Praized Media introduces Local Search platform
Millions of conversations about local places are occurring across blogs and social media sites every day, yet they are fragmented and unstructured. Online communities can now capture, aggregate and structure these conversations to deliver relevant recommendations for their users with Praized Media, the local search platform designed for social media. The new venture today announced the beta launch of its platform and availability of the first Praized communities on the MoCo Loco design blog and on Facebook.
Praized’s platform is based on a distributed approach to ensure that each community delivers local results that are relevant to its users. For example, a Praized installation on a vegan blog will have completely different restaurant recommendations than on a meat-lovers’ blog because the two groups have fundamentally different tastes. Praized has developed a platform that addresses some of the biggest challenges associated with aggregating social media content around places and offers the following key benefits to social media publishers and their communities:
Praized’s platform is free to social media sites and provides publishers with new sources of content, incremental ad revenue and increased page views. The platform enables site publishers to easily leverage their existing community to tap into the valuable, but difficult to execute local and social search space. It is also fully search-engine optimized to help drive additional local traffic to community sites from search engines.
Praized designed a white-label platform that integrates with editorial content by using either an API or plug-ins that are compatible with SixApart’s MovableType and Wordpress. Bloggers and site editors can embed snippets of merchant information within posts or news articles to drive traffic to their Praized-powered local section. Praized also designed its platform to be available to Facebook application developers and others through an API.
Partnerships with Yellow Pages Group Co. and Localeze provide each Praized community with access to more than 17 million searchable North American business listings. Each listing has a place profile with contact information, a map and default tags. As users contribute additional tags, the merchant profile gains added context and color.
Praized communities enable users to search, discover and discuss places with like-minded people. Users benefit from discovering the “long tail” of places via discussions on lesser known local merchants that struggle to be found through Web search. End-users also get real value from social tools that allow them to tag, comment, bookmark, share and vote on places that matter to them.
