Sponsored Search: Question 2 - Free or paying search tools

The free social search tools mentioned in the case tweetvolume.com and tweetscan are officially “in maintenance” since many months, whereas the BlogScope project from the University of Toronto has been successful and has become a paying service, Sysomos.
• Do you think a shift occurred? Don’t hesitate to give examples.
• How do you see the future for these websites: free or paying? Why?

(1)Not shift, but evolvement.
Blocksphere exists less than 3 years, I think it just got the idea from tweetvolume.com. And when the tweetvolume.com and tweetscan say they were "in maintain", maybe they are just looking for some solutions to fight against Blocksphere, they can become more competitive by improving their function instead of switching into a payment model.
(2)As such kind of tools develops, competition will be much more fierce, so the price will be lower and lower, and finally become free with more multiple functions and higher quality (but should be in a long term), And what is the business model? maybe these websites can 1)cooperate with search engines, eg, become part of Google Adwords, 2)introduce some third parties by putting ads for them, or become partners of various search engines, even social media, 3)other tried-and-true solutions we discussed last class, such as bundling, up-selling, and cross-selling, etc.
But I dont think these websites will be popular enough to become ubiquitous...Advertisers may find easier way for their keywords bidding instead of using these tools for deep analysis...If not for research, why do I use that?

Thanks very much for your post (first reply on this forum )!
When you speak about Blocksphere, do you mean the website under the address blocksphere.com ? because it is also "in construction" ! Maybe it is only temporary, but I am not sure because Google shows it as "hidden" website.

For the others: do you agree, disagree with this opinion ? Dear guests, we are waiting for your posts !

Im sorry that...i just wanted to type in the "BlogScope" mentioned in the case..

Mathilde Menard wrote:Thanks very much for your post (first reply on this forum )!
When you speak about Blocksphere, do you mean the website under the address blocksphere.com ? because it is also "in construction" ! Maybe it is only temporary, but I am not sure because Google shows it as "hidden" website.

For the others: do you agree, disagree with this opinion ? Dear guests, we are waiting for your posts !

@matilde, what do you mean by a "shift". Regarding the second question I don't believe that those kind of websites have a future. First of all you are gathering your information from a third party but you have no control on the platform? Tweeter can make changes on his platform as much as it wants, so everytime when a certain feature will be modified or maybe removed, you have to adjust your instruments and spent money. Secondly, you can not analyse every tweeter profile with the same instruments. If you observe properly you will notice that every tweeter community has a different way of communication than the other one. Teenagers are not talking the same way as adults, same goes for car race fans and opera visitors. And last but not least, what happens if Tweeter falls down or acquired by a competitor. You are establishing your business on the ground of someone else, but if this ground is no more available you lose everything.

@Kai: Thank you for your opinion.
With the term "shift", I was asking if you think it is the end of free search tools, replaced by paying tools.

But for you it is not a question of price, am I right ? Do you think this kind of website has no future because it is too specialized (only Twitter) or do you think no social search tool has a future ?

A shift from BlogScope to Twist volume or a shift from Twist volume to BlogScope?
Blog and Twitter are very different concept, one is stable article usually with many passage, one is 140 words words update rapidly.
People seldom write a blog every one hour, but can twist every five or ten minutes.
In comparison, blog search is easier than twitter search. You can use search engine and constrain the scope to blog, but can't constrain to twitter.
If I'm a data mining researcher, Twist volume is much more useful than BlogScope, especially I need to pay for BlogScope's service.
I'd rather than use free search engine or write a process to get blog information.

I'd like to start from question 2.
Honestly I am not familiar with both sites. So I look for Sysomos site which is still active. If they can get those numbers precisely from all over the world, I believe it's worth paying for companies for marketing purpose. I guess such information/data were traditionally provided to companies in very expensive price. If individual company can search by own more specifically, again, I believe it's worth paying. So my answer to question is the more precise data they can gather, the more companies will be attracted to use.

On the other hands, I looked at someone's blog talks about tweetvolume which doesn't seem to be precise enough for paying. If that's the only feature they have, it's fun but it's too simple and not worth paying. Perhaps they should look for advertisement type of revenues. I am assuming due to simplicity of tweetvolume or tweetscan, they did not attract customers who want to pay.

Hi,

Like Xiaowei and KaiCamenzind said, I don't believe paying search engines have a future. Indeed, first of all I am wondering what would be their added value comparing to Google or Yahoo? One could argue that they'll gather really precise data, but as we know that algorithms of Google and Yahoo have been revised hundreds of times only this year, I don't really see that happening. In addition, even if they focus on one specific market/topic, they'll miss the quantity aspect, and I think the couple (quality; quantity) is necessary to provide a wide and precise range of information. We should also bear in mind that the auction made by Google in order to decide which advert will appear the first is decided thanks to the best couple (Cost-per-click the company is willing to pay (bid for the auction) - quality of the ad), so the quality aspect is already present, so I don't see these paying services being sustainable in the long run.
On the second aspect of the discussion, I think using a social search engine tool could be a good idea, but only on some purposes. indeed, if I want to have precise and good information on , let's say, quantum physics, I want information from physicists and I don't think they are huge fans of Twitter...and like someone said we don't really trust blog information...So Social search engine tool may be limited to a certain purpose, for instance, I think social search engine can be great for shopping, normally you really trust people's advice and shopping also need a large audience: so selling via twitter or facebook can enable someone to reach more than 700million people and it's all the more so powerful as you know what these people like.

There's simply no reason to pay for the aggregate data unless its presented in a meaningful way. Essentially all the data is coming from the social media sites Twitter itself, so I'm surprised they are not charging a fee for 3rd party programs to access its database. Like many Freemium services on the internet, data aggregate sites may offer the service free to normal end users and charge a premium for highly specialized, in depth statistics for companies which maintain a Twitter account (which many increasingly do). A twitter account for a company is much more interactive in many ways than a static facebook fan page or wall, since its conversation is presented in real time. However, with the oncoming changes to facebook which aim to graph everything on a temporal plane, Twitter may indeed lose this advantage.

Certainly there is room for 3rd party sites to make money compiling data, though Twitter should have the resources to provide these services by itself without relying on them. As a company Twitter has been increasingly desperate for a way to monetize its site, and this would be a perfect opportunity. It need only target big corporations with a discretionary budget and leave the end user alone, as many would leave in droves if the hitherto free site required additional fees.

I think an evolution has occured and there is room for both players; social search and traditional search such as Google or Yahoo. Indeed, the customer base targeted is different for each one.

Today, social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter has a huge amount of visitors each day. As a result, it obviously has a role to play in the online advertising. It can attract a lot of companies. For example all the entertainment industry have all interest to do advertising on these social platforms. When one goes to Facebook, he is entertaining and so he is more sensitive to entertainment ads.

But a lot of ads can't be successful on social platforms. Indeed, a lot of ads are highly targeted depending on the search made on Google and Yahoo. For example let's imagine an ad for a hotel in Macau. There is no point for the hotel to make and ad on Facebook or Twitter because this ad only interests a very limited amount of users. Also, it is very hard to determine whether it will interest a user depending on his profile and the previous actions it made on Facebook. Google is much more interesting because the hotel will directly target a user when he types "hotel Macau".

So to me, it is most probable that both platforms and ways of advertising will coexist as the customer targeted are different

Corporations are nowadays spending enormous amount of money to monitor their e-reputation. And since the emergence of the cloud, HT departments of big firms have been reshaped to give some importance to the community management functions (how to monitor and improve your reputation online, how to better interfere with your consumers online). Hence, Andrew Mason replies "himself" to criticisms of his service from Groupon's Users.

There is room for any platform or software who would get some money out of simplifying the task of community mgnt providing better data mining and monitoring tools and 24h updates on customer review. I agree that it would be a good way for Twitter to try and make (if not a profit a least) less losses. However the quality and reliability of the service has to be very good since free (but stripped down and hence non satisfying) services already exists (tweetdeck, Trustedshops ...)