With the continued success of Twitter and other social networking tools, any criticism (or praise) of products and companies is becoming increasingly public. Finding a way to manage these external communications in the internal decision-making process is an ongoing challenge for many businesses. Today, in an effort to help marketers and community managers better deal with such outside correspondence, blueKiwi, an Europas shortlist finalist, has announced the introduction of a free version of its Social Business Platform aimed at integrating outside conversations into daily internal communications to improve the decision making process.
Instead of community managers simply engaging with outside audiences via social networking tools, blueKiwi pulls outside conversations into internal discussions in order to leverage the thoughts and ideas of its user base, much like Salesforce aims to do with Chatter or Bantam Live. It is social CRM. Bluekiwi combines a slew of web 2.0 capabilities: such as collaboration, document sharing, blogging, event posting, and polling, into a single, unified solution. The use of social analytics tools ensures that the most pertinent conversations reach the eyes of the community managers.
The blueKiwi dashboard allows the community manager to integrate outside feeds—be they RSS feeds, Twitter, or Facebook—in order to stay on top of external chatter. The “Notebook” shows anything and everything in the blueKiwi community which involves the user. Any chatter which involves the user is threaded in a Facebook status-esque interface, making it simple for users to stay up-to-date on conversations in which they are directly involved.
To ensure the product is being utilized most efficiently, the product has an automated personal assistant, Alice, programmed to make recommendations to community managers in order to keep them on top of important tasks. If part of an online community seems to be slacking in a certain department, Alice will make recommendations to try and increase efficiency. The homepage of blueKiwi also gives suggestions based on analytics to further this goal.
The free version of blueKiwi supports one external community, which can range from customer forums, to channel programs, to developer groups—basically anything where the majority of the users are outside the internal network—but allows unlimited internal groups and external members. Within the community, admins can vary the access privileges of individual members. Internal and External members can see everything which goes on in these groups, or admins can restrict access to only internal members. As conversations continue to grow, admins can change access privileges as well.
blueKiwi was founded in 2006 by Carlos Diaz and Christophe Routhieau. They have raised a total of $12.3 million in funding from Sofinnova Partners and Dassault Systemes.
It’s not blueWiki, it’s blueKiwi.
dyslexics of the world untie!
Wtha wsa thta?
Hahah.. well caught typo !
This post and the blueKiwi website creates a great opportunity for me to comment on the manner in which companies claim to be communicating their value.
On the home page is a link diplayed as “benefits and features” which takes the visitor (prospect) to a page that speaks to the “features”, but I do not see compelling mention of the “benefits” that clearly demonstrates how prospect will generate a return on any time or $$$ invested into the blueKiwi solution.
When value is not clearly communicated, it is common for companies to default to a “freemium” approach . . . thinking “if the we can just get people to try it” they will “experience” the value and want to pay for it. You cannot take short-cuts when it comes to value clarity that resonates with and is relevant to target customers.
Often when value is not clear, it does not exist.
Now I am not saying blueKiwi does not represent value, but I am saying they have a whole lot going on amongst the pages of their site . . . but not whole lot of value clarity. Get that right . . . right now . . . the longer you delay, the more opportunities you will continue to miss . . . and then address your pricing – there are opportunities there as well.
Reminder:
It’s not the price they don’t like, but what they understand they are (or are not) getting for that price. – Chris Hopf, PricingWire
agree….
Looks like a ‘Paid Post’ to me. Alert!!! Mike
And you too can have your own for just a one-time fee of $9.99! Each ‘paid post’ comes with a free sham-wow as well! And if you call now, we’ll throw in a second sham-wow…for free! What a deal!
http://www.bluekiwi-software.com/
you’ve linked the wrong site….
Actually it’s the right site, the site is just down.
The webiste is back. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Too bad when I attempted to sign up, the form won’t submit. Boo. For $12.3m in funding, you’d think you would at least figure out your sign up flow.
The webpage at http://www.bluekiwi-software.com/form_submit_free.php? might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.
Sorry for the inconvenience, we are receiving a lot of inquiries from Techcrunch readers :-) and may be the server overloads randomly.
Please try again I just made the test and it works perfectly.
Agree with chris
http://www.betextremesoft.com