Beyond Reputation, Needium Enables Prospecting

I spoke to Sebastien Provencher, co-founder of Praized, about the company’s intriguing new reputation tool Needium. My pre-interview discussion is here.

There are a number of interesting things about Needium. First, it’s not trying, like some of the reputation tools, to cover the full spectrum of possible functions or merchant needs. It won’t, for example, address “presence”: where do merchant listings appear online and are they correct and complete? It’s aiming for simplicity so that merchants can use it themselves.

However Seb told me there will also be a managed service for SMBs or white label partners. The pricing is variable depending on the level of service.

The two columns in the screenshot below reflect the core functions of the Needium tool: “mentions” (of the business or keywords) and “opportunities.” Praized will increase the number of sites and services it draws upon for data. In this early stage, it’s Twitter and Foursqure primarily. Facebook is coming shortly.

As I previously discussed so far this is the only “reputation management” or CRM tool for SMBs that enables them to find new business directly.

In the screen above the merchant is a Holiday Inn in Boston. The people on the left are “tweeting” that they’re going to Boston or explicitly seeking hotel recommendations in Boston. If the merchant has linked his/her Twitter account to Needium that person or entity can reply to the Twitter prospects with an offer or other information that promotes the businesses.

Obviously there will need to be some education here around communication with prospects but it’s a pretty compelling feature. It also illustrates the way in which the SMB reputation management space is quickly evolving with multiple offerings testing out a range of features, increasingly which involve promotion as well as monitoring.

The jury’s still out on what the right mix of features and functions is for these reputation tools.