Rankings in the search marketing game just become a lot easier if you are the ‘local’ or the ‘small’ guy in town. A creation from Praized Media, a Montreal based social media company launched a new platform on July 9, which allows users to rate local businesses and offer comments regarding products and services.

Praized Media’s offering is one of the first of its kind, where users are completely responsible for the rankings and success of the businesses. Praized is set up on the site where readers can ‘praize’ or ‘raze’ the business. The more praizes a company has, the higher its ranking is on the site, increasing its visibility. When a business gets a raze, it sinks in the listings. Rankings are not aided by paid advertising spots or sponsorship to any local charity or group.

Praized is offered as a free program to web publishers of blogs, social media and other community sites. Users perform a local search for a business, restaurant, service, doctor, dentist, vet or any service they need. The platform comes pre-populated with over 17 million listings from North American businesses and companies. New listings can be added by anyone and given tags, a map and description. The more details a business has, the better their profile looks and the more attention and potential customers it will attract.

According to their website: “Our platform captures, organizes and aggregates local conversations about places.” The large search engines have failed to do it locally, so Yellow Pages.com and Yellow Pages.ca jumped in to partner with Praized Media when they heard about the venture.

Users are called praizers and they can set up their own profile. Praizers are the cornerstone for the software to work, so they have the ability to:

· Vote on favorite places

· Tag and bookmark favorite locations

· Share their favorites with other praizers

Each profile has links to their community, their favorite places within that community, their friends and acquaintances.

Winners from the new platform are the web publishers who earn ad revenue by clicking. Advertising money always follows local searches, making advertisers and people who reap the advertising dollars happy. Since the directory listings market is worth over $30 billion dollars a year, there will be many local directory publishers who are happy too.

The real winner from people using Praized is the local business who does not have a large advertising budget. The local business can get ‘word of mouth’ advertising by getting users to praize them online, thereby increasing their visibility. The more praizes they get, the more people will use their services. Everyone knows how valuable word of mouth is too gaining new customers.

Subsequently, when a business is razed, or receives negative feedback, people will also know and choose other services who are rated higher. Clicking for ratings works as fast as or faster than word of mouth, with both good and bad feedback.

Since this is a community-minded site, it also allows users to flag other user comments or reviews that are inappropriate or slanderous. Comments that slam a single individual for no reason or look to be competition trying to hurt other business will be removed. Moderators are in place that handle all inappropriate responses.