Last week URL shortening service bit.ly announced the launch of their social search platform and reputation monitoring service. Used by all of us online over-sharers to shorten 80 million URL’s a day, bit.ly now has the ability to tie-in a more in-depth set of their own search results by keyword/phrase and sentiment/tone with their already existing data set attached to short URL activity.
You might ask yourself why not just use Google search for a lot of this stuff but the problem is that trending topics across Twitter, what bit.ly is mostly used for, are so real-time and new that their true buzz/readership value can’t be captured by sites like Google until later after they’ve been indexed. In addition to several other factors, Google search results are influenced algorithmically by page rank. Because many tweets and blog posts haven’t even had the chance to establish any page rank yet due to how new they are, bit.ly now offers a way to monitor trending activity via search results using their own data, served up on their own platform.
Since high volume link activity monitoring is already part of their DNA, these tools will serve as extremely useful because they can tie in all of the other data they already collect about their URL’s - clicks, geographical location, sharing, etc.
Reputation monitoring, sentiment & tone
The first product layered on top of their new search platform is the reputation monitoring service that attaches sentiment and tone to search results with a really nice dashboard for monitoring keywords over time. They made sure to include the ability to set up email alerts to help you get in front of any negative conversations that are rising about your brand, products or applicable industry.
Bit.ly’s new offering will be part of their Enterprise 2.0 suite of applications and will be rolling out only to their enterprise customers over the next two weeks.
More information
If you’d like to participate in the beta test for reputation monitoring, just send an email to beta@bitly.com.
For more information about Enterprise or to schedule a product demo go to http://bit.ly/EnterpriseSignup
