Social Media Tools Review: Bitly

by Rosemari

 

The problem

Long urls are cumbersome.  They disrupt precious white space in the body of an e-mail and are difficult to share, particularly in a world where character length of updates from sites like Twitter and Facebook matter.

How Bitly solves it (or attempts to solve it)

Bitly is a service used to shorten lengthy urls.  Additionally, if you register for a Bitly, you are able to track how many clicks your specific link retrieves and information about who is clicking on those specific pages. 

According to the “About” section of the Bitly website, “bitly helps you collect, organize, shorten and share links. We are currently reinventing how people discover and share content on the web.” Let’s see how this could apply to a real world scenario.

Scenario

For example, let’s say your organization wants people to check out the new a new video on your main website. You can send a social media update that lists your traditional url to get to your website in order to access the video. However, you will not have the capacity to determine if the traffic on your site is due to the video or another factor (perhaps people looking on the website for details regarding an upcoming event, etc.).  Bitly allows you to share a unique link that will show you the number of clicks specifically for the video.

Additionally, let’s say you are trying to determine who is the best spokesperson for your organization via social media. You can have various Bitly links being pushed to by different handles, including your agency handle, your CEO, and your community mobilizers, to determine what handle is most effective and which audiences are most interested in your video. 

Once you’ve pushed your link, you can track how many clicks occurred in various time frames (some options are “total,” “past hour,” “past 24 hours,” etc.). It also allows you to see the platform individuals using to click through (for example, Facebook, Twitter, Direct, etc.) to your video as well as the countries they are clicking from.  These types of benchmarks are similar to the metrics available using Google Analyzer.

Other features

Bitly offers free account that allows you to shorten and share, create custom hash tags, have an individual link statistics page and single tracking domains.  Bitly also offers a vanity account called BitlyEnterprise for $995 a month that offers additional features, such as multiple tracking domains, “end-to-end branding,” and no rate limits. Organizations and companies like Pespi and CSPAN have custom links such as pep.si and cs.pn. 

Online Advertising: The David and Goliath of our time?

by Rosemari


“If we had to do it over again,” reflects Josh Koster in his article Long-Tail Nanotargetting about Al Franken’s online advertising budget in 2008, “we would have spent more on Google and Facebook and much less on local newspaper placements.”

The power of online advertising is the honed by the ability to pinpoint your target audience. Online advertising not only allows you to get the most bang for your buck, it also gives you a greater opportunity to engage with individuals who have the most potential to buy your product, vote for your candidate, support your cause, listen to your band’s music, attend your event, and organize your rally.

You may not have the biggest budget or the widest audience, but it the right online tools and savvy, you can make a serious impact. The power of microtargeting online can be the catalyst for a David-and-Goliath style smack down. And that’s super exciting. 

Peter Greenberger’s article The Digital Playbook: Can online ads move polls numbers, draws similar conclusions based on a case study from RESOVE: The National Infertility Association. Grennberger’s article compared the impressive ROI RESOLVE’s online approach had to their public service announcement (PSA) for the same campaign that lamentably left their target audience with no measurable impact. 

Koster’s anecdote about removing Lou Dobbs from CNN’s roster was particularly inspiring and a testament to the importance of online strategy for impacts in mainstream media and our society at large. It made me feel like the playing field had finally been leveled.  The best ideas (and not the biggest budget) win! Or do they?

Before I get out my pom-poms, Koster reminds me, “like all digital success stories, [Al Fraken’s] case study is not about reinventing the wheel, but about modernizing a strategy that has always worked.” And while David may be the first jump on the online advertising bandwagon, history tells us that Goliath is not far behind.

Participatory Consumers On and Offline: We should demand more

by Rosemari 


In my former life, I often organized large-scale events for local government. During the planning, my boss would always suggest that one of the top administrators give the opening remarks at these events. I think she wanted them to see the great work we were doing and make sure that they felt important.  She wanted to feed into their notions of own power and prestige.

However, the old school approach of power and prestige is changing. And I would argue that this change has, for the most part, started online. Online, consumers are interactive, participatory, and often the key determiners of what power and prestige looks like.  Online, it’s not enough that you have a seemingly important job if you don’t have anything to say or can’t say it in an intriguing and engaging way.

Digital politics guru Alan Rosenblatt (my professor at American University’s School of Communication), discusses how this new level of participation raises the bar and creates potential among consumers in his four part series titled Dimensions of a Digitally Networked Campaign for Politics Magazine.  He writes,

“Because activists and voters can talk to each other, produce and share their own media content, create local and national counter-campaigns (even from within a campaign’s own website or social network page), they can take the campaign in directions all of their own making.”

And as online consumers are able to transform campaigns for advocacy, I think that consumers should be able to call for the same level of engagement, critique, and quality offfline.  The point that my former supervisor missed is missed by many organizations both on- and offline.

Offline, your title shouldn’t matter if you are too afraid to be authentic in your opening remarks. Or if your public speaking are worse than an unironic Ben Stein calling roll in Ferris Bueller. Online, Colin Delany provides sobering (but much needed) advice about how to avoid getting caught up the old methods of what’s important to the consumer in his nitty gritty primer Politics 101:

“If your site structure looks like your organization tree, stop to think about someone coming to your site who’s never heard of you before. Not only do they not care about the welcome message from your president (unless he or she is famous, hot, unusually charismatic or is a candidate for office), the information they’re trying to find is probably buried somewhere deep in your press section, if it exists at all.”

Furthermore, we need to understand the responsibility we have when we create both on and offline platforms. When we provide these soapboxes it’s important that we keep the target audience on the forefront of every programming decision we make. Understanding how empowered and participatory consumers are taking their online power offline can guide us through those decisions.

While it’s easy to want to tout our programs to the brass, like my former supervisor wanted, it’s not worth it or useful. Consumers demand more. And so should we.