Gina Bianchini is the CEO of Ning. She also blogs about Social Networking, Ning and the journey of building a company. Ning is a 2 1/2 year old company, and they have created a platform for building social networks. “You choose a combination of features (videos, blogs, photos, forums, etc.) from an ever growing list of options, you choose how it looks, you decide if it is public or private, you add your brand if you have one, and you enable the people on your network to create their own custom personal profile pages all in one social network.”

She was at SWSX with her crew and I spoke to her from San Jose (before my own flight to Community 2.0 at Las Vegas).

The work social networks obviously means many things, so I am going to refrain from making specific definitions of what it is and rather focus on what it can do for your company.

The question we were discussing was around “How can companies embrace the power of social networks and the power that it can bring?” I was specifically interested in the social networks that Ning powers and wanted to understand the examples of specific networks that they have benefitted from.

Ning just released their new version of Ning (Feb 2007) and since they have seen 14,000 new social networks added to their existing 30,000 social networks.

Here are the top 3 takeaways from the interview that you can leverage as a company looking to either “stick your toe in the social network” or “drink out of a fire hose”.

1. The power of the two way dialog with customers and users: They dont teach you this in Business School (She should know since, she went to Stanford) but there is immense power in leveraging the knowledge and experiences of your users and customers. Intuit does a good job of this, but the idea that your company builds a product and “tests” it but not in “real world conditions” is now no longer an excuse for products that have good design but poor usability. Users and customers can tell you really how your product or service works in their environment and under their conditions.

2. Reducing feedback time on newly released products: Since they launched their product in 2 weeks Ning has feedback from users directly on what is good and what needs to be fixed. She personally spends a good amount of time (4+ hours daily – which is amazing) on listening to user feedback and working with them on ensuring their issues get heard and fixed. We know from another consumer products company that they reduced the time to get packaging issues resolved on their new product by 3 months using online communities.

3. Getting your product messaging and positioning right: We obviously spend a lot of time, energy and effort on building the right message and position for our products, but who better than your customers to tell you what’s working and what’s not. Leveraging the power of user message testing I know that a software company changed its target audience to price the product higher.