Leveraging social for content enrichment

As I was reading Flow on my Kindle app to cope with some typical PM impostor syndrome, I noticed some sentences were subtly underlined on the page.

This is the ‘Popular Highlights’ feature, where specific sentences or passages which have been highlighted the most by other readers are subtly underlined and also a count is provided as a validation metric. The response to this feature has been pretty divisive. While I personally enjoy crowdsourced enrichment of content, some felt that this feature is a distraction and leads to a focus only on the most mainstream interpretation of the content.

Enrichment of content by adding a social element to it is a low-hanging fruit for content providers. Everyone from OTT providers to video games can bring in the social aspect to differentiate and enhance their offering, as pure content-led differentiation is increasingly difficult due to the high investments required. Here’s some examples of how I have seen it implemented across multiple segments:

YouTube

YouTube has added a ‘Most replayed’ feature where specific sections of the video which has seen the most engagement is highlighted and presented to viewers. I find this very useful, especially in longer-format contents like product presentations or interviews, I can quickly zoom into the most relevant sections.

Elden Ring

The most popular game of 22, Elden Ring has a fascinating implementation of leveraging social inside content by adding Player Messages throughout the game. This leads to very helpful and funny contextual messages left by other players who have played through that section duly appraised for quality by the larger player base. This has led to the creation of an in-game niche social media network very relevant to the players, entertaining, connective and devoid of usual trolling or antagonism. Also a bunch of memes!

The above implementations show that crowdsourcing content enrichment is a largely well-received and serves to enhance and drive focus on relevant parts of content in this era of hyper-short attention spans and multi-device content consumptions.

How do OTTs bring in Social?

An easy reference for OTT providers is looking at other community-driven content platforms such as Steam for gaming. The first MVP can just be a straightforward adaptation of existing community features inside Steam, I’ve captured this in the below comparison:

Conclusion

Today, everything is social and everyone is distracted. Sports fans are reading Reddit threads, arguing with their friends on Whatsapp groups, researching stats while simultaneously watching the game. Content providers must evolve to make the consumption of their content a social experience. This will both enhance user experience, lead to creation of communities and eventually drive user engagement and stickiness to the platform.