

Online community best practices: Reward your top users - briancray
http://briancray.com/2009/07/31/online-community-best-practices-reward-top-users/
Discussed the 90-9-1 rule of social communities and how to reward that remarkable 1%.
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joez
Yelp is a great example of how to reward users.

They have multiple metrics for most prolific, from complements , to reviews,
to friends to followers. There is yelp elite status which allows users to
filter for just elite reviews and elites get invited to special elite events.

Related are what I call achievement systems or interesting thing is ways to
keep your most prolific users entertained. Usually cosmetic rewards (a
different symbol, a larger number) for jumping through hoops.

Some examples:

-World of Warcraft (larger number for doing random tasks like killing 10 bunnies within 1 second)

-Call of Duty (you level up from 1-55 in the game, but at 55 you can choose to reset your level to 1 for a different symbol that allows other users to know you are hardcore and have reset your level up to x times)

-FullTilt Poker (rewards for completing a number of random tasks like folding two pair on the flop)

-Kongregate.com is a great example (you earn achievements for playing games)

Creating ways for your most prolific users to show to others that this is
"their house" is a great way to keep them coming back.

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briancray
Wow! Awesome examples! I wish I had your ideas during the writing of this
article! Thanks so much for sharing!

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catone
This can be a double edged sword, though. You don't want to reward your top
users in a way that alienates your news users.

That is, you don't want to accidentally create a class system where top users
are given enviable privileges that new users feel like they can't attain. When
that happens, you end up exacerbating the 99/9/1 problem even more by making
it very hard for most new users to get into your community.

As an example, I've been a moderator at a number of forums over the past 15
years or so, and at a few we've rewarded people with special privileges based
on the number of posts -- such as images in their signature, special badges
under their avatar, additional private message space. Some of those rewards
are hidden (like PM space), but some are very visual (like special badges) and
had the effect of creating a class system in the community. People will
special badges were seen by new users as special and their contributions were
assumed to be more important -- even though that wasn't the case. Eventually,
the divide was so great and it was so hard for new users to catch up that we
ended up with just a small number of active users -- those who had been with
us a long time and already had a high post count.

(I'm not talking about any forum community in particular, but have seen this
happen on more than a couple.)

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briancray
Good points Catone. How the heck does one prevent that from happening while
rewarding top users? Hmmm... Food for thought!

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TrevorJ
There was a TED talk about this which was very insightful. I was unable to
find it, anyone remember what I'm talking about? He talked a lot about Flickr
in particular.

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alain94040
For a better discussion of those topics, you can watch this talk at
Startup2Startup
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hH2VzGpVwHY&feature=chann...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hH2VzGpVwHY&feature=channel_page)

She did a great job of explaining how to apply gaming tactics to social
networking. Which is exactly what this thread is about.

