You must have seen those shortened, and cryptic, web addresses – particularly in Tweets?

Essentially URL shortening is a technique that condenses a long URL (Uniform Resource Locator), a web addresses, to a short collection of odd characters. The tools that do the shortening are becoming very popular thanks to sites like Twitter, where every character counts.

There are good reasons to use URL shortening:

• Copying, or remembering a very long URL, hundreds of characters long, isn’t easy
• Twitter only allows you 140 characters – so long URLs are out!

But one service, Bit.ly has pulled ahead of the others.

Twitter recently changed its default link shortener from TinyURL to Bit.ly.  However, Bit.ly recently raised $2 million in venture financing allegedly from the same VC-firm that Twitter received $100 million from in September.

Do have a look at the Bit.ly site.  You can shorten long links directly, or better still if you create an account, use it as addon in your browser, and better still access the complete history of your bit.ly links.  Analytics!  Essential for those metrics for your Social Media Marketing strategy …

But there is a risk – a shortened URL can be sometime used for pranks, for phishing (attempting to acquire passwords and credit card details by masquerading), or for affiliate marketing (using one website to drive traffic to another).  As ever, with anything on the internet, take care …

Another Social Media webinar for you to view. This one is from Customer Think Corp, and is called “Showcase: Social CRM” – tagline “harvesting the power of Social Media and CRM systems.”

After an introduction by Bob Thomson (CEO of CustomerThink), three companies make presentations: Lithium (“the leading Social CRM solutions“), HelpStream (“the first company in the world to deliver a truly social customer service and relationship management system”), and SAP (“the world’s leading provider of business software“).  Of the three Lithium made the most valuable contribution to the webinar – the remaining two appear to have not fully appreciated the implication of the new marketing paradigm …

Bob’s introduction to the webinar included reference to a venn diagram showing the intersection of the external Social Media cloud, and the internal Business CRM system.  It’s the intersection where the interesting conversations exist – real message of the show.

The Lithium’s contribution to the webinar captured my attention: the crucial dependence on Super Users for successful on-line support forums.  Essentially, it’s not possible to create a customer network, it must be allowed to grow.  These super users will promote you wares on your behalf; it’s not merely a matter of “if you build it, [they] will come.”  The excellent example in the webinar is from a Logitech (“… designs personal peripherals to help people enjoy a better experience with the digital world”) support forum – where the super user like KachiWachi appears to spend the majority of each day resolving Logitech’s customers problems for free … and, in doing so, converts many potential leads into sales.  But there is a price to pay: these super users must be rewarded – and their reward takes the form of expert ratings – an acknowledgement of the expertise and collaboration with other users of the forum.

This on-line support forum community will even address the risk of competitors seeding the forum with misinformation.  Your on-line advocates will quickly pounce on the perpetrators and expose them …

Earlier this week, 30th September 2009, Google opened up their Wave preview to about 100,000 people.  Salesforce.com, with their interest in the service cloud , are naturally one of the first to demo Wave integrated with their CRM.  In a Salesforce Force.com Blog entry called “Getting in Front of the Wave” you will find background details on Google’s Wave and a YouTube video  (see below) on how the Wave platform might be integrated with Salesforce.com …

Just come across an interesting Blog post by Lauren Ingram, a software QA engineer at Salesforce.com.  The full title of the post is “The Digital Age: Reading in Reverse: How to make a profit.“  It’s well worth a read …

In Lauren’s Post there’s a reference to a Gartner research note (G00168995, 22 July 2009).  In this research note Gartner state that despite a decline in sales due to the economy they have not seen a drop-off in their customers requesting vendor evaluations related to Sales Force Automation (SFA).  The note includes, of course, one of Gartner’s classic magic quadrants.  The magic quadrant, a square (shown here on the right – click to enlarge) divided into four “quadrants”, is essentially a visual aid for comparative discussions of vendors attributes.  Of course, the placement of vendors in the square needs careful interpretation.  All the SFA vendors in the square offer Software as a Service (SaaS – read as service in the cloud), one of Salesforce.com’s key marketing attributes – and, Salesforce.com is in the prestigious top right-hand corner of the magic quadrant.

Lauren summarises the theme of his Post in the final sentences, “… Salesforce is betting on the service cloud.  Today, we’re reading in reverse, making our customers available to their clients.  And it’s all because you, the reader, insist on using that Twitter account.”