So I’m an absolute fiend for tracking data—I guess it comes from my Marketing Research roots. The first job I had in my Marketing career straight out of college with my shiny new diploma was as a Marketing Research Analyst for one of the country’s largest banks. It wasn’t my first choice as I was hoping for a more creative aspect at the time, but it paid big and I wanted that marquee name on my resume—at least back then when I used to care about that kind of stuff.
Today, one of my best friends for tracking responses to all kinds of marketing efforts is a URL shortener. If you don’t know what I mean, here are two examples: http://Budurl.com/WhatYouKnowFacebook and http://BudUrl.com/WhatYouKnowPodcast.
There are many such URL shorteners out there including TinyUrl (I have a client who calls them "Tiny Earl" which always cracks me up), SnipUrl and others. Usually a URL shortener is the ally of the serious marketer who wants to know how to fine tune their efforts, or pretty up an otherwise lengthy and ugly longer URL. But recently I discovered that using URL shorteners is actually throwing a bit of a monkey wrench into my marketing efforts, and I’ll bet you may be experiencing the same thing without even realizing it.
It all started a few weeks ago when I was preparing to send a message to my e-mail list to let them know about the latest What You Know Is Worth More Than You Know(TM), The Podcast episode, some new blog posts and other news, and I noticed for the first time ever, I was getting a SPAM assassin score back of 2 rather than my usual zero.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with using sequential autoresponder database systems, SPAM assassin is a helpful tool on most of these systems that pre-screens your intended e-mail message before you send it out to your database and lets you know how likely it is that it will get caught in a spam filter or even blocked by an ISP. Any score below 5 is supposed to be okay, but this is one time that you actually want a grade of zero if you can achieve that.
So it was really troubling me that I had this score of 2, especially when I found out the reason was that I supposedly had a URL in my message that was on some blacklist. Now I NEVER, EVER spam anyone or do anything inappropriate with my e-mail messages or URLS, so I was a bit freaked out that somehow something was blacklisted. I kept playing with my message, taking out different URLs I had in it, until I noticed that when I left off any variation of my URLs that were shorteners rather than the traditional web site addresses, my SPAM Assassin score went back down to zero. My efforts to have clean URLs and to track response to the links in my message were causing me to have a higher than necessary SPAM Assassin score. Who would’ve thought that?
The more worrisome event regarding my URL shortening was involving my sometimes friend and sometimes pain in my side shall we say, Facebook. As I mentioned in my What You Know Is Worth More Than You Know(TM), The Podcast episode #49 Facebook: What Infopreneurs And Entrepreneurs Must Know About Using It Now, I’ve had to change my whole Facebook strategy from friend me to fan me.
Part of that involved making it easy for others to locate my two Facebook fan pages, but suddenly people were telling me that my links weren’t working. Puzzled, I tried them and they worked fine. Then I tried them through Facebookinstead of just in my browser, and found out that Facebook was blocking them as content that its users objected to. Well the joke was on them as they were blocking access to fan pages hosted on their own site. I guess they object to themselves!
The same problem happened when I went to let people know via one of my fan pages about a new blog post and I used a URL shortener in the status update. When I pressed the update button to change my status, I got a pop up from Facebook again in the same vein. So basically any content that was linked to a URL shortener was now dead meat. I figured, okay, maybe it’s the resource I’m using and I tried two other URL shorteners. Same result.
I contacted the good folks at BudUrl customer support to ask them about this, and a representative told me that it’s a problem not just for their URL shortener, but from time to time with all of them (as I discovered first-hand when I tried two other of the top URL shortener resources), and it’s only getting worse, although the are working with the sites and services to fix things as best as they can.
The problem is the old "a few bad apples spoil the bunch." Unscrupulous people use the shorteners to spam in e-mail or social media or have it link to truly inappropriate content, and then it spoils things for everyone.
So what to do? Well for my e-mails, I’m currently living with that 2 spam score, but if I find it increases or is having a worse effect than I thought on e-mail delivery, I’ll have to just go with uglier URLs and/or use other methods for my tracking that are more cumbersome. As for Facebook, I’ve had to tell people within the Facebook site to use “What You Know” or Melanie Jordan” in the search box on Facebook’s upper right-hand corner to find my fan pages, and I just use my straight URLs for now and use other means to do my tracking. And I also am trying to help the cause by asking Facebook via their “report a bug” page to not indiscriminately block URL shorteners. I’m sure they’ll get right on it.
In the meantime, my URL shorteners are still helpful overall in my marketing, but this is definitely a disturbing issue to keep an eye on in your own marketing efforts.
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--Melanie R. Jordan, Everybody's Infopreneur Coach, Author of What You Know Is Worth More Than You Know™ - Achieving The Life You Were Meant To Have By Making Money From What YOU Know! and Host of infopreneur podcast What You Know Is Worth More Than You Know(TM), The Podcast Available 24/7 at: http://www.WhatYouKnowIsWorthMorePodcast.com
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