Social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) is now a mass-market. Millions of consumers are now sharing activities and opinions about local businesses. They are also expressing needs such as “I’m hungry”, “My car just broke down” and “Does anyone have a dentist to recommend?” We call this the “Needium” (the “need” medium). Local businesses would benefit from hearing the voice of the consumer and engaging with them but these activities are happening on many sites and can be hard to discover. In addition, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are extremely busy. Needium, created by Praized Media, harnesses these valuable local conversations by capturing and aggregating relevant local information found in millions of social media status updates and messages. This is the true evolution of word-of-mouth marketing.

Introducing Needium (http://needium.com/), the social lead generation tool for SMBs. Needium monitors social media sources and detects business opportunities based on local user needs and life events. It also listens for merchant name mentions (reputation management). Needium aggregates and structures that information in a Web-based dashboard where merchants can log-in to easily join conversations (and more) without having to monitor all social media sites individually. Based on merchant information in our structured database, a series of pre-configured results are automatically created for them, using their location, categorization and some user social actions collected from publicly available social media activity streams.

In addition, the Praized Media enterprise platform toolkit includes:

• Local Activity Stream module
• Real-time Search module
• Local Questions & Answers module
• Social Yellow Pages (merchant ratings/reviews platform)
• Editorial module (structure and connect existing local editorial content around places)
• Social media applications (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
• Mobile

Founded by a team of local search technology veterans and social media experts, Praized received funding from CSL Ventures (formerly Garage Technology Ventures Canada) in September 2007.