Gigya launches partner ecosystem to turn social, gamification into cash

So you have a million likes on Facebook and your latest sweet nothing on Twitter was retweeted 10,000 times. How many dollars found their convoluted ways through all those pipes and tubes into your pocket?

That’s a question social infrastructure company Gigya is looking to answer.

Gigya promises to make sites, services, and apps social, fun, and engaging via simple-to-integrate plugins, giving brands the ability to integrate social sign-on or gamification strategies. Now, a few months after announcing a $15.3 million fifth round of funding, the company is releasing new capabilities for brands to use the social data they collect and feed it into marketing automation systems such as HubSpot and Marketo.

Gigya, which is in a hyper-growth phase right now, already touches over a billion Internet users with its social plugins and architecture. As Victor White, the company’s senior marketing manager told me, Gigya is on target to triple revenue this year, having just completed seven consecutive quarters of double-digit sales growth, signing new clients in the past few months like Adidas, Time Warner, and Italy’s national airline, Alitalia.

Now the company is taking that momentum and building a partner ecosystem, which it is calling NEXUS. The make the millions of data points Gigya’s social tools collect on your site and your apps available to marketing automation tools.

For example, online retailers using Gigya’s tools can integrate Certona’s product recommendation engine into their site, which can then segment users based on rich social data, target specific groups and subgroups, and make better product recommendations. Another example would be feeding social data into an email marketing campaign, which sounds old-fashioned but is actually still one of the best ways to connect to customers and drive sales.

“By strengthening our relationships with top online marketing vendors, we are able to help our clients extract the incredible value that social data brings,” Gigya CEO Patrick Salyer said in a statement.

NEXUS integrates seamlessly with a number of launch partners out of the gate and offers an open API that allows businesses and partners to connect any existing technologies.

photo credit: Chris Pirillo via photopin cc