Last night at the Online Community Roundtable, hosted by Webex in Santa Clara, a fascinating discussion emerged: “What does it take to activate participants in an online community?”.

It was agreed that community managers need to tune in to the most important motivators of their individual members/participants/prospectives. To paraphrase the consensus “Every community participant asks themselves 'What's in it for me?' before they contribute to content or help to solve a problem”. Various sorts of psychic rewards systems using ratings, reviews, privileges, prizes, recognition, and other kinds of incentives were reviewed in-brief.

The best practices about how to glean this sort of business intelligence will come to the table at the next meeting, which is in January. With this sort of knowledge, we would craft our community development agendas and priorities in a manner that is more likely to produce results.