Glam Upgrades Ning for 50 Cent, Fox Sports and Others

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Glam Media is releasing a new set of features today for its Ning platform intended to help socially adept brands like 50 Cent and Fox Sports grow more robust communities among fans and followers. The move comes seven months after Glam Media acquired the white label social publishing platform, and it marks the first step toward a tighter integration of the two companies.

Ning publishers can now run ads through Glam Media's network on their sites. In addition, Glam Social will allow brands to create and incorporate more customized content into their media strategy. Hip hop artist 50 Cent is using the new features in Ning to put a greater focus on the mobile channel and reach more users through strategic advertising for his ThisIs50 community.

The ad platform features a social analytics dashboard, engagement tracking and metrics from sites including Facebook and Twitter.

"The advertising and marketing that they're doing is really around growing a more vibrant community for them internally," said Erin Matts, SVP and chief digital marketing officer at Glam Media. "(50 Cent) has been a longtime user of Ning, and so being a first partner of ours for this upgrade makes a lot of sense."

For brands adopting the new features such as 50 Cent, Fox Sports and online art enthusiast community My Modern Met, a compelling addition to the platform is the ability to create custom sites for mobile in the HTML5 environment, said Matts. Ning is also giving brands the ability to aggregate social activity from various networks into a single hub and introduce their communities to social brand advertising from Glam Media.

As brands increasingly become publishers in their own right, Matts expects more businesses to seek out advice on everything from creative strategy to execution. "We're behaving almost like an agency within this company to help those brands."

The new features for Ning will be released over the coming weeks and the company plans to launch Glam Social by the end of the third quarter with subscription plans starting at $24.95 a month.