people. As Robin Dunbar himself wrote:

The evidence that personal social networks and natural communities approximate 150 in size, characterised by a very distinctive layered structure, has grown considerably in the past decade. We see it in telephone calling networks, Facebook groups, Christmas card lists, military fighting units and online gaming environments. The number holds for church congregations, Anglo-Saxon villages as listed in the Domesday Book and Bronze Age communities associated with stone circles.

This layered structure turns up in both communities and personal social networks, with each layer being around three times the size of the layer immediately inside it. In fact, the same layers, with the same sizes, turn up in the multi-level societies of monkeys, apes, dolphins and elephants. It’s just that humans have more layers.

As communities get bigger, things start to devolve. I’ve seen it happen on a wide variety of forums. Grow to 300 people and you begin to see things struggle. Grow to 1,000 people and social contracts break. Grow to 10,000+ people and everyone’s just spamming, talking past each other, and it’s absolute chaos. Twitter has entered this chat. Is it still, technically, a community? Yes. But is it a good one?

If you’re going to have an incredible community, you need to be strict with the number of people that you let in. Another way to think about it is that the best communities have the best curators.

Let’s look at a couple of examples.

Despite not being a real estate investor yet, I have somehow become very interested in the #ReTwit community on Twitter. While he might disagree, I’d argue that Moses Kagan is probably the “Godfather” of this community. The level of respect he commands is unparalleled.

Building off that respect, he launched his own event called Re-convene with his wife. Events are the truest representation of a community because you are literally bringing people together in one room or building. If he announced the event and let anyone register, he’d sell out in a day; even at $5,000 a ticket.

But instead, he stipulates the types of people he’s looking for. In a tweet where he talks about the event, he says:

– Operators should really only come if they have at least 3-4 deals under their belts and are looking to scale the enterprise using OPM

– Passive allocators should probably be looking to place at least $250k / yr into sub-institutional RE deals

He is curating the type of person he wants to be at the event. In turn, his attendees know that they’re going to meet serious real estate operators. If you’re an investor with $1 million to invest in real estate, you want to meet operators who know how to invest that money. You don’t want the average house flipper pitching you.

Another example is Forbes Council. Scott Gerber is the co-founder of Community.co, which powers Forbes’ communities. When he and I talked on the podcast, he said:

Their C-suite was doing a wonderful job at events, but at that point hadn’t done anything yet to really truly convene in small circles. Their now CEO, Mike Federle at that time had built similar programs that other publications he was at and gave us the opportunity to work with Forbes and really prove could we build the professional association of Forbes. That’s what we ended up doing.

Take the business brand that is meaningful to millions of stakeholders around the world and look at the different verticals we might be able to curate around. At that point, we started with the Forbes Technology Council, the idea being, C-suite people that are in the thick of technology from startup to enterprise, because there’s a lot of sharing that can happen behind closed doors, and the rest is history.

If you look at Forbes Council, the requirements are being a senior executive at a company with at least $1m in revenue or financing. Is that a lot of money? Of course not. But it’s still enough to curate most people. This ensures that members are able to have good conversations with people at similar levels to them.

They further curate by topic. Forbes has a business development community and an agency community. You get filtered into your respective communities to ensure that the discussions are fruitful.

The only way these communities—Forbes or Re-convene—can be successful is if their members and attendees feel that they are meeting incredible people. And so, the only way to facilitate that is to ensure that you are being ultra-curatorial with your members.

In some respects, it helps to do curation one-by-one. If you have lunches planned for your events, give them assigned seats. You can try to facilitate tighter connections since people will talk to whomever they’re seated next to. If you know that an investor is looking to put money into storage, for example, connect them with the storage operators.

It’s the same online. You can host sub-community discussions with certain cohorts of the larger community. For example, if it’s a media community, have one discussion with just the CEOs. Have another discussion with the audience development people. This ensures people are getting the best value they can.

Community is actually very hard. It requires a lot of moving parts. But the best community operators are great curators. Ensure that you are bringing the right people to the table and your community with thrive. Open it up to everyone and you’re going to see your best people leave.

Thanks for reading. If you have thoughts, hit reply or join the AMO Slack. I hope you have a great weekend!