“How should we incent people to participate in our online community or be our word of mouth ambassadors?” clients frequently ask.
Forget money, give them egoboo.
Not the game Egoboo, but egoboo, derived from ego boost, which people get from seeing their name in “lights” and getting recognition for what they have to say.
According to Wikipedia, egoboo originated from science fiction fandom around 1947:
As a reliable way for someone to get their name in print was to do something worth mentioning, it became caught up with the idea of voluntary community participation. As a result of this, in later years, the term grew to mean something akin to an ephemeral currency, e.g., “I got a lot of egoboo for editing that newsletter.”The term later spread into the open source programming movement, where the concept of non-monetary reward from community response is a key motive for many of the participants.