The folks at New York’s bitly want to be known for more than shortened links. So the company, funded by investors such as RRE Ventures and AOL Ventures, started a beta trial early this month for a service that monitors the reputations of its enterprise customers. Though it is best-known for those shortened and shared links, bitly is now putting the data behind that service to work in new ways—including helping business track how they are trending in social arenas.
Clearly bitly could not keep growing based on just shortening Web links, especially now that Twitter is handling that task in-house for tweets and, as of Oct. 10, wrapping all links with its own URL. Peter Stern, bitly’s CEO, says the new reputation-monitoring system sends e-mail alerts to his company’s enterprise customers when topics and keywords they have selected are generating buzz in the social media space. When links that relate to the chosen topics are shared via Twitter or Facebook, bitly notifies its customer if there is a significant trending change.
The technology can also track news clips, for example, that are copied and pasted into e-mails and then shared. “We can prioritize and rank that content based on how many people are engaging with it,” Stern says. “We know the correlations between the content you are clicking on and can measure relevancy.” Bitly’s other services include providing custom short links used by content publishers such as Foursquare, Pepsi, and the New York Post.
Now bitly is flexing is muscles to tackle new services. “The idea behind bitly has always been to provide a great engine for social sharing and analytics,” says Stern, who joined the company in May. He previously
