Marketers, community managers, and innovation teams, listen up. blueKiwi, which calls itself "the global conversation company," today announced the availability of a free version of its well-established Social Business Platform. The company, based in France, has raised $12M in two rounds of venture capital and just opened a San Francisco office. It touts as customers such leading global brands as Alcatel-Lucent, Allianz, BNP Paribas, Cap Gemini, Dassault Systemes, Nokia, Microsoft, and Rainmaker, and partners including Accenture and Logica. 

The new, free version delivers all the social media tools necessary to create vibrant online communities with external audiences. That's the key difference to understand with blueKiwi, differentiating it from such offerings as Jive, Socialtext, and Yammer, which are all focused on the internal employees of an enterprise. 

blueKiwi lets you monitor and manage external voices and bring the best of those conversations inside the company to make better decisions about products, services, and business strategies. That latter point is another key difference with this platform, as Erica Lee, VP of marketing, told me: "It's much more than crowd-sourcing for customer service. It's about building great products."

The company positions its solution as one that takes conversations "from discussion to ideation to action." The blueKiwi platform combines collaboration, microblogging, document sharing, polling, widgets, and an ideation process into a single solution. Community managers can engage, listen, and leverage the intelligence of both internal and external community members, in an ongoing conversation, and take the best ideas and turn them into reality.

"Too many products cater to internal people. The real power of enterprise 2.0 is bridging between external audiences and internal groups. If you don't complete the loop from external to internal, you lose the value and can't take the social advantage," said Carlos Diaz, CEO of blueKiwi Software.

What do you get with the free version? You can have up to 10 internal members, and unlimited external members, though you are limited to one external community. That makes it ideal for smaller firms or nonprofits. Larger or midsized firms would choose the Premium Version, at $699 per month, which allows up to 50 internal members, unlimited external members, and five external communities. Big enterprises get unlimited everything, at special, negotiated pricing.

Yes, the Kiwi Is a Fruit, Therefore…

The company also announced today the launch of its "Fruitful Conversations Community." Love that name!  Accessed through the blueKiwi website or within the product, this online community is open to any blueKiwi customer, whether they're using the free, premium, or enterprise versions. In this community, clients and prospects can discuss critical success factors for community management, how to engage members, and measuring and leveraging conversations from the crowd.

"In today's business environment, everyone is managing a community of some sort, and their greatest challenge is finding new and innovative ways to engage those communities," said Erica Lee. "With the 'Fruitful Conversations Community', we're creating a space for people with the same challenges to discuss and overcome some of the hurdles of community management. And we'll invite some of the community gurus from around the globe to join us in these conversations as we all learn to listen and then leverage the crowd."

I'm on it! I signed up for my free account, and am joining Fruitful Conversations. Anything that can make managing a community easier is a good thing, because this function is becoming so important for any business today.  In the signup process, after getting my confirmation email (which took 6 or 7 hours to arrive, likely due to time-zone differences), I particularly liked the way the "Community Rules" were presented — very well written and explained.