ninemsn launches ‘The Social Games’ – new London Olympics social gaming community featuring catch-up TV alerts services and prizes

Ninemsn is bringing a new challenge to the online Olympic community, sporting a new social gaming platform on the Wide World of Sports London 2012 website.

The ninemsn Social Games award badges and cash prizes to the ‘most social’ and engaged Olympics fans across the site.

Designed to increase engagement and social referrals to ninemsn, the Social Games will give visitors points for; sharing Olympic content, watching videos, commenting on and rating articles and images, and taking part in the trivia challenge. The eight week Social Games offer a weekly $1000 cash prize, and a major $10,000 prize at the end of the competition.

To join the Social Games, users log into the site through their Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Windows Live profile, and can keep track of their social status and how many points they have accrued via the live leader board.

The Social Games utilises a social gamification platform and suite of social plugins provided by Gigya.

Says Alex Parsons, managing director of ninemsn: “We’re using social infrastructure technology to build a more active and engaged online community. This deep social integration provides us with the complete set of tools we need to cater to and understand our users across our network.

“The Gigya platform will further solidify our increasingly two-way conversations and relationship with our audience.”

Coupled with its social plugins, Gigya’s social gamification platform enables publishers to incentivise user behaviours like sharing, commenting and generating referral traffic and helps us generate loyalty among its user-base.

By storing permission-based social data in Gigya’s social identity storage system, ninemsn is also able to gain a complete understanding of its users and market to them with an unparalleled level of personalisation and relevancy.

Says Patrick Salyer, CEO of Gigya: “This is a very exciting implementation for Gigya. Ninemsn is one of the biggest and most successful media companies in the Asia-Pacific region and it is implementing nearly every single product that Gigya offers. Gigya’s partnership with ninemsn is yet another indication that companies are looking for one vendor that can provide comprehensive social infrastructure – everything a site or app needs to be social.”

Also launching in time for the Olympics is ninemsn’s new schedule alerts and catch-up TV service, which enables users to set SMS and email alerts for when events are being aired live on TV,  or they can be prompted when the related video is launched in the devoted catch-up highlights channel, which is posted online six hours after it has been broadcast on Nine.

Says Parsons: “With the time difference between London and Australia, our online catch-up TV channel will have all the big events captured overnight and ready to view across the morning for our ninemsn audience.”