Back when all I ran was White Wolf stuff, I structuralized this, as follows:

Since the XP rewards in WW games is usually pretty small, between 2-5 per session, if you go by the book, I went around the table and asked everybody to say one thing that they really liked about another player’s performance or table presence, and reward the recipient with a bonus XP, to reward good behaviour.

Eventually, I drifted that to reward both the recipient and the speaker, since I thought that praising another player was worthy of support, too.

In games that use XP differently, I still try to do this, but in different ways. Sometimes I just do it informally, but I definitely like that ritualized debrief of, as you say, acknowledgement.