My brother Mike is living in Vancouver, and besides being a pretty awesome graphic designer (he worked on Megedeth’s site!) he has also been helping to promote his friends’ band, Magnus Rising. He’s perpetually working on their webpage, and is always considering new and interesting ways to promote their stuff. The other day we were chatting and I threw some thoughts his way.

The Marketing Potential of URL Shorteners

I mentioned using a URL redirect to help fans get to the Magnus Rising iTunes page. He set up magnusrising.com/itunes, and that helps make their music a little more accessible. Links like these are awesome because they pass what I like to call the ‘phone test’. If you can tell someone a link over the phone, and they can find your site successfully — well, then you’ve chosen a good URL.

I’ve been using my own URL shortener here on 1rick.com for some time (using PHPurl). For example if you want to find my iTunes feed, just go to 1rick.com/iTunes. For my YouTube page, it’s 1rick.com/youtube. Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, my CNet blog, they all work like that.

Why is this useful? Well for one, these links are easy to share on Twitter and Facebook. That’s an obvious advantage. But you can also share them in YouTube video and playlist descriptions (see how I did this for my Media Tectonics presentation). I could even print them on my business cards.

A Creative Solution for Copyright Problems

Consider the implications for a band like Magnus Rising. They could invite audience members to film and photograph their performances and upload to YouTube or Flickr, but also encourage them to post the iTunes URL in the description.  The guys over on Twit.tv rightfully pointed out the other day that doing something like this is far better than pursuing take-down notices.

So suppose someone has posted your copyrighted content on YouTube, and it’s racking up lots and lots of hits. Which option makes more sense? Threaten them with legal action, or try to get a piece of that traffic by saying “Hey, we see you’ve posted our content. We’d certainly appreciate it if you add our iTunes link to your video.”

Needless to say, your fans would admire you that much more for taking such an open stance about your IP. I mean, does anybody like Lars Ulrich anymore? Last I checked, he was still a big dope…

When Apple decides to put eBooks on iTunes (likely in the next year), this sort of strategy could work well for newspapers, book publishers, and lots of other content producers too.

Kickin’ your own URL shortener on your own domain also allows you to monitor how many times your short links have been viewed, and for bigger companies, this is key. Bit.ly is great for this too, but it’s best not to be dependent on third party services if you can avoid it.

The new internet has brought a ton of dilemmas with it, there’s no denying that. But it has brought just as many solutions too if you know where to look.