3. Keep your earned media
I doubt you have a service level agreement with a hundred different short URL providers. When the next one goes bust, there's a strong chance its redirects will stop working entirely, and all of that earned media will evaporate. According to Carat, earned media assets are "consumer driven. They include all word of mouth communications, social media, viral, organic search, fan sites and shared content. To some extent, these communications are Earned through doing Bought and Owned well, but they reflect on the brand's entire behavior."
The recent news about tr.im, a service initially slated to disappear, has taken a happy turn, and it is giving the service to the community to maintain and develop. I'd like to think the service's spirit was universal, but I doubt it. The service Cligs is currently dealing with similar business woes. Why find out how much of your traffic was coming through the next service to go bust?
Tips: Utilize your new branded short URLs in every social media channel. Make them so easy to use that it'd be more work to go elsewhere to generate them. Add an element to your site where users can copy a page's short URL to their clipboards with one click. For product or campaign pages, try out vanity short URLs like http://molecu.lr/Analytics to increase recognition.
4. Do it yourself
The most straightforward way to reap the benefits and data from URL shortening is to set up such a service yourself. Technically, URL shortening is a low-hanging fruit; it will take an average lone developer about a week to get a basic service programmed from scratch. Simpler yet, there is a variety of off-the-shelf open-source applications that can get you up and running even quicker. Free applications like Yourls, Shorty, or lilurl can be set up in a couple of hours on your server. There are also software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors who can use your domain and give you, for a fee, a variety of statistics and logs. One example is budurl.com's enterprise edition.
Tips: When setting up a URL shortening services yourself, there are several factors you will need to consider:
- Think of your audience. Is it going to be used company-wide, by specific team members, or provided as a service to anyone on the web? Normally, smaller audiences will require a simpler and thus cheaper setup, while larger audiences may require multiple servers and continuous feature development. Workflow is another aspect you might wish to explore. Think of how often the tool will be used and whether there will be a need to provision its use and associated approval chains. Also, be aware that it is critical for URL shortening services to act as a springboard to the destination page, imposing minimal delay. Test how well the server performs on your expected load levels.
- Create a bookmarklet. To simplify the creation of short URLs and increase the adoption of your service, the creation of a bookmarklet is recommended. Bookmarklets are browser bookmarks that will send the URL of the page currently being viewed in the browser and open a window and tab to your URL-shortening service. The page that will open will present you with the shortened URL. This way, a single click of a button can generate the shortened URL. You can also add a "Copy to Clipboard" widget on your pages (check out the lower left side: http://is.gd/4fPnx). Make it so easy to use your short URLs that it'd actually be more work to use a third-party provider.
- Redirect broken links. One more elegant feature offered by some services that could be of special value to marketers is the ability to edit and monitor the content that you are linking to. If a page on your website is removed, you can point an existing shortened URL to a new version of the content or to an alternative page . If the shortened URL points to an external site where the page is no longer available, you can detect that and react. Be sure to provide alternative content or present messaging to explain what happened. When you own your short URLs, you have a variety of ways to retain your earned media.
One organization that is already taking this approach is Coca-Cola, which set up a hosted short URL service called CokeURL.com. The service is at marketers' disposal and gives them the ability to share content on or off Coca-Cola web assets using short URLs. The URLs can be short (CokeURL.com/s) or descriptive (CokeURL.com/fizzyVideo).
Summary
We hope the choice here is an easy one. Providing your own short URLs that tell readers your brand is awaiting them after the click increases your visibility. Implementing a short URL service on your own site increases your web analytics value and guards your earned media against third-party failure. Social media is a deep and fast moving channel, so keep your head up.
Emile Daigle is an engineer and Yuval Zukerman is a senior consultant at Molecular.
On Twitter? Follow iMedia Connection at @iMediaTweet.
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