At last week’s Social Media Club Seattle Meeting, Sean Moffitt presented on “Wiki-brands.” He coined this term to describe companies with successful (active) customer communities after interviewing a slew of very large companies.

One slide that particularly interested me from Sean’s presentation was one on “Matching Community Incentives to Motivation”. He indicated that there were patterns of human behavior (motivations) that you should aim to please with community features.

I have stolen a slide out of Sean’s presentation, and re-worded things very slightly to match my own experiences with HelpShare, Lookmarks, and most recently Twibes Twitter Groups. This chart indicates the type of motivation, and the type of community feature that can facilitate that motivation. I color-coded the features applicable to Twibes where we’re doing a good (green), average (yellow), or bad (red) job.

Hopefully this will help you prioritize features for your own online community. Are there other motivations we are missing?