Miami Herald: Low Cost Marketing Tips for Small Business

Posted on Mon, Sep. 20, 2010
Marketing help just clicks away
BY TASHA CUNNINGHAM
Tasha@BizBytes101.com


1. Twilert. This is a Twitter app that allows you to receive e-mail updates of tweets that contain keywords related to your business. Other apps like TweetDeck let you do the same thing, but Twilert sends the updates directly to your e-mail in-box so you can view them when it's convenient for you.

2. Slide Rocket. Slide Rocket is a free online tool for creating slick, professional Flash-enabled presentations that can showcase your products and services. It's like turbo-charged version of PowerPoint. You can share your presentations instantly on YouTube and Flickr and track the number of people that view your presentation using Slide Rocket analytics.

3. Click Tale. With pricing plans that start at free, Click Tale is an essential tool that lets you learn more about how your visitors interact with your website. You can record snapshots or ``movies'' of your customers' browsing sessions and get detailed information on how they use all areas of your site. You can use the data you collect to improve their customer experience while on your website.

4. Trackur. Trackur is a tool that allows you to monitor what people are saying about your brand on social blogs, social networks, and online forums.

5. iKarma. Based in Jupiter, Fla., this reputation management tool allows you to compare customer comments, review products and services and get customer referrals that help you manage your brand's online word-of-mouth.

6. BrandDoozie. This do-it-yourself online tool allows you to create professional marketing materials in minutes including business cards, logos, brochures and flyers. It's free to create your materials and just $19.99 when you're ready to download and print them, saving you thousands of dollars in design costs.

7. Shoutlet. With this tool, you can distribute, track and manage your social media marketing campaigns across different social networks at once, saving your business time and money.

8. Later Bro. This service saves you time by allowing you to post-date Facebook and Twitter updates. You can plan, create and schedule updates for delivery to your customers at a later date.

9. PRLog.org . This service is completely free and lets you distribute press releases about your company to blogs, search engines and news sites. It's a great way for a cash-strapped entrepreneur like you to get the word out about your products and services.

10. Pitchrate.com . This free service will help you maximize your public relations and marketing efforts by connecting you with journalists who write about topics related to your business. It also offers free guidance on how to get publicity and a regular free ``PR Happy Hour,'' a series of conference calls that let you interact live with marketing and PR experts to ask questions and get advice.

Check out BizBytes101.com for more must-have marketing tips.



Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/09/20/v-print/1830154/marketing-help-just-clicks-away.html#ixzz106K1TL48

How to Put Your Business on Facebook ( Entrepreneur Magazine)

Dani Babb: The Online Professor
Group, Fan Page or Both?
Make sure your Facebook strategy is the one that works best for your business.

By Dani Babb | March 09, 2010



URL: http://www.entrepreneur.com/ebusiness/theonlineprofessor/article205406.html


In today's social media-driven marketing frenzy, online business owners are expected to be top in their game in using tools like Facebook and Twitter to their advantage. These free tools are increasing in popularity but also in saturation--many people report not reading updates anymore because of "information overload." It's important to keep information fresh, useful and purposeful while adding, if your brand allows, some humor and interesting information.

One of the most common questions I get about Facebook is, "What options should I use? Groups or regular pages?" This is a more complicated question than it seems on the surface, but important for making certain you spend your hard-earned money and precious time in areas that will give you the most bang for your buck. You can certainly have both, but it's important to know what you can and can't do with each.

First, let's take a look at a standard Facebook fan page and some of the options available to you. Pages can be viewed by unregistered users, though you will need to set your security preferences for this. A viewer does not need to be a Facebook member to view your fan page either. You can add extra applications to make your page more personal and send messages to all members using the updates feature. Pages also allow you to see statistics. You can create a corporate "person" page. There are tighter security options now in Facebook than in the past, so be sure to explore what each of those does. I recommend logging out and seeing what you can and can't view while not logged in as a registered user. Fan pages can be useful in helping the viral aspect of social media because "Joe became a fan of…" pops up on each persons wall (unless they turn it off or remove it) when they become a fan of your business.

Groups, on the other hand, allow you to send out bulk invitations (for instance, you can ask all of your friends to join the group) and any of your group members can also invite their friends. If you have "friends" on your Facebook page who are acquaintances or just share common interests this is a good way to market.

A group, however, has a limitation of 5,000 members if you wish to send a message. They are generally considered to be best for more personal interaction. I use a group, for example, to help people find online teaching jobs called "Make Money Teaching Online" where members share experiences, job tips and who's hiring. Group pages allow you to set other administrators to see who is requesting to join the group. If you post something to the group page, it will also show up on your personal wall. Some people don't like this because it ties them to their businesses, but this can be useful in creating a "person behind the online business" feeling with your customers. You have more control over participants and permissions with group memberships.

Both groups and fan pages allow you to create discussions and others to reply. Both have a wall for people to write on. Both allow you to share videos and pictures. Both require you to manually remove posts as an administrator if something does not meet your standards or purpose for the page. Both also allow you to create events.

Regardless of which one you choose (of course, you can have both), be sure to update regularly, keep your audience engaged and offer something of value. If you use your page or group purely for promotional reasons, you are far less likely to build loyalty, and there's a good chance that your members and friends won't be returning to your pages anytime soon.

Where the Jobs Will Be (WSJ)

Landing a Job of the Future Takes a Two-Track Mind
Career Experts Say Positions in Growing Fields Will Require an In-Demand Degree Coupled With Skills in Emerging Trends


By DIANA MIDDLETON

If you're gearing up for a job search now as an undergraduate or returning student, there are several bright spots where new jobs and promising career paths are expected to emerge in the next few years.

Technology, health care and education will continue to be hot job sectors, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' outlook for job growth between 2008 and 2018. But those and other fields will yield new opportunities, and even some tried-and-true fields will bring some new jobs that will combine a variety of skill sets.



The degrees employers say they'll most look for include finance, engineering and computer science, says Andrea Koncz, employment-information manager at the National Association of Colleges and Employers. But to land the jobs that will see some of the most growth, job seekers will need to branch out and pick up secondary skills or combine hard science study with softer skills, career experts say, which many students already are doing. "Students are positioned well for future employment, particularly in specialized fields," Ms. Koncz says.

Career experts say the key to securing jobs in growing fields will be coupling an in-demand degree with expertise in emerging trends. For example, communications pros will have to master social media and the analytics that come with it; nursing students will have to learn about risk management and electronic records; and techies will need to keep up with the latest in Web marketing, user-experience design and other Web-related skills.

Technology Twists

More than two million new technology-related jobs are expected to be created by 2018, according to the BLS. Jobs that are expected to grow faster than average include computer-network administrators, data-communications analysts and Web developers. Recruiters anticipate that data-loss prevention, information technology, online security and risk management will also show strong growth.

The Next Finance Hiring Hot Spots
A computer-science degree and a working knowledge of data security are critical to landing these jobs. Common areas of undergraduate study for these fields include some of the usual suspects, such as computer science, information science and management-information systems.

But those might not be enough. That's because not all of those jobs will be purely techie in nature. David Foote, chief executive officer of IT research firm Foote Partners, advises current computer-science students to couple their degrees with studies in marketing, accounting or finance. "Before, people widely believed that all you needed to have were deep, nerdy skills," Mr. Foote says. "But companies are looking for people with multiple skill sets who can move fluidly with marketing or operations."

Social media has opened the door to the growth of new kinds of jobs. As companies turn to sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to promote their brands, capture new customers and even post job openings, they will need to hire people skilled in harnessing these tools, Mr. Foote says. In most cases, these duties will be folded into a marketing position, although large companies such as Coca-Cola Co. are creating entire teams devoted exclusively to social media.

Similarly, employment for public-relations positions should increase 24% by 2018. Job titles—like interactive creative director—will reflect the duality of the required skill sets.

Back to School
Students will have to study strategy to maximize relationships between third-party content providers and their company's Web team. Other key skills will be search-engine optimization to maximize Web traffic and marketing analytics to decipher the company's target demographic, says Donna Farrugia, executive director of Creative Group, a marketing and advertising staffing agency in Menlo Park, Calif.

Many universities and community colleges are offering certification programs focused on burgeoning sectors. For example, the University of California at Los Angeles's extension program offers a certificate in information design.

That, program, like similar certificate studies at other schools, aims to give students an edge in Web site search optimization—a major attraction for Web-based companies who want to boost user traffic, says Cathy Sandeen, dean of UCLA's extension program.

User-experience design—a sort of architecture for information that Web viewers see—is another emerging field. Jobs there include experience specialists and product designers at firms ranging from computer-game companies to e-commerce Web sites.

Ms. Sandeen says the school will offer a certificate program for user-experience design as well, at a cost of about $3,000 to $5,000. The program will run one to two years, depending on a student's schedule, and will couple product design with consumer psychology and behavior.

"Our students [will] learn to think like anthropologists, evaluating how easy it is to utilize the products," she says.

Not surprisingly, green technology, including solar and wind energy and green construction, are also booming areas. Engineers who can mastermind high-voltage electric grids, for example, will have a great advantage over other job applicants, says Greg Netland, who oversees recruiting for the U.S., Latin America and Canada for Sapphire Technologies, an IT staffing firm in Woburn, Mass. that is a division of Randstad.

"Global sustainability will become more important to employers," Mr. Netland says. "It cuts costs, making experts in the field highly attractive to employers."

Jobs in alternative-energy systems, including wind and solar energy, will require a variety of skills: engineers to design systems, consultants who will audit companies' existing energy needs, and those who will install and maintain the systems.

Financial Opportunities
Despite the slashing of positions seen in the financial sector during the economic crisis, recruiters also expect thousands of new jobs to be created in the compliance field, says Dawn Fay, district New York/New Jersey president of Robert Half International.

Ms. Fay counsels job seekers to look at the misdeeds of the past year or two to identify where new jobs will bloom in the financial sector. "It was a year of Ponzi schemes and banking meltdowns," she says. "Be strategic and position yourself as someone who can mitigate those risks."

That makes risk management an emerging specialty with strong growth in jobs expected. Those on track to be financial analysts can get additional certification in risk management through organizations like the Risk Management Association or the Risk and Insurance Management Society.

"Risk management was a mainstay in financial companies, but I believe it will be present in every Fortune 500 company," says Jeff Joerres, chairman and chief executive officer at staffing firm Manpower Inc.

Hospital Upgrades
Health care is expected to continue to see a surge in hiring, with more than four million new openings estimated by 2018, according to the BLS. Hiring for physical and occupational therapists will likely be strongest. But new specialties are popping up, particularly in case management, says Brad Ellis, a partner with Kaye Bassman International, an executive-search firm based in Plano, Texas.

Case managers do everything from managing the flow of information between practitioner and insurance company to mitigating risk to the hospital.

"If you're a licensed nurse, for example, getting a certificate in risk management from the state board of health would make you extremely competitive," Mr. Ellis says.

Harris Miller, president of the Career College Association in Washington, D.C., says IT will be increasingly important in the quest to drive down health-care costs, too. Students specializing in nursing informatics, which combines general nursing with computer and information sciences, at the master's degree level will swap a clipboard for a smart phone to manage patient data. Schools like Vanderbilt University are offering nursing informatics degrees via distance learning, and certification is offered through American Nurses Credentialing Center, based in Silver Springs, Md.

The strong push toward making medical records and information more accessible through computerized record-keeping means opportunity, Mr. Miller says. "This is going to require people who are skilled in the hardware and software of nursing informatics."

Write to Diana Middleton at diana.middleton@wsj.com

Using Facebook to Get More Business (NY Times)

November 12, 2009
Small-Business Guide
How to Market Your Business With Facebook
By KERMIT PATTISON

Quick Tips:

Identify a short list of goals before you begin.

Show some personality in your page.

Don't shill. Use your page to engage-and trust that sales will follow.

Use Facebook data to analyze your customer demographics.

Suggested Resources:

A Facebook guide for advertisers.
http://www.facebook.com/advertising/


Advice on getting started from Mashable.
http://mashable.com/2009/09/22/facebook-pages-guide/


Strategies and a tutorial from All Facebook - "the unofficial Facebook resource."
http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/03/facebook-page-strategy/


Business owner, you might want to friend Facebook.

A growing number of businesses are making Facebook an indispensible part of hanging out their shingles. Small businesses are using it to find new customers, build online communities of fans and dig into gold mines of demographic information.

“You need to be where your customers are and your prospective customers are,” said Clara Shih, author of “The Facebook Era” (Pearson Education, 2009). “And with 300 million people on Facebook, and still growing, that’s increasingly where your audience is for a lot of products and services.”

Start Small

For most businesses, Facebook Pages (distinct from individual profiles and Facebook groups) are the best place to start. Pages allow businesses to collect “fans” the way celebrities, sports teams, musicians and politicians do. There are now 1.4 million Facebook Pages and they collect more than 10 million fans every day, according to the site.

Businesses can easily create a Web presence with Facebook, even if they don’t have their own Web site (most companies still should maintain a Web site to reach people who don’t use Facebook or whose employers block access to the site). Businesses can claim a vanity address so that their Facebook address reflects the business name, like www.facebook.com/Starbucks. Facebook pages can link to the company’s Web site or direct sales to e-commerce sites like Ticketmaster or Amazon.

Facebook offers an array of tools and networks, and it’s easy to wander down too many paths. Ms. Shih recommends that newcomers start by asking themselves a simple question: What is your basic objective? Is it getting more customers in the door? Building brand awareness? Creating a venue for customer support? Once you have set your goal, you can strategize accordingly.

“You can waste a lot of time on Facebook,” said Ms. Shih, founder of Hearsay Labs, a Facebook marketing software company. “But if you’re a business, you don’t have any time to waste. Figure out your objectives first, start small and do things that help you accomplish your objectives.”

Ms. Shih suggests that businesses ask friends and family to become fans of their pages so that they display a respectable crowd of supporters when they debut. Pages can grow organically by word of mouth — the average Facebook user has 130 friends on the site — or by advertising or promotion.

You can enliven your page with photos, comments and useful information. As you grow more comfortable, you can add videos or business applications. Flaunt your personality. The page of an ice cream parlor should feel different than that of a funeral parlor. “The pages that are most successful,” said Tim Kendall, the director of monetization at Facebook, “are the ones that really replicate the personality of the business.”

It’s Not All About Selling

Art Meets Commerce, a New York marketing firm, has struck up a never-ending conversation with fans. The company uses Facebook as a crucial part of its publicity campaigns for theatrical productions. Its Facebook page for the show “Rock of Ages,” for example, has more than 13,000 fans.

Staff members constantly update the page with new photos, videos and quotes from the cast. They’ve also learned what not to do: Once they posted a video of Paris Hilton plugging the show and got negative feedback from fans who professed to be sick of her.

But it’s not just about marketing — or, at least, it’s not just about selling. “You end up moving away from being an Internet marketer and go into almost customer service,” said Jim Glaub, creative director at the agency. “A lot of times people use Facebook to ask questions: What’s the student rush? How long is the show? Where’s parking? You have to answer.”

Some basic rules: Buy-buy-buy messages won’t fly. The best practitioners make Facebook less about selling and more about interacting. Engage with fans and critics. Listen to what people are saying, good and bad. You may even pick up ideas for how to improve your business. Keep content fresh. Use status updates and newsfeeds to tell fans about specials, events, contests or anything of interest.

These interactions can take a vast amount of time — the “Rock of Ages” page has 300 to 600 interactions every week — but they can also provide a big payoff. Facebook is one of the show’s top sources of new ticket sales.

Last year, Art Meets Commerce introduced a Facebook ad campaign to promote an Off Broadway run of the musical “Fela!” The campaign aimed at Facebook users with interests like theatrical shows or Afro beat. According to the company, it generated 18 million impressions, more than 5,700 clicks and $40,000 in ticket sales — all for $4,400 spent on advertising.

“We can advertise all day, but if we don’t give them what they want they will not be a fan anymore,” said Mark Seeley, a marketing associate at Art Meets Commerce. “Even though we represent the shows as marketers, we don’t want to constantly tell people to buy tickets. You talk to them like you talk to your friends on Facebook.”

Aim at Potential Customers Only

Some guys use Facebook to find single women. Chris Meyer used it to find women who are already engaged.

Mr. Meyer, a wedding photographer in Woodbury, Minn., had had little luck with traditional advertising. A full-page ad in a bridal magazine generated zero leads and a trade show yielded only four bookings, barely covering the cost of his booth. But Facebook proved a digital bonanza.

Mr. Meyer aimed at women ages 22 to 28 who listed their martial status as engaged in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. He estimates that he has spent about $300 on Facebook ads in the last two years and has generated more than $60,000 in business. He says about three-quarters of his clients now come to him through Facebook, either from ads or recommendations from friends.

“I’d be out of business if I didn’t have Facebook,” Mr. Meyer said. “Especially with this economy, I need to stretch each marketing dollar as much as I possibly can.”

Facebook enables small businesses to engage in targeted marketing that they only could have dreamed about a few years ago. Facebook users fill out profiles with information like hometown, employer, religious beliefs, interests, education and favorite books, movies and TV shows — all of which can help advertisers deliver messages to specific demographic slices.

As you create an ad, you can add demographic criteria and keywords and see how many Facebook users fall into your target audience and modify it accordingly to get the most bang for your buck. Advertisers can elect to pay per impression or per click, set maximum budgets and schedule the ad to run on specific dates.

Thus a coffee shop in San Francisco can display advertisements only to local people whose profiles or group affiliations suggest they like coffee. According to Mr. Kendall, Facebook’s director of monetization, ads can also aim at people based on social exchanges, like a person who sends a message to a friend, “let’s get together for coffee” or who posts a status update about just having awakened and needing some java.

“We can help you find customers before they even think about searching for you,” Mr. Kendall said. “We’re very, very well-positioned to generate demand, based on the fact that we know a tremendous amount about a user.”

The Facebook ad system provides instant feedback with metrics like the number of impressions and clicks-through. This reporting allows Mr. Meyer to improve his advertising; if one ad doesn’t generate enough hits within 24 hours, he pulls it and tries something new.

Give Away Cupcakes!

Charles Nelson has an M.B.A. and is a former investment banker who owns a growing national chain of stores. Yet this 40-year-old entrepreneur checks Facebook with the frequency of a college student. Up to 30 times a day, he logs onto the social networking site via his laptop or Blackberry.

For Mr. Nelson, this is serious business. He and his wife, Candace, own Sprinkles, a cupcake bakery that relies on social media in lieu of traditional advertising. Mr. Nelson considers Facebook marketing essential. “People are out there talking about your business everyday, whether you’re looking or not,” he said. “This gives people a place to come and speak directly to us.”

Sprinkles uses Facebook to give customers a whiff of what’s cooking. Every day it posts a password on Facebook that can be redeemed for a free cupcake. Since April, its fan base has risen tenfold to 70,000.

Mr. Nelson and his wife previously worked as investment bankers in the technology sector and were keenly aware that, even for a traditional business like a bakery, social media is a crucial ingredient. His advice: make it relevant to the customer, keep it fresh and remember that the return on investment may come slowly.

“Be patient with it,” Mr. Nelson advised. “People are not going to flock to your social media site overnight. Technology is about the network effect. It takes time for those connections to build.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/12/business/smallbusiness/12guide.html?em

For Job Hunters - Make Your Linked In Profile Shine (linkedin.com)

5 Steps to a Fantastic LinkedIn Profile

Posted in Career Advice Job Hunting Social Media on August 9, 2009 at 5:34 pm
by Lindsey Pollak

As a Campus Spokesperson for LinkedIn, I am currently in the midst of facilitating a series of training webinars for college career services professionals (sign up here if you haven’t already — they are free!). I recently wrote a blog post for CollegeRecruiter.com advising career services professionals how to improve their LinkedIn profiles. Today I’ve adapted those tips for job seekers and young professionals:

As the largest and most vibrant professional social network, LinkedIn provides a wealth of opportunities for job seekers and ambitious young professionals. But LinkedIn doesn’t work unless you work it.

How can you make the most of LinkedIn? Here are some tips for creating a profile that will impress employers, colleagues, headhunters, professional association members and more:

1. Include keywords in your summary statement. The Summary portion of your profile provides a chance to share the highlights of your bio in your own words. It’s also a place to include key words and phrases that a recruiter or hiring manager might type into a search engine to find a person like you. The best place to find relevant keywords is in the job listings that appeal to you and the LinkedIn profiles of people who currently hold the kinds of positions you want. Check out LinkedIn’s Company Pages feature to search through the profiles of employees at your dream employers. And remember, it is absolutely fine — crucial, in fact — to include unpaid or volunteer work in your Summary. If you are a current student or recent grad, you can include relevant coursework and extra curricular achievements as well.

2. Write for the screen. LinkedIn, or any website for that matter, is not the place for long-form prose. Present your summary statement in short blocks of text with lots of white space. Bullet points are great, too.

3. List all experience. One of the most valuable aspects of LinkedIn is the way it connects you with former colleagues and classmates—which, as we all know, are some of our best networking contacts. It would be a shame if a long lost former colleague or classmate, who happens to be a recruiter now, couldn’t find you because you hadn’t listed that shared employment in your LinkedIn profile.

4. Collect diverse recommendations. Nothing builds credibility like third party endorsements. The most impressive LinkedIn profiles have at least one recommendation associated with each job a person has held. Think about soliciting recommendations from professors, internship coordinators and colleagues, employers, classmates with whom you shared an extra curricular activity and professional mentors.

5. Share your news frequently. The best way to stay on other people’s radar screens is to update your status on LinkedIn (the box near the top of your profile) at least once a week. Tell people about events you are attending, major projects you’ve completed, professional books you are reading, successes you are celebrating or any other news that you would tell someone at a networking reception or on a quick catch-up phone call.

Want to become a more active user of LinkedIn? Check out the LinkedIn Learning Center and, for students, the LinkedIn Grads Guide. I also recommend Guy Kawasaki’s LinkedIn Profile Extreme Makeover.

Find the Best Price - 100 Bargain Websites (from Mashable.com)

Bargain Hunting: 100 Places to Find a Great Deal

Posted using ShareThis

Mini-Links let you track your followers (New York Times)

May 4, 2009
Mini-Links to Web Sites Are Multiplying
By JENNA WORTHAM
If you have spent any time on the Internet in the last few months, chances are you have clicked on a shortened link Web address.

URL shorteners, which abbreviate unwieldy Web addresses into bite-size links, have been around for years. The most popular service, TinyURL.com, was started in 2002 by a unicyclist named Kevin Gilbertson.

But the tools have soared in popularity recently, in part because of microblogging sites like Twitter and Facebook, where messages are limited in length and every character counts.

URL shorteners are easy to build, and dozens of competitors have proliferated, with minimalist, character-conserving names like Bit.ly, Is.gd and Tr.im. Most of them are simple tools created as a labor of love with no real business model behind them.

Shorteners, however, could have real value beyond making Web addresses more manageable, said Danny Sullivan, editor of the blog Search Engine Land.

They have the ability to keep track of use — how many times a particular link was clicked and the geographic location of the clickers — which could be valuable to marketers, news outlets and companies looking to measure the impact of a link, tweet or mention online.

“The tracking element is very important,” said Mr. Sullivan. Some tools even highlight comments posted to Facebook or FriendFeed about a particular link — features that standard tools like Google Analytics may not be able to provide.

One popular link shortening service, Bit.ly, is trying to build a business around that kind of data.

Betaworks Studios is a New York technology incubator that has invested in Tumblr, a microblogging tool; OMGPOP, a social gaming site; and Outside.in, a hyperlocal news aggregator. It developed Bit.ly as an internal tool for its portfolio of companies to use.

“It emerged as much more than that,” said John Borthwick, the chief executive of Betaworks. “Everyone from Dell to Demi Moore is on Twitter and could want to track their emerging social system.”

Since Bit.ly was introduced last year, its volume has soared. The company says that now 50 million Bit.ly links are clicked each week — more than double the rate of early April. “And next week, we’re expecting to hit 60 million,” said Andrew Weissman, the chief operating officer of Betaworks.

The growth has attracted venture financing. Bit.ly recently announced that it had raised $2 million from investors that included Alpha Tech Ventures, the software industry pioneer Mitch Kapor and the early Google investor Ron Conway.

“The Web has been devoid of a feedback loop for a while,” said Christopher Sacca, an investor who has financed several Web start-ups, including Bit.ly, Twitter and Photobucket.

Because Bit.ly tracks its clipped URLs in real time, no matter where they are posted — instant messages, Twitter, Facebook, blogs or e-mail — the service could become “a real source for extracting information about how people are using the Web,” Mr. Sacca said.

In addition to tracking links, Bit.ly uses a service called Calais, developed by Thomson Reuters, that can extract semantic terms from the Web pages that Bit.ly users are redirected to. This allows Bit.ly track the most popular topics being shared across the Web, as well as zero in on a specific category like finance or health care and retrieve the most popular Web sites shared on that subject in the last 24 hours.

The company hopes that being able to track the “social distribution of information in real-time,” as Mr. Borthwick describes it, could potentially be relevant to the future of Web search.

Although Bit.ly is not yet sure how to make money from all this data, “there’s a business model here,” Mr. Borthwick said. “We can smell it.”

For all the convenience of short URLs, some Internet security experts worry that they could be used to camouflage spam and phishing attacks and redirect people to malicious Web sites.

“People have no way to know where they’re going,” said Patrik Runald, chief security advisor at F-Secure Security Labs, a maker of security software. “These services are great and they serve a purpose, but at the same time, there is a darker side.”

And if a shortening site shuts down, any links funneled through it would be lost forever, Mr. Runald said.

Bit.ly says it is developing an archive system to keep links from decaying and employs several filters and a preview function in Firefox and TweetDeck, a desktop application for Twitter, to help cut back on spam.

Given the ease of use, the bigger threat to start-up companies like Bit.ly is that major corporations will create their own custom URL shorteners to bolster their brands. Digg, StumbleUpon and FriendFeed recently unveiled shortening services, and it would be easy for the big social networks, like Facebook or Twitter, to create their own. And there is always the chance that a heavyweight like Google will step in and obliterate the competition.

“That’s always a risk, but we’re racing to establish ourselves in the market,” said Mr. Weissman. “We’re willing to bet that innovation comes from weird little corners of the Internet, like this.”