But your questions are indeed the key follow-on questions. What is the parallel for a company to the kinds of things artists do to engage their fans? How does it give back and participate in a community?

When you look at the community, as Doug notes, it isn’t a homogeneous group with single set of shared interests. It’s more like infinite overlapping circles. This is both the opportunity and the challenge for marketers. Opportunity in that they don’t have to touch every member of a community. Challenge because they need to be certain they are touching the right ones. The fact that currently so many are not reaching out to the right ones is the source of most of my bad pitch content on Marketing Roadmaps.

n a personal level, I find that once you pass the Dunbar number on a single social network, the network doesn’t break down– it breaks up- into a bunch of “Dunbars,” adding up to something greater in the long run.

what do i mean? If you have more than 150 Twitter followers– say, 1,000. You are never talking to 1,00 at once in any case– you are talking to far fewer at a time.

Breaking it down into “Dunbars” units may be one way for companies to scale social networking but still engage. That’s where time, people and money start to add up.