It’s the Holiday season. The time of year to reflect on the past year and to look ahead to the future. It’s also the time of year to show the ones you love how much they are appreciated by giving gifts. That makes it a great time of year to show the members of your online community just how much you appreciate them and their participation.

Enabling and assigning badges is just one way to reward ongoing participation. Badges are easy to enable and to assign. There are badges to reward different forms of participation and accomplishments. For example, you can assign badges based on longevity to users celebrating their 1st, 2nd, 3rd+ anniversaries as registered members. You can also assign badges to New Members to welcome them to the community.

Perhaps you would like to assign badges to your Most Engaged, Influential, or Reputable members based on scoring algorithms in social analytics data., Badges can be assigned to these groups of members (Valued Contributors, Valued Member, Engaging Member, Influential Member) or to only the top scoring member in each category (Top Contributor, Top Engaged User, Top Influential User, Most Reputable User).

In addition to badging, it is also a nice gesture to thank your community members with a graphic, messaging, or video on your community home page or within your community digest email newsletter.

Another fun thing is to provide some holiday avatars (profile pics) for a limited time for your users to choose from in addition to the existing selection of avatars.

Still not enough? Real life rewards are always a nice, unexpected treat. Consider special promotions or coupons for your community members. Or if you have the budget, run a holiday giveaway within the community where you will be sending a number of gift cards to a randomly selected group of active users during a specific time frame.

But what about those members on the naughty list? You could send them a lump of coal, but that might not get the message across. Maybe it’s time to enforce your community’s Rules of Engagement and take advantage of some of the user moderation features such as putting a member on Probation, where all of that user’s posts would go to the moderation queue for approval. Or my personal favorite, the Bozo flag, where the user thinks they still have full rights to post, but their content is only visible to them.

What are some other ways you are recognizing your community members this year?

Enjoy the holidays!