Secure your bit.ly URL – before somebody else does

This isn’t one of those “sky is falling” posts, but it is important for marketing and brand managers to be aware of the implications of the bit.ly custom name feature and how it can wreck havoc with your company’s (and personal) brand.

Bit.ly is a popular shortening service that converts long URLs to a shortened, more palatable version for human consumption and also fits well with character-limited services such as Twitter. Despite its usefulness, there’s also a dark side to URL shortening thanks to bit.ly’s ability to create “custom names” in its service and it’s important to understand the implications, even if you don’t use bit.ly.

A brief overview of bit.ly.

Let’s say you wanted to share a YouTube video you created with your friends and the YouTube URL is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1qHVVbYG8Y. If you were sending an e-mail, besides the ‘ugliness’ of the URL, its length doesn’t really matter. If you’re using the popular online service Twitter, you have to cram everything you want to say in 140 characters or less.

For example,

“This hilarious YouTube video of Simon’s Cat reminds me of our family cat Chester. He can be a real terror.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1qHVVbYG8Y“

The above tweet exceeds Twitter’s 140 character limit by 10 characters. If we wanted to post this, we would have to cut back on the text. Now, if we use bit.ly to shorten the YouTube URL, our tweet would be:

“This hilarious YouTube video of Simon’s Cat reminds me of our family cat Chester. He can be a real terror.  http://bit.ly/ytQkg“

Note, the only difference is the URL (in blue) is the only change. Bit.ly saved us 23 characters!

Whenever you shorten a URL, bit.y keeps the original URL, and maps an odd-looking, but globally unique identifier. In our example above, this identifier is ‘ytQkg’. When somebody visits your shortened link, their web browser queries bit.ly and is in turned redirected to the full URL you originally shortened.

But wait, there’s more: Custom names in bit.ly!

In addition to providing pretty cool statistics about your shortened links (beyond the scope of this post), bit.ly also lets you specify your own identifier, called a “custom name” in lieu of its own meaningless identifier. This means, if I wanted create a shortened URL to my website, I could create http://bit.ly/benlucier that would redirect to http://www.benlucier.ca.

The dark side of the bit.ly custom name.

Custom name is a powerful feature of bit.ly, but it can also be dangerous to personal and corporate brands, especially as bit.ly grows in popularity. For example, what if a disgruntled customer created a shortened URL targeted at you? http://bit.ly/yourcompanyname could redirect to http://www.ihatecompanyname.com. It’s happened already. Once a URL has been shortened, the custom name or identifier cannot be changed with intervention by bit.ly.

Custom names may not seem like much of a threat now. In fact, I’d be surprised if users and organizations outside of the ‘Twitterverse’ have even heard of bit.ly or its utilitarian use. But as Twitter becomes more prevalent, so will online shortening services.

It only takes a second to shorten a URL with your company’s names and trademark, pointed to your website. I recommend you do it now before somebody else does. You might not like where they point it.

Tagged as: bit.ly, brand management, Marketing, Twitter, URL Shortening