• Design, Design, Design: Amazing design makes everyone feel better. There are some products and services that compete on nothing but design. Have you polished every pixel, adjusted every color and rounded every corner? Can users understand what’s going on without trying too hard?
• Loyalty and Rewards with Game Mechanics: Most of our customers ask about moderation tools. While moderation is important to keep control of your community and brand, game mechanics can be a much more effective way to not only discourage bad behavior but also encourages the kind of behavior that drives your business objectives (More engagement, more pageviews, more purchases). Give rewards, clear leveling paths and points to get users going in the right direction. (Badgeville)
• Rewards: While Game Mechanics with virtual goals are fun, you can provide users even more incentives to play the game. Exclusive content, exclusive discussion forums, super powers for moderation and curation and more. (Badgeville)
• Tallent on the page: Your journalists, celebrities and members of your team interact on Twitter or Facebook. Are they engaging on your site as well? Are they tweeting about your site? Are they responding to users in the comments, on the river and in the chat room?
• Official Twitter Account: Are you promoting the benefits of your new real-time apps on your official Twitter and FB accounts? ‘Participate on our site site for…’, ‘Check out our site for…’ etc.
• Grab This: Allow users to grab your real-time experiences (River, Chat, Comments, Live Blogging etc) in either branded JS embed (something users can embed on their own websites) or in a new browser popup dedicated to showing real-time content – a kind of ‘Branded Tweetdeck’ they can keep on their second monitor.
• Cross-pollination: Are you promoting your on-site activity (Comments, Ratings, Polls, Video plays etc) on the home page and sidebars of your site? In real-time?
• User Profiles: A page per user with a stream of their activities. Not just Facebook activities, but all activities taken on your site. Allow users to interact with those activities right from the user profile page. Also be sure to expose your user profiles via Hovercards on all streams.
• Permalink pages: Set up permalink pages just like on Twitter. We have a plugin that hyperlinks the date/time stamp on every Echo item to a dedicated item page. This can be an enormous opportunity to encourage users to deep link to your site.
• Follow: Allow users to follow the things that matter to them. Tallent, Teams, Journalists, Topics, Tags etc. Give them a home page that represents a real-time stream of their followed interests. (BranchNext)
• Notifications: Users should be able to email subscribe to any stream or conversation thread. (BranchNext)
• Mining: Are you mining your mainline river/comment thread/chat for images, users, top comments, top tags etc in the right rail? Surface valuable activity in the stream quickly (StreamSentiment)
• Notifications: When a user comments on any stream (or has their comment aggregated in) they should be notified if anyone replies to them. Right now we can do this via email (BranchNext Plugin) and @ replies on Twitter (via the upgraded JanRain sharing plugin). This will close the viral loop and encourage return visits.
• Real-time Chat: Have you considered a persistent chat room or lightweight forum for each section/tag on your site where users can talk to each other.
• VIP Participation: Have you thought about encouraging your VIPs to join in on a regular basis. We have a great ‘Green Room‘ experience that helps manage Q&A with VIP guests.
• Intercepting VIP tweets: It’s possible to give your team ‘fake’ Twitter accounts to tweet from. This account would be  marked as private. Then a bot that follows that account relays all their tweets to the ‘official’ account with all appropriate links redirected back to the official.com permalink pages instead of 3rd party sites.
• Aggregation of conversations: Are you displaying Tweets or FB conversations on comment pages. We will soon have @ replies to tweets and Arktan can import FB comments from your FB fan pages. Display it inline, under the main stream or in a separate tab.
• Better comment system: Have you custom built your comment system with Echo? Considering using the new RealTidBits Comments product. It offers a number of UX advantages and an ongoing roadmap of updates.
• Productization: The core components of your deployment must be self-contained JS files produced by your dev team with simple configuration options that define tabs, sources and skin files to make deployment and management easier. We can connect you to customers who can share their experiences with this

These are just some of the best practices we’ve learned over the last few months.

Do you have any more?