Image via Wikipedia

While traditional marketing, communications, R&D and the like revolve around the notion of “audiences,” social media is centered on communities.  Radically compressed here, the difference is that the value derived from audiences tends to be one-dimensional; their shared interest makes them amenable to messaging, products and services that they consume.

Communities, by contrast generate value by increasing the connectedness of their members with one another.

Communities benefit from network effects, that is the larger they are, the more value they create (This in contrast to audiences, whose size is not a measure of value-creation but of conversion-to-sale potential). Therefore it is in your interest to nurture fewer, larger communities rather than the fragmentation we see being created with the social media mystery house.