He gives a preview here. Some thoughts on the app’s link-tracking.
Yongfook’s new project to help track and measure social media campaigns is basically a souped-up URL shortening service focused on helping businesses instead of the average social media user who blogs and twitter.
A URL shortening service basically takes a very long link and makes it into a shorter one. What happens when someone clicks on that shorter link? The service needs to resolve that shorter link into a longer one and redirect the browser to load the original page. During this resolution stage, two key data can be captured: the click and the originating page for the click.
Of course, Google Analytics can be massaged into being about to provide this data, but changes would need to be made in the behavior of the administrators (if not the code) of the publishing and linked sites.
It would be trivial for such a service to allow campaign sites being run by the PR companies to add a DNS entry to point a sub-domain to the service. What this does is that it prevents the creation of obscure shortened URLs that point to potentially malicious sites.
So instead of getting http://urlshort.com/1231872138 which gives no indication of the endpoint, we can get URLs like http://socialmedia.nike.com/awesome_sneakers_campaign.
Of course the latter link isn’t exactly shortened, but you get the drift.
Once the creation of these links pointing to a campaign’s page (i.e. a page promoting a newly launched product ) is done, these little ‘peas’ can be sowed all across the web.
Now, whenever someone clicks on a link, the app can get data to generate beautiful reports.
I guess what happens now is that when PR companies start generating social media releases, the URLs would now all be using a shortened URL or at least a URL generated by the service.
No more http://www.nike.com/campaign but http://socialmedia.nike.com/campaign.
The beautiful thing about this is now PR agencies or any other company for that matter who engages bloggers can start being sure which group of bloggers are worth the engagement. Imagine creating two campaigns for the same site. One to target the ‘in’ bloggers and another to target people on forums.
Each campaign will produce two different links. So, you get http://socialmedia.nike.com/campaign-a and http://socialmedia.nike.com/campaign-b which effectively point to the same site. Now, you use two different links for two different sets of press releases. The service would make it much easier to identify which campaign is more effective.
If a blogger uses the souped up link, data capture is easier and I’ll know which blogger to stop inviting.
If the use of this service catches on in Singapore, we might start seeing which bloggers are the ones ‘not wearing any clothes’.
The idea is a simple and beautiful one. The use of URL shortening services has exploded alongside the growth of social media. Yongfook’s app and other similar ones targeting the same space are using the common behavior of social media users to generate more useful data for companies.
Final thought – This service could potentially even help businesses and PR companies assess the portion of marketing budget that should be spent online. Why? Hint: links aren’t just published online.