The Praized website was launched last year, when they announced a $1m investment by Garage Canada, and the product in itself was presented as a new way for people to find local places and merchants, thanks to “praizes” from other users.
Unlike the textbook way of launching a web product, it seems like Praized is experimenting new ways to market their web product. First, one of the thing they did very early on was associating the praized.com domain to a blog. This blog is being regularly updated with new articles, and getting new exposure, trackbacks, comments, thus establishing an online & authoritive presence about everything local, even though there was no usable product (to be more exact: they didn’t have a working product a few weeks ago). I found incongruous though that it’s a personal blog, by one of the co-founder, Sébastien Provencher, who seems to identify himself as Praized, on twitter and many other places. But what do you know, I am not an expert in internet marketing and certainly a little bit lost in all those “personal brand 2.0″ discussions.
Fast forward, the startup has installed last week their product in 2 websites where you can get a peek of what’s coming.
The first one is mocolocal, where readers of the mocoloco art/design blog are invited to submit their favourite places. The goal here is to leverage an existing, dedicated community and get them to discover “artsy” places.
The second one is web2places, a blog where attendees to the Web2.0 Expo can find top places and events in San Francisco. In fact, the co-founders of the startup have planned an expedition are attending the conference. Compared to mocolocal, they are using here a different tactic, which is linking generously to other attendees, events, and places; the objective that the community (the conference attendees) notices the website and it gets adopted, in a viral way.
You can even try out the system, by creating a user account at auth.praized.com; although I won’t probably be using it anymore as I am neither in SF or an art guy. Even if I were an art guy, I’d think the interface could be simplified. Or could have more pictures. Less of the “list” feel and more content where people could identify to. Because that’s the kind of thing one would be need to be convinced to check a place. But as I said, don’t mind, because I am not an art guy, plus I have no idea what final objective this application is trying to achieve.
Like me, you might have now more questions than answers, such as: is this a test to see what works and what doesn’t with the product? or are those 2 websites a test to see if they can grow organically an audience with the existing product? or is this the “real deal”? or is it the first steps to an elaborate strategy, where they have taken into account every factor? You have to give credit to Praized’s executive team by trying out new innovative guerilla marketing tactics. This is quite creative, and I am curious to see what they have in mind next…
Comments
Stephane Daury April 22, 2008
Samuel Lavoie April 22, 2008
Martin Dufort April 22, 2008
Some interesting facts: If you go to the web2places.com web site and search for other places not within San Francisco, you will find a *LOT* of stuff. Try it out.
And Kudos to the Praized team for the marketing twist…
L8er _ Martin
Martin Lessard April 22, 2008
Heri April 22, 2008
George Favvas April 22, 2008
1. It’s probably also safe to assume their goal is not to be a destination site per se, but to provide tools to existing sites that have a preexisting community/traffic centered around a common interest, place or time.
2. They’re pulling data from existing business directories (Yellow Pages and Localeze) so they’re really just focused on adding a social layer to local search.
3. They’ve also decided not to share “praizes” across different partner sites. For example, “Praized HQ” shows up on both MoCo Loco and Web2Places, but the “praizers” and comments are distinct. This could be because they’re early in their release cycle and still testing, or (more likely) a conscious decision not to be yet another community, and not to compete with their distribution channel.
Sylvain Carle April 22, 2008
@mtw : nice post – http://tinyurl.com/66kfej – if you find some tome next week maybe you should interview these guys…
Praized Media April 22, 2008
MontrealTechWatch covers our guerilla marketing tactics… http://tinyurl.com/66kfej
Samuel Lavoie April 22, 2008
@George the third observation is interesting, wonder how its gonna end up. I would personally like to have some sort of cross community infos, at least for myself and my friends..
Heri April 22, 2008
Yeah I noticed that. But as Georges wrote, they are connected to a places database (yellowpages in canada) so that should work.
Georges,
1. might be. might be not. my opinion is that they still have their cards open
2. looks like it. I’be disappointed though if a user couldn’t add a brand new place
3. it’s a conscious decision. if you think about it, why would mocolocal users have the same opinion about a place than web2.0 crowd.
Samuel,
I don’t think you can use this to raze a place. I haven’t seen any “negative” votes. seems like praizes only push places up.
Sylvain Carle April 23, 2008
@Martin Lessard : yeah, you got those two right – “Launch early, update frequently” and “early adopters come from their close social network, hence a better feedback” is indeed a part of our strategy. But we are also pushing web2places to anyone that might find it interesting at Web 2.0 Expo, so the “limited” part is not quite right.
@George Favvas : wow. nice analysis. we (the praized founders) were quite impressed with your reading of it, you are a sharp reader of “in between the lines”!
@Samuel Lavoie : right. the right balance between specific community and network-wide data is a balance we are experimenting with right now, this will play out better in a few months when we have more communities and praized.com up and running…
@Heri : Number one, we are a distributed platform. More on that in the next few months, but this is a strong belief we have. Just google search for “atomization+praized” and read what we have been writing about this.
Two, adding a place is available on beta.mocolocal.com, just look in the footer. It’s not available on web2places.com yet, because this one uses our API and we were a bit tight on timing for release (can I add our dev team did a supremo excellente job on this one, as the “Cheerleader Tech Officer”?)
And three is right on the spot. Our motto is “trust your tribes” after all. That’s one of the key insight we think we bring to the table, there is not one list of “best x in city z”… there’s lots of them, it’s a question of POV.
Thanks for the coverage, we appreciate it and we enjoy the conversation!
The Praized Media Product Blog » Blog Archive » Praized on the radar - Media coverage far and wide August 08, 2008
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