Marketing Pilgrim

Forget Facebook, the real action in social networks is the ability to build and brand your own! Ning.com has been doing that for a couple of years and has today announced they’ve raised $44 million in “Series C” funding.

Co-founder Marc Andreessen explains where the money will be put to use:

We will be investing that money in our business — in scaling our operations to accommodate our traffic and growth; in our product design and development efforts; and in our platform evangelism and support programs. Apart from those investments, we plan on staying as lean and focused as we possibly can.

Having consulted with Ning, I’ve become a huge fan of their service and pretty much every client I speak to gets a recommendation to consider branding their own social network. Even large corporations are surprised to learn they can have their own version of Flickr or YouTube in just minutes!

via.