Promotion takes a ton of work. Obvious? Yes. But when people think of promotion, they often aren't thinking about branding, cross-promotion, and general 'community respect' that should come from a good promotional campaign.
It's all too often that you'll see people tooting their horn about one product, when they're missing the opportunity to mention all of theirs or to increase awareness of their overall brand. I've recently become a Twitter convert and man the helm of both the @cmsmarket and @covertapps usernames. What converted me, and what have I learned in just over a month of Twitting? A lot, and I'm going to share it with you now.
Branding vs. Promotion
Though the terms are used interchangeably sometimes, or the former is forgotten altogether, in any business where you're trying to distribute a product, I'd argue any day of the week that Branding is more powerful and harder to do than promotion. While the below are limited in scope, the listing should make it much more clear the difference between the two.
Promotion
- Product focused
- Usually time-oriented
- Quick (easier) to do - "HEY LOOK AT ME!!!"
Branding
- Overall 'company' focus
- Has halo effect on all products
- Longer term campaign (Building trust)
Essentially, if you have a good brand and brand-awareness, the job of promotion for an individual product becomes much easier. A good brand builds trust and name familiarity before your next product is even available. Therefore, when your next shiny widget comes out, people already trust that it's good because it's coming from you. Obviously, if every product you release is terrible, a great brand can't fix that, but it can certainly smooth out the rough spots when necessary.
What does this have to with Twitter? Everything.
I'm not a recluse, I knew about Twitter. It just wasn't my job to promote CMS Market using it. Now it is. I knew about all the url shorteners out there (Like my pic?). What shocked me is the void in the market that I immediately saw. Using TweetDeck with 5 columns monitoring different things all day related to Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress, what did I learn the most? Bit.ly has one helluva brand! They're everywhere. People 'trust' their links (which of course that trust comes from the author as well), but that's not to say there isn't a Rick Astley video in the waiting behind any one of your friends Tweets.
Being a promoter and business-oriented, I of course went to work to get a part of that. I would love it if every link I saw had cmsmarket.com in the post, wouldn't you (for your site of course)? So over the last month, the CMS Market development team has created a new Joomla extension called "UShorten". For what purpose? To help us, of course, and you to increase your brand (if you're using a Joomla powered website, at least). How? An automatic URL shortener component which will create your own shortlink URL's. You can see it now at the top of every one of our pages, and if you haven't already noticed, that the "Tweet about this" link actually uses a http://cmsmarket.com/ shortlink URL. Go ahead, try it. Please.
You may easily ask, what's the point, and it's a valid question. Ideally, all the tweets you do about your site will now have your site name in them. However, and even more importantly, anyone else who re-tweets or finds a page on your site, can now automatically promote your brand for you! If you're not a Twitter user, then it's even more important so that other's can take a little bit of the promotional work off your shoulders.
Details of UShorten
So how does UShorten work, when will it be available, and what about the pesky license and price? Good news on all fronts. We're putting it through it's paces now, but it needs some more cleanup and test-cases before we're ready to release it into the wild. A feature-list is summarized below:
- 100% GPL
- 100% Free
- Sequential or random shortlink generation
- Respects (doesn't trample) menu aliases
- Option to prevent automatic links for Registered/Special areas
- Admin created shortlinks - great for creating your own - http://cmsmarket.com/j15
- Supports blocking of whole components from shortlink generation
- Supports blocking of specific shortlinks (dirty words, 'faq', etc)
- Supports canonical links (necessary for CMS Market and our filters for narrowing your searches)
- Option to use capital letters (doesn't work on all servers)
- Selectable shortlink length
- Basic hit tracking
- Much more
Quick answers to obvious questions
- Won't this make my URL's longer in my Tweets? Most likely. However, if you have a short URL to begin with, you won't be losing much. Some minor manipulation to your server configuration should help you to redirect any non-www links to www (if necessary). Additionally, services like bit.ly creates shortlinks of up to 6 characters due to the large amount of sites they have to create links for. For CMS Market (which has many pages), we can get away with 3 which allows for more than 250k URLs. 2 characters (using capital letters) let's you generate shortlinks for ~4k pages. That should be sufficient for most sites, and you can always increase the length later as necessary.
- Can you give examples of how much longer the URL would be? Sure I can. Glad I asked! For CMS Market, our domain name is normally 13 characters without the 'www.' The shortest link I've seen is http://ow.ly/kUij (courtesy @james_hafner) which is 7 characters shorter. Most bit.ly links use 5-6 characters, which makes them only 4 characters shorter than our branded ones. For us, that's a great trade!
- My URL is http://www.OMGMyURLisMyLifeStory.com, will UShorten be useless for me? Maybe less so, but not entirely. Though it will lose some of it's value, you can still create your own custom shortlinks which can make advertising certain pieces of your site better. Additionally, there are times when people use their full URL right now (they're trying to increase their inbound links and branding when they don't even know it!)
What now?
Hopefully this gives you some better ideas in any areas you deal with promotion on how to convey a larger message about your brand and not just your product. As for UShorten, follow our blog and check for updates from us on Twitter.
UPDATE: UShorten has been released
More details can be found at the UShorten product page or in the updated announcement "UShorten Released - Automatic Short URLs Come to Joomla" announcement blog post. The support forums have a user guide and other information for support. Enjoy!
Image Courtesy: jwarletta
