Today, we’re rolling out a new Ning plan for customers who need extra special treatment: the Ning VIP plan.

Ning has become known as a flexible, powerful social platform. Within minutes, anyone can create an online community that’s completely custom. A wide range of individuals, organizations and companies depend on Ning to bring people together – right down to the smallest groups that may only have a few dozen members.

Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen Ning Creators take the platform to a whole new level. Many successful communities with big audiences are generating significant revenue. Others use Ning as a co-publishing platform to fuel social conversations for their brand and products. These customers are demanding more from Ning. They need to be confident that their network won’t go down. And, if something serious does happen, they need to know Ning will respond quickly, even at 3 a.m. on a Sunday morning. They need an account manager who understands their objectives, the progress they’ve made with their network and the challenges they face – someone who can provide a high level of service and advice. They also need deeper metrics to understand how members are interacting on their network and sharing content on the social web.  And, they need professional design services so they can launch a community that communicates their brand and values.

We frequently receive inquiries for this higher level of service and premium SLA (service level agreement) from prospective customers as well. Up until now, we haven’t offered a subscription plan or a dedicated team who can address these needs. In several cases, we’ve negotiated a special deal and tasked a number of internal support and engineering resources to deliver this special treatment. With others, the customer either purchased a Ning Pro subscription or we lost out on their business.

Today, I’m excited to announce the launch of the Ning VIP Plan:

• Guaranteed uptime
• Point-in-time recovery back-ups
• 24/7 IT support for urgent issues
• A dedicated account manager
• Monthly social engagement reporting
• Launch consultation and training
• Professional design and development
• 1 Terabyte of storage and 10 Terabytes per month of bandwidth

Due to the location and time zone of our VIP account managers, we can initially only deliver the VIP Plan to customers in the U.S., Canada and Germany. If you’re interested in the new Ning VIP plan, please give us a call at 1-866-992-0971 (U.S. and Canada) or 0800-101-4903 (Germany).

On April 12th, we received confidential details of a security vulnerability that could allow someone to sign in as an arbitrary Ning user. The intent was not malicious, and to our knowledge and reasonable belief, there has been no unauthorized access to user accounts. The Ning engineering team immediately took several steps: We changed the encryption information to generate a sign-in cookie, and we changed where the information was stored. In addition, we proactively strengthened the encryption algorithm. The changes were then immediately rolled out across the Ning platform starting late last week. Ning Creators and their members may have noticed the protective measures when we forced all users to sign-in again. At this time, we are confident that we have addressed the vulnerability.

We would like to thank the team that identified the vulnerability and collaborated with us to fix it. We take privacy and security very seriously at Ning. We would again like to emphasize that due to the confidential way we were approached, no user accounts have been maliciously compromised.

Not too long ago, we laid the groundwork for our member categories feature by streamlining the management of your existing and prospective members. This feature is now live and we wanted to share with you the details and how it works.

Categories
You can create up to 50 categories and assign members to them. All of your members will begin in the default category, called “Members.” You can create and edit new categories via the Member Categories tab in the Member Management section. A couple of important limitations to note: the default category can’t be edited, and members can only belong to one category at a time.

Listings
When you create a category, you have an option to create a listing page exclusively for the members in that category, and you can create listing pages for up to 10 categories. When you do this, a new submenu item for the category will appear in the submenu items for Member pages. You can choose the text for the submenu listing, so that you can pluralize or customize it. This is a great way to highlight specific members within your community.

Image and Text Badges
Each category that you create can also have an optional image or text badge that gets added as an overlay on a member’s profile picture. Whether you create badges of honor or badges of shame, this is an excellent way to identify admins, reward special members, or just make it easy for visitors to identify different types of members. Text badges are based on the category name, and can be placed at the top or bottom of the profile picture. You can set the text color, background color, and the background opacity for each badge, so you can get as creative as you like!

Images badges can be positioned in one of the four corners of a member’s profile picture. We’ve included over 20 badges to get you started, and you can upload and manage up to 50 of your own custom badges!

CSS Tricks
Designers and Ning Creators comfortable with CSS will be pleased to know that each category made is associated with a CSS class added to the #xg_themebody div in profile pages. This means you can create CSS styles that will be applied to the profile pages of members in a category. This will let you do things like adjust the background or color scheme of every member of your network who’s in a specific category.

Messaging
Once you’ve assigned your members to categories, you can use new functionality in the Broadcast Message feature to send a broadcast message to just those members. Choose any category you’ve created and proceed from there.

Let us know how you’re using member categories and badges within your community!

We will be performing maintenance on the Ning Platform this coming Friday, December 2, from 10 p.m. to 12 a.m. (midnight) Pacific Time. During this time, all Ning Networks will be unavailable for 2 hours.

We’re proud to have been able to realize a consistently high uptime over the past year. To keep this consistent record high, we need to perform some crucial upgrades to hardware, systems and databases. We want to ensure your Ning Network stays online and speedy for the next year and beyond.

During this time:

• Your Ning Network will display a maintenance page matching your current theme customization to let your members know that your community is temporarily unavailable.
• We will update the Ning Status Blog when this maintenance begins and ends.
• We’ll also provide ongoing updates during this maintenance period on the Ning Status Blog and on our @Ning Twitter account.
• The Creators Network will also be down for maintenance. We will update on Creators when all is complete.

We recommend advising your members of this downtime in advance via a broadcast message and/or other notices on your Main page. We’ve put together some boilerplate language you can use for messaging by simply copying and pasting. Or, tailor it for your community:

• Formal: We will be performing maintenance on [network_name] this Friday, December 2, from 10 p.m. to 12 a.m. (midnight) Pacific Time. During this time, [network_name] will be unavailable. We hope this won’t be too much of an inconvenience as we work to perform some necessary upgrades.
• Informal: Just wanted to give everyone a heads-up that we need to perform some simple but necessary maintenance on [network_name] this coming Friday, December 2. We’ll need to take the site down from 10-midnight (Pacific). During these 2 hours, we’ll simply show a message asking folks to check back later. Thanks in advance for your patience while we tune up the site!

We know that maintenance like this can be an inconvenience, and we appreciate your patience while we perform it!

Today, we’re excited to unveil the Aviary Ning Extension, a tool that can increase member engagement and inject fun and utility into Ning social websites using photos feature.

The Big Picture

Photo sharing continues to be one of the most popular features on Ning, second only to the inbox/forum. By working closely with Aviary (www.aviary.com), a leading provider of creative web and mobile tools, we make photo sharing even more powerful and fun for your community through the Ning API.

Our priority is to provide the best social experience for Ning Creators; we’re constantly pushing the innovation envelope through product development and partnerships. By strategically partnering with the best-in-class providers and services, like we’ve done with Aviary today, and uStream and SoundCloud earlier this year, we can roll-out new functionality even faster.

The new Aviary extension lets Ning Plus and Pro Creators and members easily edit photos directly in a Ning Network. It’s easy to make useful tweaks like cropping and red-eye reduction; editing the contrast, brightness and colors; adding text to photos; and — if you’re feeling creative and playful — placing “stickers” like mustaches, hats and sunglasses directly onto the images of people and objects in your photos.

As the saying goes, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Aviary’s Ning Extension gives people the freedom to make these changes on the fly, meaning these creative tweaks happen directly within Ning Networks and lets you speak volumes, such as on PetBrags.com:

How it Works

Ning Creators and members have always been free to express themselves, and now, our partnership with Aviary opens the floodgates for letting them do so in a new, unique and fun way. Aviary’s suite can be applied across Ning Networks and even integrates with making changes to member profile photos — now, it’s never been easier to show off your personality!

Once Aviary is up and running, simply hover your mouse over a photo you want to edit and you’ll see a “Photo Stickers & Effects” option. This will start up Aviary’s editor and encourage you to apply updates, transformations and filters to your photo. Once the changes you want to make are complete, click on “Save” and the modified photo will be saved back to the Ning Network.

To activate the Aviary Ning Extension, just head to your network dashboard and visit the Ning Extensions page (under Tools). Once there, click “Activate” to turn it on. For troubleshooting visit this Ning Help Center article.

Next week, Ning will be leading a conversation at Carsonified’s Future Of Web Apps conference in Las Vegas. I’ll be delivering a talk to entrepreneurs and speaking about my own experiences at Ning as we transitioned from a freemium model to a top-tier paid social platform empowering community organizers to build custom and powerful social websites. My goal is to shed light on ways entrepreneurs can make their customers happier, and their e-businesses and ventures successful, using the lessons learned by Ning over the past year.

Since we’re all about fostering a dialogue around community, we’ve also teamed up with Carsonified as they’ve launched their own Ning Network, Future of Community. Ning’s presence at this event is part of our ongoing belief that the future of the web is social; as the world finally breaks in their online shoes, we’re starting to use those shoes to travel along offline paths too. This presents an immense opportunity for everyone, and especially entrepreneurs looking to connect with their customer bases in new and highly engaging ways.

The future of the web is brighter than ever, and we couldn’t be more excited about the social movement on our heels. Join me at 3:20 – 3:40 p.m. (Pacific) on Tuesday, June 28. See you at the Future of Web Apps conference!

Over the past year, we started doing something new: publishing a public Product Roadmap for our customers. This is a way to follow along with what we’re working on right now, what’s coming next, and  offers a quick glance in the rear-view mirror to see what we’ve created so far this year. We update it from time to time, and we’re updating it again today.

Looking back, we’ve released a majority of the features we put on the roadmap in January. We kept up the momentum in core feature improvements and continued to innovate and deliver new features. Both of these are heavily influenced by your input. I wanted to take a few minutes of your time to let you know what to expect throughout the rest of this year and beyond.

Mobile Browsing

The world is quickly adopting the idea of viewing the Internet on small screens carried in back pockets. Phones are primary, and we know tablets are increasingly important, too. We want your communities and members to have a great, seamless experience on any device. To that end, we’re working on an optimized version of your social sites that will allow anyone with an iPhone, Android, or BlackBerry (to name a few) to easily interact on your network. You’ll still have the option of creating a custom iPhone app from one of our partners, but this new mobile version will be available to all Ning Networks. It will include many of the most popular features: Status, Activity Feed, Photos, Profiles, Forum, Videos, Groups, Blogs, as well as the ability to easily message other members.

Help Center improvements

We’ve steadily expanded your support options over the past year, including adding billing support for everyone, dedicated phone support for Ning Pro customers and email support for Ning Mini. We want to expand on that and put Help Center ticket details directly in your Dashboard for easy access, with detailed status information right there. Simply put: We want to give you more information at your fingertips to answer questions immediately, and when you do reach out to us, ensure that we are more available and responsive than ever.

Chat

Some Ning Networks don’t use the Chat feature at all, but those who do use it a lot and have asked for robust improvements. We are very (very!) excited to let you know that you’ll soon see a brand new and improved chat feature. This new chat will be a step up in just about every way, from interface to capabilities. This is one of the first features you’ll be able to try out in the next few months.

Events

Some Ning Networks are heavily focused on Events, both online and offline. We’ve heard lots of great feedback about how we can make the Events feature even more useful for both Ning Creators and their members. A long standing request is the ability to copy events, and we’re committed to making that a reality. It’s now on our calendar.

Paid-Access added options

We recently announced our eagerly awaited Paid-Access feature, which allows you to charge your members to join and/or access valuable content on your network. You can do so with a fixed price or ask for donations. The next phase of this project involves adding recurring subscription payments and offering even more options for how to pay for and use it.

Better Pages

You’ve always been able to add standalone pages to your network. We’re going to make them a lot more valuable by adding privacy controls for Pages, the ability for you to customize your URLs, and the option for one-column (full-width) pages. If you’re interested in SEO, you’ll be happy to hear that you will soon have control over the meta tags for a page, as well as being able to add custom code to the <head> tag.

Theme Marketplace

The Design Studio we released earlier this year has been a breakthrough change, offering Ning Creators the ability to highly customize their network. People love the new themes and the ability to quickly and easily preview and change them. In fact, they’ve asked for more themes, and we’re going to provide that in the form of a Theme Marketplace. This will provide Ning Creators, as well as outside designers, the ability to submit themes they’ve created. It will even allow people who submit themes to charge for those themes, if they choose.

Internationalization

It may not be apparent to all of you, but we’ve started making some extensive language-specific improvements to the Ning platform. It will become more visible over time, with the ultimate goal being to offer your members a way to view your network in their native language. A few things you will begin to see include: a decrease in the amount of time between when a new feature is released and having it offered in all languages; translations of popular Help Center articles to major languages; and language-specific community support groups.

Ning Extension: Aviary

Members love to share photos. What if they could edit those photos right on the site? We’ll be rolling out a nifty palette of tools and effects to add text, crop, and even drag-and-drop fun and funny stickers on those photos. It’s a great way to get your members engaged, and you’ll see it soon with our upcoming Aviary Extension. We’re calling it Photo Effects and Stickers.

These are just some of the things we’re working on for the remainder of 2011 and into next year. We have a few additional things to add to this Product Roadmap that we aren’t quite able to reveal yet, but we think you’ll be very excited about them. We’ll keep you updated here on the Creators Network as they get confirmed.

Thanks for your continued feedback and support of the Ning platform!

There are over 90,000 social websites on Ning worldwide. As a social platform that integrates with major social tools, Ning is in a unique position to observe patterns across the entire social ecosystem. The new Ning Point of View (POV) Report examines trends in community engagement across the ever-changing social ecosystem that all inspired organizations and businesses can apply to spark change with as few as 20 people.

20 = The Magic Number

You may have 1000 “friends” who never visit but it only takes 20 people to evolve from one-way broadcasting from the community leader to meaningful many-to-many interactions. This is an encouraging finding especially for small businesses and non-profits with resource constraints. With as little as 20 people, you can bring an online community to a significant level of activity – when members spend an increasing amount of time on the site, and visit more regularly.

The Unique Combination of Social Tools Builds Engaged Communities

Nearly 50 percent of Ning sites integrate with external social applications. Facebook and Twitter tie for the most popular external social media platform integration and nearly one in five Ning sites integrate with Facebook Like. The most popular features on a Ning community are the ones that facilitate dialog and engagement – Inbox and Forum in addition to Blog, and Photo / video sharing.

What makes a Ning community successful is not one particular social tool, but rather, the unique combination of social tools that each site employs, presented in a visually stunning way that draws members in, inspire them to participate and keeps them coming back.

Creating Communities That Change the World

Social communities within Ning span a diverse interest set—from education, entertainment, business, cause, religion, to health and politics. The common thread running through all of the sites is a goal of community creation that sparks meaningful action and activity.

Of the top 20 social categories we looked at on Ning, the Education and Business & Brands categories took the first and second spot, respectively:

Want to dig deeper in the Ning POV report? Check out our report and infographic. What do you think transform people on your Ning site from a community of shared interest to a community of action?

Here at Ning, we take your privacy very seriously and are committed to maintaining high standards of data privacy. We recognize that privacy expectations (and regulations) can get complicated as data travels around the world, so we’re eager to make things simpler for Ning Creators. We’re happy to announce that Ning is now part of the European Union (EU) Data Privacy Safe Harbor.

As background, the European Community has established a data protection regime that regulates the transfer of personal data of individuals in the EU to non-EU nations that don’t meet certain “adequacy” standards for privacy protection. The EU Safe Harbor provides a method for U.S. companies to comply with these European privacy laws and efficiently transmit data across U.S. and EU borders.

This is good news, especially for our Ning Creators in the EU! For more details regarding the EU Safe Harbor Framework, take a look at the U.S. Department of Commerce’s website.

The year 2010 will go down in history as a breakthrough year in which Social Media went truly mainstream, as over 75 percent of the online audience used some form of social Web technology. The year 2011 promises to be even more transformative as consumers increasingly expect and demand that every experience they have on the Web will have social features built in from the ground up rather than simply being bolted on. We’re calling this trend the Custom Social Revolution, and we’re excited to be playing a part in it along with all of you, our Ning Creators!

Last year was a similarly transformative year for Ning as we started the year by making some tough but essential decisions to focus 100 percent of our company on our Premium Ning Creators. In the summer, we launched Ning Mini, Plus, and Pro, which represented the next chapter in Ning’s history. We haven’t taken our foot off the gas since. By the end of December we had released over 20 new features for your Ning Networks including Social Sign In, a Ning Creator iPhone App, the Ning Everywhere Platform API, a new Text Editor, and — most recently, — the removal of Ning ID.

We finished 2010 over 80,000 customers strong, and I wanted to take a moment to say thank you to the tens of thousands of you who made the transition to Mini, Plus, and Pro with us, as well as the tens of thousands of you who have joined us since July. Your creativity, your passion, your dedication to what you do, and your continuous product feedback inspires us and helps make Ning such an awesome place to work. So, thank you and please keep it coming!

As we start 2011, we are already heads down and cranking on pushing the innovation envelope and delivering the capabilities you need to make sure that your Ning Network plays a formative role in the Custom Social Revolution. Some of the things that we’re already working on and will deliver in the first half of 2011 include:

• A new Theming System to empower you to create stunning designs that reflect the identity of your community. Key features include one- and two-column layout options, header and footer control, and a whole new set of gorgeous looking themes
• The Ning “Like” button, which will provide more engagement opportunities on your Ning Network, feed into your Leaderboards, and integrate with Facebook Like
• Paid Access, which will let you charge for access to and content on your Ning Network
• New, improved spam controls
• A richer, cooler, more interactive Activity Feed to increase engagement and activity on your Ning Network as well as integrate with other leading social services
• A completely new, totally awesomeified mobile Web interface
• And a few more surprises that we’re not ready to talk about just yet!

We’ve heard consistently from our Ning Creators that you want greater visibility into what we’re doing, and by the end of January we’ll be launching a regularly updated Road Map page on Creators. It’s the simple reality of software development that we can’t deliver every feature that everyone asks for exactly when they want it, but we can do a better job of communicating to you what we are working on, and that’s exactly what this new Creators page will do.

Another big area of focus for us this year is to strive to delight every single one of our customers. We know this is a tall order and something that requires a huge amount of work and dedication. I’m here to tell you today that this is something to which we are committed! As we made the transition to a subscription service, your expectations around the level of help and support we provide understandably increased substantially. From September through December, we significantly expanded our Advocacy and Support team in order to more quickly respond to your requests, and by the end of the year we were answering just about every request within 24 hours for Pro customers and 48 hours for Plus customers. We are sending out regular post-contact surveys to get your direct feedback on how we can continue to improve. We’ve also invested in expanding help resources, including expanded Best Practices content with Ning Creator interviews, screencasts to go along with our new Get Started page for new Ning Creators, and regular Ning Talks on topics such as advertising and customization. We know these improvements are just the tip of the iceberg. We’ll continue to expand and enhance our help and support capabilities throughout the year. As a first step, beginning later this week we’ll be posting and updating the list of recently fixed and open bugs on Creators that we’re actively working on to save you the trouble of having to track these down yourself.

As a Ning Creator, you are part of an elite group of people who are on the vanguard of the coming Custom Social Revolution, and we’re excited to be your partner in these exciting times. To all of you we say Welcome to 2011 and Viva La Revolucion!