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.