7 replies to this topic

[DJKay]

Hi Gang,

Since we have many web sites, I have been thinking about getting a custom url shortner that we could use across all our brands under our various business units and all their online marketing/social media activities. I am aware that Bit.ly started to give this away for free in their pro version.

I was wondering what all of you out there thought in terms of its impact on social media optimization; SEO/SEM? Right now, my boss and I are looking for a way for us to mop up our company social media strategy. We are starting to piece together a more unified strategy for the company at large because its pretty much been the wild wild west for each business unit/profit center. I thought maybe going to a designated shortner that everyone used related to their division, might help pull it together.

So my questions are, will it hurt or help in regards to Topsy and real-time social search..i.e. the ultimate holy grail all the engines want to go after...Is Bit.ly really preferred?

So..feedback, opinions, help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance for helping me crowd-source this one..

DJKay

PS. Jill, I put this in coding and technology because its getting an enterprise solution for all of our divisions but if you think it belongs somewhere else, just shoot me an email in the forum so I know where you put it. Thanks.

[Michael Martinez]

I have not tried to do this so I cannot offer you any feedback based on personal experience. However, I do see a few branded URL shorteners from time to time. I assume that since a cutting edge service like Search Engine Land has not backed off from the practice that they have found some benefit to using a custom URL shortener.

[DJKay]

Hi Michael,

Thanks for joining in. I work for a publishing company and they have a history of being "domain" crazy.

They buy oodles and oodles of domains because of their cyclical events business. We are trying to mop that up too [not sure how much of a dent I can really make but I am trying]. In our case, it would be a matter of getting a mandate from the CEO's office to establish a branded shortner for each of the brands we are going to keep/feed and has social media activities where they use if for their FB;TW; Linkedin; and all others

If they let them do it, the battle we would be facing is that each of the business units [profit centers] may want to have a variety of custom shortners under their brand...which I think could potentially diminish the impact because they would be more fragmented and we would not be building up link cred/engine cred under a few custom shortners instead of 6..7..12 etc. It would just become another tactic/accoutrement they throw on the pile.

Its balancing the benefits of branding at several levels, product level; audience level; division level;company level and managing the link cred/engine cred. Thanks for the tip about search engine land, I had no idea they were using custom shortners.

Which leads to a good point, if there are others out there who are using custom link shortners or have seen other companies who are, feel free to post so we can collect some intelligence.

Comments, suggestions and additions to the topic at hand are greatly appreciated. Thank in advance.

The other thing to face is how we manage this at an enterprise level in regards to the bit.ly pro account or some other app we may get to do this for us.

I am still in the research phase on that one as I know of Bit.ly pro and Yourls but I believe that is just a wordpress plug in and won't work us because we are an enterprise shop.

Thanks again.

DJKay

[chrishirst]

Why not simply code your own? It's certainly not the most complicated script in the world, the whole thing could be done in less than a hundred lines of code.

[DJKay]

chrishirst-Wonderful idea, would really like that, then we would control and could customize it for further reporting needs.

Its very hard to get IT time for projects. I am just not at a company, say like Zappos or TripAdvisor, where they have developers assigned specifically to Interactive Marketing/SEO/SEM. I appreciate you saying its only a few lines of code. Lots of stuff and other priorities to wade through with them, plus they are just beginning to implement SiteCore with a development partner.

I was planning on running this by our Director of Development in our weekly meeting. I will let you know how it goes..FYI, I am still trying to get the GA social plug in rolled out across all of our web sites; the addthis sharethis plug in they announce last week will help, but it still needs developer time to implement (yes pasting code) ..just not the world I live in...but its nice to dream

As before, any comments, suggestions, greatly appreciated. chrishirst-thanks for jumping on.

DJKay

Edited by DJKay, 05 November 2011 - 07:12 PM.

[chrishirst]

What server side code is available because I probably have the bare bone of a script already in my code snippet library.

[DJKay]

Thanks. Its .NET/.aspx, JavaScript and IIS. Is that what you need to know? Thanks, DJKay

[chrishirst]

Yep and I'll have a look what I have got for .net.