Waste Management To Launch Branded Game App, Oceanopolis, For Facebook

It should come as no surprise that one of the hottest and most profitable areas of the social media sector is social gaming. As annoying as it may be to constantly see users' status updates on how many pigs or bushels of corn they've sold playing Farmville, or how many hits your capo friends have racked up playing Mafia Wars, social gaming is BIG business, with thousands of individuals each day signing up.

Most user are gravitating to apps developed by the top global social game operators, including Zynga, Playfish (now part of Electronic Arts), Playdom, Five Minutes, and SlashKey. These companies held a combined market share of 56 percent in 2009, up from 38 percent in 2008.

As further evidence, consider this. According to this piece today in GamaSutra:

Microtransactions will help social games generate more than $1 billion in 2012 despite growth in the sector slowing after this year, according to research from global media markets analyst firm Screen Digest. The social gaming market has seen explosive growth in the past three years, making $76 million in 2008, $639 million in 2009, and a predicted $826 million this year. With that revenue growth, the number of new titles and gamers playing these releases have also increased dramatically.

Need more proof that social gaming is here to stay? Even Google is getting in on the trend. As widely reported earlier this month by many mainstream media outlets and blogs, including Mashable and TechCrunch, Google has quietly invested somewhere between $100 million and $200 million in Zynga, which has raised nearly half a billion dollars in venture capital in the last year alone. Multiple sources indicated that Zynga will be the cornerstone of a new Google Games to launch later this year.

So aside from more companies, more app, and more platforms, where is social gaming headed? It seems that the next phenomenon wave, widely adopted by many consumer and business brands on Facebook, Foursquare, MySpace, and SecondLife (remember this???), is to create branded gaming apps/presences that are both entertaining (obviously) and directly tie in to a company's mission, culture, and product/service offerings. We've seen this before in other media channels, so the concept is not entirely new. However, the number of high-profile brands diving headfirst into the social gaming space with apps of this nature will increase exponentially in the coming months.

And that is why this piece of news caught by eye this morning, courtesy of TechCrunch. Waste Management, the multi-billion dollar, publicly traded provider of waste and environmental services in North America, and its subsidiary Greenopolis, an environmentally-themed social networking site and blogging community launched two years ago, are diving into social gaming with a new Facebook app called Oceanopolis. The game is now launching in beta, with a full rollout expected in the coming weeks. Here is a screen shot of the new game:

In Oceanopolis, players maintain islands by recycling trash to build sustainable communities, and by interacting with friends. Users virtually earn points which can then be turned into printable coupons redeemable at movie theaters, restaurants and stores. Alternatively, these points can be turned into cash donations. Points can also be earned outside the game by recycling or by blogging on the Greenopolis site.

Why is all of this significant beyond the branding component, and the first concrete sign of a trend? It's quite rare for a company, such as Waste Management, to be so forward thinking on the marketing front. In the past year, the company has forged high-profile product placement, advertising, and sponsorship agreements to be featured on Golf Channel's "Big Break" and on CBS's wildly-popular "Undercover Boss." In fact, I expect to see the company continue being innovative and aggressive with respect to its future marketing activities.