Blogs

As we announced last month, Ning.com Network Search is making a comeback!

We have been working hard to make it easier than ever to find Ning Networks for your interests and passions. So we’re happy to announce that in the next few days, search will be back on Ning.com! We’ve heard a lot of feedback about how important this feature is from Network Creators as well as from members looking for Ning Networks.

For your Ning Network to appear in Ning.com’s Network Search, it must:

• Be public. Prospective members won't know too much about or be able to join your Ning Network if
  it's private, and we want to protect the privacy of private Ning Networks and their members.
• Be active. If your Ning Network has thousands of members but hasn't had new content in months,
  it's not likely to be ranked highly in searches.
• Be launched and accessible. We don't want to showcase Ning Networks that aren't yet ready for prime time!
• Not contain content that violates our Terms of Service.

For information on how to optimize your Ning Network for search, or if you have any search-related concerns about your Ning Network, please contact us through the Help Center.

Thanks,

Brent

A fantastic blog post was put up last week, which has lead to a number of great discussions about member traction and engagement within communities. Dr. Mike Wu, Ph.D. posted metrics based on his study of over 200 online communities here.

As he writes, "The 90-9-1 rule simply states that:

• 90% of all users are lurkers. They read, search, navigate, and observe, but don't contribute
• 9% of all users contribute occasionally
• 1% of all users participate a lot and account for most of the content in the community"

The data he present generally backs this up. The comments both there and in a related LinkedIn community explore how he defined his terms, constraints of the data, and how to encourage engagement.

Do you agree with his findings? Do you see them reflected in your Ning Networks?

I look forward to his future posts, where he promises to "dive deeper into the contribution level of the hyper-contributors, you community's real superusers."

Many Network Creators continue to report high levels of spam on their Ning Networks.

What are we doing about it?

First of all, I want you to know how seriously we consider this issue. Spam isn’t just an annoyance for Network Creators and their members. Spam gets in the way of member participation and interaction, which is the lifeblood of a successful, vibrant Ning Network like yours. We have a dedicated engineering team that is focused on spam prevention led by Martin Westhead.

Unfortunately, the current spam attack promoting “Canadian Pharmacy” is a sophisticated attack attributed to a Russian cyber-criminal organization. As with other sophisticated spammers, this organization employs dozens or even hundreds of people to create accounts, resolve CAPTCHAs and verify email addresses, then passes the accounts to a large botnet to post spam from thousands of computers, each with a different IP address.

Due to the sophisticated nature of the attack, there aren’t any quick fixes. We have already implemented several steps to block spam and plan to deploy a number of other features in the next few weeks. These measures are already blocking and disabling thousands of spam accounts each day. Here’s an update:

• Yesterday, we significantly tightened our rules for new blog posts, which has been the primary type of spam for the “Canadian Pharmacy” attack. These rules identify and remove spam accounts automatically. You may have noticed a decrease in spam based on this action.
• Next week, we will test and begin implementing temporary blocks on members that look suspicious based on their recent activity.
• Within the next two weeks, we'll roll out a new feature for NCs — you'll be able to give specific members of your Ning Network the ability to easily flag and hide spam on your Ning Network.

How can you help?

We are using the data from the “suspend for spam” feature to automatically disable thousands of accounts across the Ning Platform each day. Please continue to use this feature when you suspend spammers.

We recommend that you turn on blog approval on your Ning Network. This will help you block new spam posts. While it's not optimal for some larger Ning Networks, we also recommend that you consider turning on member moderation.

As we implement increasingly stringent anti-spam measure, we are working hard to minimize the number of legitimate members that are incorrectly blocked or disabled. We apologize if this happens to any of your members. Please have them write in to our Help Center and we will re-enable their account as quickly as possible.

John McDonald
Vice President, Advocacy

Many Creators have noticed an increase in spam in the last couple of weeks on their Ning Networks. Starting around President’s day weekend we saw an increase in the amount of spam reported, reflecting an industry-wide increase, particularly from Canadian pharmaceutical companies.

What are we doing about it and how can you help?

We are aware of this issue and have been working hard to provide short term fixes for this increase and long term solutions to harden the platform against these trends. A lot of our work is in the background and not directly visible to Network Creators or Members.

That said, here is a run down of some of the features that you may see:

• We continue to tighten and refine our rules for identifying and removing spam accounts automatically, which you should see as a decrease in unwanted activity.
  

• We recently released the “suspend for spam” feature. We are now using this data to automatically disable accounts and analyzing it to help improve our ability to spot and remove these accounts more quickly.
  

• Last week, we introduced a Captcha feature for Ning Networks who do not use member moderation.
  

• We are working on a feature that will allow Members designated by the Creator to flag content and hide it from view...more details to follow.
  

We’re very aware of how spam affects Ning Networks and we are working hard behind the scenes to tackle this issue. In the next few weeks and months you should see significant improvements in our ability to block spammers before they hit your Ning Networks as well as new tools to help you manage unwanted content on your Ning Networks.

Martin Westhead (Martin runs the Spam and Abuse Prevention team at Ning).

Thanks to all the amazing Network Creators who entered our Ning + Austin contest! We’re thrilled to announce the three winners:

Swap Mamas is about getting to know other parents, making connections, and doing a little old school trading with friends. The more you give, the more you get.

Amped 4-a-Cure uses the universal language of music as the vehicle to deliver the message to the masses of the importance of getting behind the efforts of cancer research.

20 Something Bloggers has brought together thousands of bloggers from all over the world, and spawned a vibrant community of like-minded, fascinating people who thrive on one another's support and feedback.

Stay tuned – we’ll be announcing another Creators contest this Monday - open to every member of Creators!

Growing a Ning Network by populating it with lots of members is often considered to be the Holy Grail for many Network Creators. As a result, we see Ning Networks that are so excited to grow — and grow quickly — that their invitation lists more closely resemble the population of a small country. But, as the saying goes, it’s about quality not quantity. The key to building a vibrant Ning Network is to attract people that will love to be part of it and regularly contribute. Think before you hit send; are these invitees likely to be active, engaged members? That’s why it’s important to invite the right connections and friends that share your passion. To reach them, we’re highlighting four simple ways to best share with and invite the people that can make your Ning Network stellar.

1. Be choosy

We give you an easy way to invite friends and family by importing your email address book from Gmail, Yahoo, AOL and Hotmail. While you may be tempted to invite all of your email contacts, it’s also important to appeal to the people you think will most enjoy jumping on the bandwagon. Sometimes, it pays to be choosy; otherwise you might accidentally invite your vegetarian friend to join the Griller’s Index.

2. Leverage your online presence

If you’d like to invite your friends from Facebook and Twitter, or include an invite on your blog, you can post or send an invitation link to join. This link will send them directly to your Ning Network’s sign up page. To grab this link, go to the Manage page and select Privacy. At the bottom of the Privacy page, copy the invitation link and share it wherever you have a web presence.

3. Personalize your invitation

Adding a personal note to a friend or highlighting your favorite part of the social network gives more context to any invitation. You can also include links to interesting things posted by members, which fosters engagement within your Ning Network.

4. Share what matters most to you

Your Ning Network might have hundreds of photos and videos posted by you and other members. Sharing the content that matters most to you is likely also meaningful to your connections and real-world friends. Look for the Share link available on most pages to spotlight compelling content through email or posts to online services like Digg. As we just announced, if you have Facebook and/or Twitter integration set up on your Ning Network, you can share content on these sites in just two clicks! This is a great way to draw people back to content you think is fantastic and it’s a nice way to tip your hat to members contributing positively to your Ning Network.

Many Network Creators and members have written to us recently through the Help Center and here on Creators reporting issues related to Search. I head up Ning’s Search team, one of the Agile Teams here at Ning, and we’re currently working hard to improve the search experience across the Ning Platform.

Right now, the Search team is developing a platform-wide Ning Network search in parallel with our ongoing efforts to improve in-network search. We’ve been working on both of these projects for some time now. Just last week, we made some major changes to in-network search, including hardware upgrades, that should ensure current and steady results. We’ve also heard a lot of feedback from Network Creators and members requesting that we bring back search for Ning Networks, and we want to make it better than ever! We have a release planned for this updated feature sometime in late March.

We appreciate your patience as we continue our efforts to revamp search. In the meantime, if you have any search-related questions or concerns about your individual Ning Network, we can help you through the Help Center. As always, our Advocacy Team is happy to help! They work closely with us in Search to make sure we stay on top of pressing issues and keep us posted with feedback received on Creators and through the Help Center.

Stay tuned for further updates on Search!

Thanks!
Brent

The BBC ran a great article about social networks holding local politicians accountable, and it features Harringay Online, a Ning Network by Hugh Flouch.

"The website was used to organise a petition to visit every local street likely to be affected by knock-on traffic.

"The council were just not listening to the community", he said. "By the end of that year we had 500 members. Now we are touching 2,500."

It's great to see Network Creators receiving recognition for their efforts, and the real-world change that comes out of Ning Networks. We hope to read more stories like this!

As you may know, Premium Support is one of the premium services we offer, which allows you to get quick turnaround for questions on your Ning Network. We offer three levels of support for various needs, from 24 hours to 4 for urgent issues. While we try to answer everyone's questions efficiently and reliably, we make it a priority to answer our Premium Support holders first. You can see a quick comparison of our Premium Support plans here, including how we prioritize issues.

Premium Support focuses on providing guaranteed time frames for responses to your questions. According to ourPremium Support Terms, we answer questions relating to issues you are experiencing, feature requests, and general usage and development questions. To clarify, we can help direct you where to find help on CSS or whether a Ning App is possible; we don’t have an in house team to design or develop Ning Apps for individual Ning Networks. That said we’re happy to suggest external firms who do provide this!

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact the Ning Help Center. And if you already have Premium Support purchased, be sure you are signing in with the account and Ning Network covered under support!

Thomas Knoll writes a brief but meaningful post with one simple tip: talk to your customers.

Now, I'd replace customers with members as it relates to Ning Creators, but the concept still stands. Specifically, Thomas points out the importance of finding out when and where your members are when using your Ning Network (product). And, what are they doing immediately before and after (ie, what triggers their visit)?

We've discussed the topic of when people visit your Ning Network here. It's important to think of this in context then - are your members at work, home or elsewhere? What else might they have, distracting them (perhaps rightly so) from your network? What sort of impact does this have on what content you are serving and when you first add it to your Ning Network?

To bring it back to his basic point, talk to your members to find out answers to these questions. It will help you be a better manager and potentially drive even more traffic!

Leave your thoughts on this below, including ideas on how and where to reach out to members!

Laura

Today on the Ning Blog we highlighted a couple of new programs we think will add to the great insights we see here on Ning Creators. Take a look at the post for more information about these programs. I've included a quick recap below as well:

The Network Creator Council Program - This program is made up of a group of active Network Creators like yourself with whom we periodically discuss upcoming feature releases, brainstorming sessions, and other targeted input sessions. We’re going to purposely limit membership in this program to a group of roughly 100 members so we can really dive into each of the topics we review. We’re including Ning Networks of all sizes and types in this program so we can be sure to hear a variety of perspectives. Here’s a bit more about how the program works:

1. Council members are invited to Palo Alto for a 1-day "Summit." The goal of this Summit is for Ning to learn more about participants' Ning Networks, tell them how the Council program works, and gather their feedback on a series of upcoming features and other things we're working on.
2. After the Summit, we conduct regular conference calls so we can get more input from Council members on new topics or changes we've made based on Network Creator input.
3. Finally, we also have a private Ning Network that we host for the program to ensure we keep the lines of communication open with the Council members. As with the Summits and Conference Calls, information from this Ning Network is kept confidential and is not divulged outside of the Council program so that we can maintain the privacy of our Council members and our own product development where it makes sense.

If you're interested in participating in the Council program, feel free to email us (ning-research@ning.com) with your name and Ning Network url. As I noted above, participation is limited, so we can’t guarantee you’ll be invited into the program, but we definitely want to hear from Network Creators who are interested in providing constructive input.

Quarterly Online Survey - Last month, you may have seen an invitation from Ning to participate in a brief online questionnaire. This 11-question survey is a way for us to regularly measure how we're doing along several key attributes in the Network Creator experience. We'll be keeping regular tabs on this data throughout the year as we strive to create the best experience for you and your Ning Networks.

Through the discussions here on Ning Creators, we've learned a lot about you and your experiences. We look forward to opening the lines of communication even further with these two new initiatives.

"For me I see how easy it is to get caught up in the exciting side of the business, e.g. the technology, the platform, the shiny, bleeding edge new feature. But from my experience the way to make an impact is absolutely on the strategic planning and organizational development side of things. It’s not sexy and it’s certainly not easy, but ultimately the real impact if you work on the brand side is found through fundamental organizational transformation."

So says Jordan Williams, Manager of Digital Engagement at REI. I completely agree that this is the more difficult and time consuming aspect of community management, whether on a national level or smaller group. :)

One of the great features of Ning, is that creating networks is easy and free, which means you can create test Ning Networks. This is something I always encourage, to provide a place to test out changes to design or format. In terms of planning and organization, the test network can also be used to scope out goals for the main network, brainstorm or discuss issues that come up. An alternative is to have a private Group on the primary Ning Network for this, though that provide a bit less freedom in testing ideas.

I'd argue that representing a major brand like REI brings its own challenges and expectations. However I encourage all to read this interview of a seasoned Community Manager!

We're excited to be heading to Austin, TX in March for the SXSW Interactive conference, March 12-16. While we're there, we'll have a booth on display at the SXSW Tradeshow during the day, and will be sponsoring the {RV}IP Lounge at night throughout SXSW Interactive.

While we're in Austin, we'd also love to meet up with any Network Creators that are either attending, or live in the area. Please let us know in the comments below if you'll be around!