Immersion and Ecosystems
By: Abhinav Gaurav
Tags: Immersion, User Experience, Ecosystem, Content, Metaverse

Recently I came across a tweet which said that “Eventually all the companies will end up becoming a content centric company in coming days”.

Sounds pretty simple , right? But it isn’t. At present due to the increase in adoption of the social networks and decrease in network access costs, for the first time in human history, people are genuinely going Online and their numbers is increasing at a rapid rate. And to cope with the increase in potential customers/audiences, contents creation has become an integral part of the day to day business decisions. And with that BS content has also increased in a large number as demand is surpassing the supplies and with time it will be like an assembly line of content creation ( you have the keywords and you just create a sentence around it which can lead to better search engine performances).

“Quality vs Quantity” at it’s best.

One more angle in this is that, as social media is not regulated (and I don’t think it will be ever in my lifetime), people are always ready to outrage over the simplest things. Recently Tanishq ad and Swiggy tweet fiasco comes into mind. This is not the last time, it is just the beginning and with time as more and more people come online, “being politically right and content which can satisfy both the spectrums/wings” will become a niche expertise and company which can do that will be the new Ogilvy and WPP of the future (considering Ogilvy and WPP don’t swallow them).

Now that we are clear on the kind of content which will be created in coming days, we need to consider the “immersive-ness quotient” of the content.

“Immersive-ness quotient” of content is directly proportional to the success of your Community and Ecosystem.

Let’s go back in time, MySpace created the community around Music and Pop Culture, Facebook created the community around Social Games and Social Apps and Snapchats created communities around Disappearing Messages and the list is long. One thing to note here is that all the above examples aren’t of your usual bread and butter companies.

In Maslow’s hierarchy of Needs, they are in top 3 sections. But what happens, when you talk about the bottom 2 sections, that’s where things gets interesting, because now we are taking about BFSI and other industries like Healthcare, Transportation and others.

Top 3 sections’ companies relies on “virals” to engage with their audience and it works for them as they all can easily pass the Toothbrush test. But when we talk about core industries, it isn’t so as daily usage will vary from once a day to once in 5 years, so just having “viral content” won’t do much help as people’s attention span is getting shortened with time and by the time, people want to use them they might not even remember it.

So what can they do?

Building Community and Ecosystem around your products is the one way to go about it. And it’s not a one time task, it’s a continuous long term activity.

Most interesting thing about Games and Entertainment industry is that their learnings and insights can be replicated everywhere.

Just to understand what is an Ecosystem?

Read this thread. Nobody can explain it better than Matthew Ball.

The Metaverse

If this gets too heavy, you can also listen to his discussion/interview where he explained it with some nice analogies. It’s long but completely worth your time.

Spotify Link

Other Podcast Links

So now the question is “How to build an Ecosystem around a product which can’t even think of passing the Toothbrush test?”

Some experiments and efforts are going on and we need to keep an eye on them to see what works and what doesn’t.

More on it later.