Needium Taps the “Need” Medium for Leads

While I was on vacation over the past week, the guys over at Praized Media had the audacity to both coin some new business lingo (social media is now the “need” medium) and launch a new reputation monitoring/social lead-gen tool called Needium. I haven’t used it yet but it sounds like a pretty good idea.  Here’s how Sebastien Provencher of Praized put’s it:

Needium monitors social media sources and detects business opportunities based on local user needs and life events. It also listens for merchant name mentions to enable reputation management functionalities. 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.

So what he’s saying is that merchants can see what people are saying about them in social media and they can be alerted to conversations where a person might be expressing a need for the merchant’s service.

This screenshot gives you the idea. Check out the “Opportunities” column to see where a Boston hotel might want to jump into the conversation and sell a room:

Needium seems pretty clever from a biz point of view. It basically qualifies social conversations for merchants. That said, it will be interesting to see once a need is identified how merchants enter the conversation. In the hands of the wrong guy, Needium could quickly become SPAMium. But with a little social media training, Needium could fill a need that a lot of SMBs didn’t even know they had.