BizSugar.com › Marketing › Do we need to incentivise participation in online communities?

When we are building and managing online communities we want people to take part in the social context. The communities are not market-based transactions, but social environments. Monetary incentives (or equivalents) will only go to create an environment at odds with this. That's why we tend not to incentivise participation in our online communities, we find that we usually don't need to. Where we do incentivise we tend to do so with gifts, information or access - non-monetary offerings which leave people firmly where we want them in the social context.