On the weblog Brickmeetsbyte.com a blogpost on self-service communities was posted last week. Unfortunately for you it is written in Dutch, but it holds some very interesting research conclusions. One of the conclusions is that reputation systems are very important to increase member participation in self-service communities. Because social status is important for community members, these members contribute simply to gain higher status.

The key to success in all our clients’ innovation communities is increasing member participation. So all activities that can potentially increase member participation deserve a closer look.

But first of all, what is a self-service community? Normally with a branded community focuses on ‘sexy’ advantages; like customer involvement in product development, enhancing the brand perception, increasing the authority on a certain subject, etc. A success case which is mentioned a lot in this context is Lego Factory. Service, on the other hand, has never been a subject to get a lot of publicity. However, a lot of people like to help each other. Companies can facilitate this by setting up forums that are managed by community members.

Research on a self-service community at HP found that social status is one of the key drivers for participants to make postings. They have created a reputation system that is based upon the number of contributions from participants. The more contributions someone makes, the higher his/her title gets. It appears that these titles are a lot more important than other types of rewards. Next to that, it is important to support the participants well. This could include good communication when a participant has been promoted in the reputation system.

As innovation communities are similar in many ways to self-service communities, one can expect that reputation systems also contribute to member participation in innovation communities.