A good article in Business Week, Will Work for Praise, on motivating content creators with evidence that status is more powerful than cash for getting users to create content.
From my perspective there are a whole host of ways to encourage users to participate and engage in a site through content creation.  I met with Tim Chang, principal at Norwest Venture Partners a few weeks ago.  We were talking about game development and how effectively tapping into the seven deadly sins play a huge role in game engagement.   Community engagement is no different.  We need to give our users a reason to play games, write reviews and help create the StyleHop community.  For all these, tapping into base desire is critical.

What many startups miss is that while the promise of status is a powerful and important motivator, it’s not the only one.  We are developing our community with a mix of incentives that tap into desires for status, greed (read discounts) as well as positive influencers like contributing to our mission of democratizing fashion.

Focusing only on status and creating mavens is a natural mistake of many fashion sites…..the mavens and wannabe-mavens are the first ones to come to your site and they are the most enthusiastic.  However, this is a trap.  You can’t forget that big destination sites need to help everyday folks solve problems – that’s job one.  While mavens can help support this goal with original content, their deep interest in being heard can often times overwhelm broader goals.  Many social shopping sites are peaking out on traffic because they are leaning too much on helping the maven’s build status – There are too many sites where we go and feel like we are being bombarded by experts.  It’s like that great boutique you want to love but you don’t go in because the sales people are too pushy.

Fashion shopping destination sites need to make shopping for fashion easier if they want a mainstream audience.