Social CRM - Reward model for the leechers?

There is a really interesting article by Gartner on harnessing social CRM. In a nutshell talks about 4 not-to-miss steps in any social CRM initiative.

One of them made me smile. The third point: 3. Understand and reward different kinds of participation. (Btw please jump off to Gartner and read the article just as soon as you're done with mine ;)

Companies need to recognise and provide social applications for all levels of participants that can be categorised as: the creators (“I want to own this”), the contributors (“I want to be part of this”), the opportunists (“Since I’m here…”) and the lurkers (“I’ll reap the rewards”).

Whether it was that mammoth skin or the promotion, pampering egos is a time old tradition to get things (read this). Most social 'tools' I've seen promote "the creator" and the contributor, forums that allow you to see content only after registering, websites that allow commenting only after you've registered. I can see that there are obvious reasons for doing this. But (think about this) in most cases it's either involuntary (un-customised website code) or poor planning (need to show more users. People would've just wanted to solve a problem but can't post because his post count it too low.)

You'll no doubt realise that the lurker and the opportunist certainly can contribute (if not consistently, because, trust me, you've been one yourself at somepoint). Newspaper sites do this by requiring you to put in a mail id. Without rambling too much (I'm famished!) just wanted to highlight that companies implementing such initiatives need to have provide incentives to lock in lurkers. Case in point: I used to frequent xda-developers for ages but only recently signed up.

[Update: Bingo! (inflated ego) Just what I was looking for. Story of how a button brought in $300,000,000.

The $300,000,000 Fix

The designers fixed the problem simply. They took away the Register button. In its place, they put a Continue button with a simple message: "You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout."

The results: The number of customers purchasing went up by 45%. The extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million the first month. For the first year, the site saw an additional $300,000,000.

Read more here.]

Does any of this make sense? [Update: Yes! Bigger ego. Yet just as humble :p]