Introducing Praized Answers, a social broadcasting service to ask local questions
Introducing our latest product release: Praized Answers (answers.praized.com). Praized Answers allows anyone to ask a question about local products and services and broadcast it to a selection of social networks (including Facebook, Twitter, Identi.ca, Friendfeed and Ping.fm). Broadcasted questions are accompanied by a short form przd.com URL to allow social media friends to answer questions in a central place (see: http://twitter.com/sebprovencher/status/1015634286).
Once they’ve clicked on the link (see: http://przd.com/q/wEg-TQ0xz), friends can use our answering tools to suggest places (via a search in our North American place database that includes more 17M+ businesses) and add a comment to the recommendation. Once suggestions have been made through our answering tool, the user can then decide which business(es) they’re going to contact or visit. After contacting/visiting a merchant, they can vote and comment on their experience using the Praized social tools.
The idea for Praized Answers came to us when we were thinking of the original consumer behavior model, i.e. “the process and activities people engage in when searching for, selecting, purchasing, using, evaluating, and disposing of products and services so as to satisfy their needs and desires” (source: Wikipedia). One of the key sources of business referrals for small merchants is word of mouth. With the rise of social media, it’s becoming easier to ask your online friends for recommendations and Praized Answers helps consumers assemble all of them in one central place.
If you look at Local 2.0 sites today, most of them are focused on merchant reviews. As reviewing is at the end of the purchase process, we feel that most of these sites miss out on the first (and most important) step in consumer behavior: the trusted referral.
Praized Answers is built on the Praized platform, a free white-label local social networking platform. Our platform (available through our API at www.praizedmedia.com) comes with all of the North American business listings you’d expect to find in business directories along with social tools like voting, commenting, tagging and sharing.
November 25th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
congrats! it’s a simple, although a very useful service.
November 26th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
[...] Directly from the Praized product blog, we just announced a cool new functionality: Praized Answers. More details here. [...]
November 27th, 2008 at 1:58 am
I’d surprised that people 1/ would take the pain to register to ask a question, 2/ would have the patience to wait for an answer, 3/ would not think that broadcasting questions is spamming. Some people seem to use the Local Business category at Yahoo! Answers though. I’m more of the type who wants an answer right away. Tag rating would bring me instant gratification, for questions like “Does anyone know a that offers in ?”